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My wife has agreed that it’s time to buy a lift for working on our cars. I’m getting too old to be laying flat on a creeper with the car barely in the air on some jackstands trying to lift things into place or awkwardly reach for them with no room to move. I would love a two post lift but...

When we built our barn the person doing the excavation ran 3” conduit in a trench between the house and barn. In both the house and barn it goes under the footer and comes up through the cement floor inside 20’ from where the house panel is. I want to put a 60 amp sub panel in the barn but...

I'm working on wiring up a hot tub and ran into a snag I wasn't expecting. I need a 50 amp gfci breaker that fits a GE load center. The problem is that 50 amp GE branded GFCI breakers just do t seem to exist. Either nobody carries them or they have been out of stock for months. Even amazon...

I'm in the middle of replacing a stuck AFM lifter on a 5.3 motor and am tired of busting my hands up trying to swing a regular ratchet an 1/8 turn at a time in tight spaces. I have one of those cheap $20 air ratchets but the thing has absolutely no torque and is pretty much useless so its sat...

I need to run water to a barn as well as out to a garden. Both are about 100' away from the house in opposite directions. I don't want to bury the pipe below the frost line for a number of reasons (mostly due to the massive ammount of rocks we have and not wanting to totally destroy the lawn...

My mig welder decided to die in the middle of a project this weekend. Not sure what caused it but there are three blown capacitors and one of the traces on the circuit board burnt off. It was a miller auto arc 130. Unfortunately the replacement board is between $400 and $500. This is a...

Im getting ready to weld a thumb on my backhoe and am confused about what stick welding rod would be best to use. I have an miller thundernolt which is an AC machine. The welds will be vertical. I have had lots of experience with mig, tig, and oxy acetylene but have had very little time on a...

For years I have been using the craftsman 19.2 cordless tools. Im finally giving up. 2 of my 3 lithium batteries wont take a charge and only one of my two chargers still work. I have a project coming up to build some horse stalls and need an impact screwdriver. New batteries and a charger is...

I was walking out by the back edge of our property this weekend and noticed that the adjacent empty lot had a whole bunch of wooden stakes with orange flags attached to them . It appears that a house is going to be built on the lot. I'm good with this as I have 6 acres and the new house is set...

After getting the runaround from some contractors trying to get quotes for a pole barn I am back to considering doing it myself. I only have two real concerns. The first is setting the poles. I plan on using perma columns (basicly 5 foot pre-cast concrete columns). The area I want to put the...

For those of you who paid someone to build your garage/shop, how did you space out the payments to the contractor? I have read some horror stories on here about people getting bad work or no work and out a lot of money so I want to make sure I am protected. On the flip side I don't expect the...

Getting ready to pull the trigger on building a barn for my wife and daughters horses. We are going to go with a poured concrete floor down the center aisle of the barn and in the adjacent rooms (stalls will be dirt with rubber mats). I'm looking to cover about 720 square feet. I don't mind...

I'm looking for companies that sell pole barn kits but have a few non-standard requirements. The building has to have a full 2nd story loft preferably with a gambrel roof. It also has to have wood siding and standard asphalt shingle roof. I have one company up in Massachusetts working up a...

I'm in the process of getting a pole barn designed and am curious as to how everyone here leveled and graded where they put their garages they built? Where I want to put the structure has about a 2' drop over 40'. I have cut all the trees down and left stumps sticking about 2' up. My original...

After moving into a new house this past spring I am finally fed up with working out cardboard boxes filled with my tools and am ready to start setting up the shop. In my old place I found a great deal on some old kitchen wall cabinets and used them for storage. A search of craigslist the past...

We just closed on a house and I'm trying to secure it before we move all our stuff there. The house was a short sale and one of the two owners was not happy about selling so we aren't sure if we got all the keys and garage door openers for the home. The locks are easy enough to re-key but I'm...

Need some advice. I built an oversize 2 car garage a few years back. It replaced a small 20x20 garage. I was able to use the existing foundation and just add on to it so one of the garage bays is from the old slab and one is new. My problem is that I never poured a cement ramp into the...

Anybody deal with a small stream running through their property? My wife and I are looking at a house to buy and I want to eventually put a barn/shop on the property. The problem is that there is a small stream running through the center of the 5 acres. The property is on a slope and it looks...

So my dad wants a clock for his workshop for Christmas. I want to build one rather than buy the saw blade clock on you see everywhere for sale. I'm looking for ideas. I have a decent metalworking and woodworking shop as well as a cnc router. I **** at design and artsy stuff though. Let's see...

I just came across a cool piece of free software to use on my cnc router. It lets you take a 3d model and slice it into interlocking sections and then export the pieces as a flat vector drawing. You can essentially take any 3d model you find out on the internet and turn it into a real life...