The Swallow Sportscar Garage 13x21x11

Hi there from a newbie to the forum!

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled onto Jack Olsen's thread on the 12-gauge garage (although I'd heard of it before then). I'm 105 pages in and it, and a number of others on here, has given me a lot of inspiration to improve my own workspace.

My budget is tight to non-existent, but I'm proud of what I've done so far I'm exceptionally lucky to have the space that I have, but it's only recently that I've hoarded enough junk to make me get creative with things!

I thought I'd share what I've done so far on here, and maybe get some ideas for further improvements!


Excuse the mess (it's slightly better now, but not by much). To the left you can see the main (still quite small) tool chest, spanner rack on the wall, a compressor that isn't wired in yet and a small knocked-together shelf (most things in here are built using scraps from other people's projects).

Here's a better pic.



The little shelf has since been replaced with a 4-tier shelf knocked together from the inside shelves of IKEA cupboards which is much better than the mess that you can see in that pic.

Above the spanner rack just out of shot is a long shelf that I put all my fluids on (oil, coolant, screen wash etc.) and above that is another knocked together shelf with two Spitfire fuel tanks on.

Move forward along the wall and you get to one of my favourite little things:



My wall-mounted bonnet storage! Made out of two shelving brackets it'll only really work with the lightweight fibreglass bonnet I have, but it gets it out of the way. I've also got my welder (a ****** good but ancient unit of undetermined making, but seems to be from an Italian factory somewhere), the compressor that actually works, my sheet metal storage (need a better place for that really) and a seized Triumph Slant 4 engine I picked up for £50 that is currently doing sterling service as a table.

Move over to the other side of the garage and you get to the messy part...



I've recently put shelving up the entirety of the right-hand wall made from 5x2 salvaged from an old lean-to cut in half to make lengths of 2.5x2. This single thing has freed up more space than all but one of my other storage ideas (and it's even a bit better than the pic as I've boxed up more of the stuff on there now).

Below that you have a Rover V8 in bits, a Rover 2600 OHC, a 4.0l Jaguar AJ6 and a 1.6l Peugeot 106 GTi engine, along with an assortment of gearboxes and other random junk that needs a place to live. There's also the chassis for my Spitfire propped up there, but that's only temporary til it gets welded to the bodyshell

The single best idea was this:



Covering the rear 3rd of the garage is an upper storage level made from 9x2 and sturdy board which currently has probably 2 Spitfires-worth of parts, most of an MGB and most of a Jaguar XJ40 drivetrain as well as innumerable other assorted bits and pieces.

Underneath that is my workbench area.



It really needs some properly sized shelves in the cabinets as it’s massively underutilised at the moment. I’m thinking of changing the upper cabinets doors to pegboard so I can hang tools on them, but that costs money so will probably take a while to do. The other option is to replace the centre cabinet with a set of drawers for fasteners, but I'd like to find somewhere to inset them into the stud wall to save space.

I’ve just added the little shelving units inside the studs of the wall which I’m rather proud of and gets my drill bits and other assorted things off the workbench but still accessible

The vice is an old Record made here in the UK we picked up for £52 from eBay. It's our third one of these as we cracked the other two, but those both had led a very hard life and had hairline cracks before we bought them that didn't show up in the photos. They both lasted for a year or more of hard use before giving up the ghost though!

Next spin around and look up!



I’ve just added in some storage for long-stock inside the rafters of the storage area which again I’m rather proud of there’s a little boxed-in section for shorter stuff, and another open section for stuff that spans the width of the garage behind that we’ve also got my paint cabinet with a portable sheet-metal guillotine perched on top



So there we go current things I have no real good place for are rolls of carpet for working on cars outside on the loose surface (currently perched on the engines), my cheapo TIG welder (going to make a little trolley for that), wooden blocks for padding jacks (no idea with that one) and sheet steel.

Current ideas brewing are a platform that I can winch up towards the ceiling in the middle that’s beefy enough to hold another Spitfire bodyshell/chassis up by the roof, sorting out the electrics properly (most of the plugs you can see aren’t wired yet), get some better lighting in there, sort something for fasteners, running some foam insulation under the roofing sheets to stop condensation, and some paint! I’m thinking a warm grey for most of it, with accents either in stained wood or slightly metallic bronze

Ideas? Comments? Distressed pleas for me to sort out the mess?

Oh, and it's hard to choose a name sometimes isn't it?

Mine's because there was a pair of swallows nesting in an adjacent garage that we've had to build other accommodation for as we're building a much larger garage on that site for my dad.

Plus, SS are my initials

I like the metal storage you came up with

racestatus said:

I like the metal storage you came up with

Click to expand...

Thanks the pic below gave me the idea, but a square would be much more efficient use of space than a hanging tube:

Just added a little two-part wheel rack. Now I can stow away my Spitfire wheels and the MGF alloys that will be going on my Spit when it’s finished I’d put it all the way across, but I’d have to get rid of my little plaque with badges on (the only thing that’s not there for pure function in the garage). I’ve got an Alfa badge, the BMW badge off the E36 that I pranged and then fixed and a Bertone badge of the little X1/9 that got hit by a tree.



Here's a pic of the new shelf as well, alongside the storage for my various jacks

Heres something i could really use some advice on.

I've come up with an idea to store a bodyshell in the upper reaches of my 11' tall garage.

It's a wide picture, so here's the link: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/behjutnbuwygcrcpfinu.PNG

It’s fairly out there, but it’s pretty space-efficient (moreso than a 2-post lift anyway). The plan is to build a frame to support a bodyshell then have a hoist lift it up to the ceiling using cables attached to the ceiling joists. At the left-hand side of the picture is the plan view of my garage To get enough drag on the single cable for it to be able to lower it all the way to the floor I need to double-back the rearmost cables which adde complexity, but shouldn’t be too bad.

In the centre of the picture is a side-view of the frame and cable arrangement. The cables will be looped down to a ******-block and then connected to different ceiling joists to spread the load. By looping it down to the ******-block, I halve the weight the hoist has to draw (essentially to lift 1000kg it just has to lift 500kg twice as far). This is good as high capacity hoists are ****** expensive...

For safety I’ll have a straight chain looped around another ceiling joist that will provide a failsafe in the ‘up’ position should the hoist brakes fail. Also, each individual part will be specced to be able to hold more than I’ll ever hold on this thing entirely by itself. As the vast majority of parts are duplicated, and any single parts will be beefier than that, it should be pretty safe. Oh, also, as per the far-right I’ll reinforce the corners of the wall where it meets the ceiling joists to stop the whole thing trying to pull the garage down.

All in all it should cost me £300-£350. About half of what a 2-post lift would cost second hand (with probably a reasonable amount of the functionality).

Thoughts? Ideas? Referrals to mental institutes?

Something else that I thought might be useful to share for people with minimal space is my small collapsible rotisserie which you can see in one of the pics on the first post.



It's fairly lightweight so wouldn't be suitable for the heavier end of cars (or even the middle-weights really), but works well enough for my little Spitfire and could easily be scaled up with bigger box section.

At one end is some parts cannibalised from a £16 eBay special winch used to turn the bodyshell and drilled as an index wheel to lock it in place. Really it needs a longer handle (or a better gearset) as it's a bit tricky to turn. In fact it works better if you just turn it using the bodyshell at the moment...



However, the bit I'm most proud of is that it folds you can dismantle the whole thing in about 5 minutes and store it very compactly.





Since these pictures I've added stabilising feet to it to limit the rocking backwards and forwards.

Oh, and the best part about it is that all-in it cost ~£130! Would probably be cheaper in the States as well, given material prices.

Man, that rotisserie is neat!

I think the weak point for your winch setup is going to be the joists themselves. I would consider building a metal frame shaped like a big # to help spread the load across several joists and to allow you to attach the frame at several points along the joists so you're not putting all the load at one or two points on each joist.

If you're looking at a maximum of 2 tons (4000 lbs) spread over, say, a 4 foot by 8 foot area, that's a load of 125 lbs/sq foot. By this calculator, a 100 psf load on 2x10 beams gives spaced 16 inches apart gives you a maximum span of 11 feet.

Note that this number is going to be much lower if you're point loading the beams as in your drawing.

So, how far apart are your beams, and how far do they have to span? I'd start there and work backwards to figure out how big of a # you'd need to spread the load sufficiently.

Of course, at that point it might just be cheaper/safer to get a couple I beams and tie them into the walls or support them on posts at the wall.

(Disclaimer: I am not any sort of engineer; I just play one on the internet and have managed to not kill myself with anything I've made so far.)

Welcome to GJ! Yes, Jack Olsen's thread is the gateway drug.

At first glance, your shop is small... but everything is in reach! And you don't have to walk very far.

Also, while I have store my big roll of crumpled up shipping packing paper up in the joists, I need to do that with my metal scraps. Thanks for the inspiration!

I have orang-u-tan-like arms, so I tend to think in a wide variety of storage altitude.

LinuxMercedes said:

Man, that rotisserie is neat!

Click to expand...

Thanks it was one of my 'ambitious but not entirely rubbish' moments

LinuxMercedes said:

I think the weak point for your winch setup is going to be the joists themselves. I would consider building a metal frame shaped like a big # to help spread the load across several joists and to allow you to attach the frame at several points along the joists so you're not putting all the load at one or two points on each joist.

If you're looking at a maximum of 2 tons (4000 lbs) spread over, say, a 4 foot by 8 foot area, that's a load of 125 lbs/sq foot. By this calculator, a 100 psf load on 2x10 beams gives spaced 16 inches apart gives you a maximum span of 11 feet.

Note that this number is going to be much lower if you're point loading the beams as in your drawing.

So, how far apart are your beams, and how far do they have to span? I'd start there and work backwards to figure out how big of a # you'd need to spread the load sufficiently.

Of course, at that point it might just be cheaper/safer to get a couple I beams and tie them into the walls or support them on posts at the wall.

(Disclaimer: I am not any sort of engineer; I just play one on the internet and have managed to not kill myself with anything I've made so far.)

Click to expand...

Ah, I knew there was a way to work out loadings, but I for some reason my brain couldn't wrap itself around converting the metric of beam-distance into how strong an individual beam would be.

I'll measure the distance between the beams tomorrow. The span is near-as-damnit 11' though.

I like the idea of a metal frame to spread the load. That's a great idea

Squankum said:

Welcome to GJ! Yes, Jack Olsen's thread is the gateway drug.

Click to expand...

It really is isn't it! Or at least I'm fairly certain I'll have withdrawal symptoms when I get to the end...

Squankum said:

At first glance, your shop is small... but everything is in reach! And you don't have to walk very far.

Click to expand...

I hadn't thought of that! Less wasted time walking across the 'shop when I can just turn around and I'm at the other side!

[/QUOTE]Also, while I have store my big roll of crumpled up shipping packing paper up in the joists, I need to do that with my metal scraps. Thanks for the inspiration!

I have orang-u-tan-like arms, so I tend to think in a wide variety of storage altitude.[/QUOTE]

Ah! That's just brought up another memory from the depths about how I could store all the little offcuts you get from metal fab work (like little triangles or long thin strips of steel) that you usually throw away and then need something exactly like it a couple of days later.

Something like this in the rafters, but with clear boxes so you can see what's in them:

Your place shouts WORKSHOP all over it! I love the place. I would like to nose around in there to see what all I could find. You have lot of parts and tools and it is just like it should be. A very cozy great place to work and call your own! Thanks for posting it.

Best Regards
Herb

HSpencer said:

Your place shouts WORKSHOP all over it! I love the place. I would like to nose around in there to see what all I could find. You have lot of parts and tools and it is just like it should be. A very cozy great place to work and call your own! Thanks for posting it.

Best Regards
Herb

Click to expand...

Thanks mostly you'd find boxes of junk that came with my various project cars, but I reckon there's something of interest somewhere!

One other thing that might be of use to people on a tight budget is my car trailer.

Whenever we'd moved cars around in the past, or gone to pick up project cars, we'd always paid about £90 to hire a trailer for a day.

Then, my sister's boyfriend (who lives with us) bought a Peugeot 106 GTi racecar that will need trailering to race days. The thought of £180 per race weekend, plus entry fees, plus tyres and fuel was pretty galling so we started looking for used trailers.

Not a single one under £1000.

So, being the tight bastards that we are, we thought 'I bet we can make one for less than that' and started looking for used caravan chassis. We could find some half-decent ones for £200 or so, but they were all up north and the cost in petrol would have put a significant dent into our potential saving.

We put the idea on the back burner for a week or two, until we were discussing it with a mate of his who said 'I drove past an abandoned caravan on the way up here, shall we go have a look'.

We went to have a look at this thing and it had definitely been abandoned. Had a chat with the poor people in the house opposite who said it had been there for days and they were going to phone the authorities to have it removed, but they would likely charge them for the privilege.

So, we hitched it up and brought it home (much to my parents' consternation). Here it is when we got it:



We grabbed a couple of beers and some sledgehammers and started dismantling it. Although it was completely rotten it still put up quite a fight. The next morning, it looked like this:



I can tell you that while it was fun (especially fun toppling the whole thing over once the ends had been knocked out) it was much more work than we'd initially thought. We were still done that weekend though, including tidying up afterwards. At the end of it we had a chassis that was actually in great nick



We looked it up and the axle has a GVRW (gross weight capacity) of 1350kg. Not really suitable for cars like the Jaaag, but will tow my mate's 750kg racecar quite nicely, and pick up the majority of small British sports cars that I accumulate with alarming rapidity.

Once that was done I ordered up some 60x40 steel box section someone was selling in bulk on eBay and started putting together a frame.



I grabbed some 3mm steel checker plate and made some runners (which I didn't get a pic of at the time) and my mate managed to source 4 small alloy ramps used for getting lawnmowers onto low trailers. We also managed to find someone selling off some long alloy box sections and grabbed them for £35.



We drilled holes through the box section to bolt the smaller ramps to and ended up with two lightweight ~2m long ramps. We're fairly certain the box sections were some sort of construction grade as they were ****** hard to cut or bend. They even had a little lip that ran down the middle of them that the smaller ramps fit into perfectly! Result!




Some more welding and some tube for pins to lock the ramps in place had them attached.



Some angle-iron welded to the underside left them suitably stowed for transport, and various other bits and pieces like lights, spare wheel, wheelarches and warning triangles to make it legal here in the UK. The wheelarches are detachable actually. The idea being that given that there's only ~1.6m between the wheels on this chassis and the wheels come above the level of the bed, we'd detach the wheelarches to load wider cars and they can bump over the wheels to fit them on.

We also mounted an electric winch to an angle-iron frame which is yet to be wired in, a battery box made out of a waterproof toolbox bolted to the chassis and a manual winch as a backup.




So far, we've taken it on a ~400 mile round trip to go and pick up a Spitfire from Devon...



...and another much shorter trip to pick up an MGB GT that I accidentally bought for 99p off eBay!



Object lesson of why you don't list something for sale with no reserve finishing at 0800 on a Sunday morning...

All told it cost us about £500 (including the paint that we haven't bought yet). You could definitely do it cheaper if you just went with the manual winch and knew somewhere to get cheaper materials (eBay's reasonable, but doesn't beat a local metal yard).

It was a ton of work so there's definitely not a living to be made doing it, but if you value your time and effort as low as I value mine then it makes great financial sense!

I can dig a minimal trailer!

From a United States perspective, well, we would have turned the camper into an enclosed trailer, but the amount of power we have in our tow vehicles, and the price of fuel, well… speaking of American perpsectives, when I saw your rotisserie, my first thought was, “In my country, we have Camaros….” Just a different scale of things. A friend of mine autocrosses a modern Lotus, and he has a large enclosed trailer – rear half, Lotus, front half, living quarters. The car he tows it with is a pickup truck the size of which would boggle your minds over there, with a 5.9 liter turbodiesel motor normally used for what you would call “articulated lorries.”

But I’m a little foreign car guy here, and your world is similar to the one I raced in. We just didn’t use a winch. (My buddy who I raced with was… “thrifty.” ) So the car was just driven on and off. However, our car ran, and you specialize in both kinds of cars, static and mobile.

I’d recommend hinges and maybe locking pins on your trailer fenders, so you can get the door open/slightly open in the case of some cars. And for mpg purposes, I’d enclose the wheels on the other side with movable panels. And a belly pan, too. You’ve got plenty of leftover material from that camper, right?

Say, is that a Ford Ranger pickup? And a Mk 2 Scirocco?



_

Yeah we did think of making it enclosed, but it was so rotten that we decided to just scrap the whole thing apart from the chassis and wiring loom.

Yeah it's a completely different scale of everything over in the States. Even garages. Mine's pretty spacious for a garage in the UK, and the storage area outside is comparatively huge, but you could fit all of that inside most mid-sized garage builds on here!

The rotisserie should be easily scaled up, it's just cheaper to make it out of less bulky materials when the vast majority of cars you work on are sub-1000kg. I'll be kicking myself if/when I get an XJS, but for now I'm happy

There's a chap in the village over (tiny little place with 1-car-wide streets) with I think a mid-size RAM pickup and that thing's huge! Probably not even close to the biggest one you can get though!

I'd definitely say I specialise more in the immobile than the mobile variety, despite my best efforts

The wheelarches are low enough that I could get the door open on the Spitfire I picked up (just), although the racecar might be a different matter. Hinges would be a good idea, and locking pins would make it all quicker to detach. If I can get my hands on any of those I'll definitely do that. Enclosed wheel wells would be a great idea as well, although we've scrapped all of the caravan so can't use it for a belly pan. The thin aluminium roof sheet would have been perfect but my dad convinced me it was **** material and not worth keeping so, despite my best hoarding instincts, we chucked it. I knew it would come in handy!

Yeah it's my uncle's 2002 Ranger which has done tow duty a number of times now. It's the 2.2l turbodiesel version which is ubiquitous in Rangers here, but I don't know if you guys ever got in the States. Good car, although the diff is starting to howl which we think is the pinion bearings wearing out...

The other car is a '92 Citroen BX! Non-turbo diesel so dog slow (although not as dog slow as you'd think, and surprisingly fun to drive as it's sub-1000kg). Picked it up for £255, fixed some rust on the sills and it passed inspection and drove for a year without fault after nearly a decade of sitting in the back of someone's garden. Then it decided the water pump should pump water out of the engine rather than through it so I fixed that, and while it was sitting it developed a hydraulic leak on the return line from the rear suspension that I haven't yet got around to sorting :S

Did I miss it or did you tell what kind of car is on the rotisserie? My first guess is a MGB GT but there are some things that throw me off.

BTW, to job on what you are doing there. It takes a lot of effort (and years) to coordinate everything like Jack Olsen has done. He makes use of used fixtures and materials as much as anyone but makes it all seem to be in symphony.

Squankum said:

But I’m a little foreign car guy here, and your world is similar to the one I raced in. We just didn’t use a winch. (My buddy who I raced with was… “thrifty.” ) So the car was just driven on and off.
_

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I forgot to ask! What did you used to race?

Zeke said:

Did I miss it or did you tell what kind of car is on the rotisserie? My first guess is a MGB GT but there are some things that throw me off.

BTW, to job on what you are doing there. It takes a lot of effort (and years) to coordinate everything like Jack Olsen has done. He makes use of used fixtures and materials as much as anyone but makes it all seem to be in symphony.

Click to expand...

It's a Triumph Spitfire, although what's probably throwing it out is that I've started welding a factory steel hardtop to the drop-top bodyshell. Part of my cunning plan to give the chassis more rigidity than a wet pretzel. It'll be welded directly to the chassis a la Big Healey, rather than just solid-mounted like most people do when looking for a bit more stiffness. Hasn't been done with one of these before, but I read a thread about a chap on a hot rod forum that had done it with impressive results.

Yeah, I spotted that the first post on his thread was back in 2009, and that was the second thread he'd had on it. I'm still on page 120-odd, but it's thoroughly impressive how each incremental change just makes it even more than the sum of its parts.

He really does seem to have a knack for making everything hang together as one co-ordinated whole. Really humble about it all too.

Do you have any more pics of the rotisserie? I am working on a gt6 and like your A frame design. I was planning on using a couple of used engine stands on each side--an idea I got from the triumphexp website.

Looks like a well used workshop. I like it.

TX63CONV said:

Do you have any more pics of the rotisserie? I am working on a gt6 and like your A frame design. I was planning on using a couple of used engine stands on each side--an idea I got from the triumphexp website.

Looks like a well used workshop. I like it.

Click to expand...

Thanks man I don't have any more pics, but I could get some more detailed ones tomorrow.

A couple of engine stands would work nicely, but only if they're height-adjustable really, or at least high off the ground. The ones I have would plow the side of the car into the ground if I tried to flip it over :S

Have you got any pics of your GT6? I'd love one myself but they're significantly more expensive over here.

I tell a lie, I've got a couple.

Here's one on it's side, which shows slightly where I've mounted the brackets onto the body (two on the lower mounting points, with a third that bolts through a hole I drilled on the bulkhead).



And another one that shows a bit more detail of the bracket at the back which bolts onto the bumper mounts and some existing holes on the boot floor.



You can also see in that picture that the brackets bolt on to the spinny bit (it's late here, couldn't think of the technical term) which means I can swap them out for other ones to hold other cars.

I'd be wary of using this if your sills are rotten as people have had bodyshells fold if they're rusted through. Pretty extreme, but worth checking...

Ah, one other little tip/trick for people on a budget.

When I was planning to make my little roll hoop for the Spitfire I looked up on eBay and saw a pipe bender for £15 and thought 'result!'.

It was only after I'd picked it up that I realised that what I needed for a roll hoop was a tube bender, not a pipe bender.

Not sure if it's the same in the States, but over here in the UK pipe benders tend to be for plumbing and are in really odd sizes. The size of the dies correlates to pipe of a particular internal diameter with a seemingly arbitrary wall thickness. For instance, 1 1/4" pipe actually has an external diameter of 42mm (and not even a 1 1/4" internal diameter, so lord knows what they're on about).

The result, crushed tube. Not good.

So, rather than stump up the money for a significantly more expensive tube bender, I thought I'd try and find some tube/pipe of the right diameter to make in insert to narrow it down to the size I needed.

Turns out that you can get 42mm structural hollow section with the right wall diameter to bring it down to the right size to bend 38mm roll bar tubing

After a bit of bending, here's what I ended up with




And it worked! It stopped the pipe crushing significantly. Enough to mean that the ratio between the sides was close enough to meet MSA regulations (our national motorsport governing body).

Never mind the fact that I had to buy 6.1m of structural hollow section to get a 30cm long insert, or the fact that I misread the regulations so I actually needed thicker tubing to meet the regulations if I wanted to enter it into race events...

BiTurbo228 said:

I forgot to ask! What did you used to race?

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It's a 1977 Golf. Started out life as an injected 1.7L, then it got a Rabbit GTI 1.8 liter mild compression motor (uh, over here, Mk1 Golf GTI didn't arrive until '83/'84... really) and then, a later 80's 10:1 8V motor, and now, thanks to a relaxation in the rules about what parts bin swapping may be done for this chassis in this particular class, a 1.8L 16V.

Car weight is under 1600 lbs. last I heard, and I'm sure less with each passing year. That's with full glass and upholstery and dashboard, but some seat substitution/removal rules and 397 other details. And, I'm guessing, 13x10 wheels with very sticky tires. (I've been out of the program for a few years now, but the car and owner soldier on.)


Say, I think it was Archimedes who said, "Give me a strong enough platform on the shop floor, and a long steel beam, and I can measure the torsional rigidity of a body shell." OK, maybe not in ancient Greece, but other racers have done that to compare the contributions of welded in cages to improving the overall stiffness.

Stiff is good! Lets the suspension do the suspension work, lets the body just be what it's bolted to. There was a time in automotive history, up until the mid 20th century, that flex in the frame was actually intended as a ride comfort strategy, but things have since evolved. Where LBC's* fit on that spectrum I do not know.

Also, I'm not aware of a Ford Ranger turbodiesel here in the States. Americans have a fraught relationship with diesels, and also, long stretches of apathy about fuel economy. GM bungled some things in the early 80's, and now VW has irked some people, too.

Full sized pickup truck buyers do like them for towing, however.

very cool garage, can't wait to see more.

Squankum said:

It's a 1977 Golf. Started out life as an injected 1.7L, then it got a Rabbit GTI 1.8 liter mild compression motor (uh, over here, Mk1 Golf GTI didn't arrive until '83/'84... really) and then, a later 80's 10:1 8V motor, and now, thanks to a relaxation in the rules about what parts bin swapping may be done for this chassis in this particular class, a 1.8L 16V.

Car weight is under 1600 lbs. last I heard, and I'm sure less with each passing year. That's with full glass and upholstery and dashboard, but some seat substitution/removal rules and 397 other details. And, I'm guessing, 13x10 wheels with very sticky tires. (I've been out of the program for a few years now, but the car and owner soldier on.)

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That must be ****** quick! In race guise that's probably slightly lighter and slightly more powerful than my car will be

My GF's a big fan of the boxy Mk1 Golfs, although really likes the Cabrios. We'll definitely end up picking one up at some point or another. Either that or an X1/9 to replace the one that was squashed by a tree :S

Squankum said:

Say, I think it was Archimedes who said, "Give me a strong enough platform on the shop floor, and a long steel beam, and I can measure the torsional rigidity of a body shell." OK, maybe not in ancient Greece, but other racers have done that to compare the contributions of welded in cages to improving the overall stiffness.

Stiff is good! Lets the suspension do the suspension work, lets the body just be what it's bolted to. There was a time in automotive history, up until the mid 20th century, that flex in the frame was actually intended as a ride comfort strategy, but things have since evolved. Where LBC's* fit on that spectrum I do not know.

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That's an interesting idea actually. Sink a couple of eyes into the concrete floor and use a long beam with weights on the end to measure the torsional stiffness. There was a set of students who did that with a Spitfire chassis for an engineering project and it got published in a Triumph mag. Very interesting to see what the overall torsional rigidity of the chassis is, and where the points it flexed most are (they split it up into sections and tested them in isolation).

People tend to run 330-400lb springs on the front which I'm pretty certain just means that the chassis is doing the majority of the springing rather than the springs!

Squankum said:

Also, I'm not aware of a Ford Ranger turbodiesel here in the States. Americans have a fraught relationship with diesels, and also, long stretches of apathy about fuel economy. GM bungled some things in the early 80's, and now VW has irked some people, too.

Full sized pickup truck buyers do like them for towing, however.

Click to expand...

Yeah I remember reading about the old diesel V8s and how they tarnished diesel's reputation, and the VW scandal won't have helped at all.

They work nicely in tiny little pickups for towing too!

Ferrari-lover said:

very cool garage, can't wait to see more.

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Thanks a lot I think I've exhausted the innovative parts of the garage, although we just finished another strip of concrete yesterday for my dad's garage which will go up adjacent to mine and will be a lot bigger. I'll get some pictures of that when I can

Great space with some good storage solutions.

If it was me I'd be a little uneasy with the rotisserie legs. They don't seem to have any feet but more critically there doesn't seem to be any tie bar between the two ends. Probably should have something to stop the two ends splaying out...

Cris B said:

Great space with some good storage solutions.

If it was me I'd be a little uneasy with the rotisserie legs. They don't seem to have any feet but more critically there doesn't seem to be any tie bar between the two ends. Probably should have something to stop the two ends splaying out...

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Thanks

Yeah I'm not particularly happy with that. I've added little 6" feet to either end which has helped a lot with keeping it planted, but it still rocks slightly.

I do plan on making a collapsible brace that fits between the two ends, but I need to wait til the next paycheck hits before I can budget for some materials...

I like it!

Some people swear by those hydraulic-jack benders. I'm not one of them. I'd rather use a roll-type bender or a Hossfeld-type.

The first car I bought when I came to California was a 1978 Spitfire. This is a picture of someone else's, but it's the right color:



I wish I still had that car.

Thanks a lot! I'm reading your thread from both ends now which is a little confusing :S I'm on page 135 at the moment so no spoilers

I'm definitely going to have to pinch your idea for propylene door panels as it's genius. I'm desperately trying to get the projected weight for my Spit down to 750kg but it keeps creeping up!

TBH I didn't even consider a roll bender for rollcage tubing, but given that you bent the box section for your table with it maybe I should have. I mainly picked up the hydraulic jack one because they're everywhere over here which means they're dirt cheap. They definitely need a bit more planning time than a roll bender though as to get a decent wide curve you need to start the bend from each end and work inwards. Bit of a learning curve with that, ended up making 4 separate hoops before I got mine right! Looked ok by the end of it though:



Cool, I didn't know you had a Spitfire what did you think of it? I've done a ton of work on them but I've never actually driven one!

I bought mine as a rolling resto but it wasn't quite as 'rolling' as the guy described. Was backfiring up through the carbs above 2500rpm as it had been run on unleaded fuel and the valves weren't sealing.

Here it is next to my dearly departed Jag (crushed by an oak while I was swapping in a manual gearbox) and my DD Alfa. Behind it is the garage at our old house. Lovely place. Brick-walled with an inspection pit. Not allowed to build those here nowadays...

BiTurbo228 said:

Thanks a lot! I'm reading your thread from both ends now which is a little confusing :S I'm on page 135 at the moment so no spoilers

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Page 135? Then you haven't even gotten to the part where he builds a movable rear wing! Oh wait, I'm sorry, you said, "no spoilers", pardon me.

Pits are not permitted in many jurisdictions in the states now, too.

A bit of trivia from NASCAR stock car racing here: you can use thin-wall tubing for the highest bars of your roll cage if you want to improve your car's center of gravity and reduce weight transfer in a corner!

I'm not saying you should. Nobody said they could. But NASCAR inspectors have caught race cars that way. That's why they have inspection holes in the cages, so wall thickness can be checked. Frightening, eh?

I'm thinking of an incident from 15, 20 years ago... and as I remembered it yesterday, I thought, "oh dear, I bet somebody has cooked up a way to cheat the inspection hole game, by welding in a short section of sleeve inside..." Bet they have some other kind of tube inspection to stay ahead of that cheat now.

I can't do pics from the machine I'm on during the day, but here's an American stock car cage:

http://martinoberg.se/luxforums/1400_Nascar_Challenger_13.jpg

Many generations (human generations!) of evolution in them. Last I heard, teams build various bodies of various stiffnesses and frequencies depending on the purpose (superspeedway, road course, and concrete short oval, IIRC.)

Active aero?! Neat i remember commenting on a jalopnik article ages ago and jack mentioned the wool tufts and rideheight sensors which i'll definitely be using. Might have to get more serious on the aero front though!

Yeah i've seen those cages before (where Roadkill made their NASCarlo). If people actually know about nascar (as opposed to thinking it's a weird american sport where they just turn left), they know that nascar is legendary for taking one piece of tech they were given by the sanctioning body 40 years ago and endlessly refining it until it's as good as it possibly can be. Case in point: the rpm limits of the pushrod v8s...

The second thing people know is just how good people have got at finding loopholes in those regs. Didn't know about the thin-wall tube in the top part of the cage though!

I suppose you could do sonic testing of the thickness of cages at random points, but i have no idea how portable the kit for sonic testing is...

Building different cage harmonics for different surfaces is just mental though...

Like the workshop, trailer and rotisserie!
We added PVC drain pipes to the ceiling of our install trailer to keep all the paint-pole and broom handles off the floor, same thought process. Every tool needs a home.

LegacyIndustrial said:

Like the workshop, trailer and rotisserie!
We added PVC drain pipes to the ceiling of our install trailer to keep all the paint-pole and broom handles off the floor, same thought process. Every tool needs a home.

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Thanks that's a good idea to store my broom actually! Thanks

Great start on your garage thread. The 12-gauge garage brought me to GJ also. A great forum with great people!

You should check out Denwood's single car garage. He did an amazing transformation.
http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=263351

Remember it's not the size of the garage but what gets accomplished in the garage.

shortykorte said:

Great start on your garage thread. The 12-gauge garage brought me to GJ also. A great forum with great people!

You should check out Denwood's single car garage. He did an amazing transformation.
http://www.garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=263351

Remember it's not the size of the garage but what gets accomplished in the garage.

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Thanks been a bit quiet on the garage front recently as the daily drivers have been playing up :S

That transformation is unbelievable. Bookmarked so I can go through the whole thing later

Not really garage related, but certainly in the 'cool old tools' category. Just picked this up for £26 from eBay so I can sew the vinyl/tartan for my Spitfire's seats.

It's made in 1936 and still functions perfectly. A little patina to it, but otherwise in great shape and a stunning piece of design as well. Really beautiful little machine.

Comes with the world's supply of misc complicated mechanical gubbins and widgets that I have no idea where they go or what they do, but if anything breaks I should have a part for it

Nice job on the tube bending. FWIW - Not sure if its common knowledge in racing circles as I've never been directly involved in racing but a friend of mine is and ... when he builds roll cages, he drills a hole in the pipe between joined sections of the cage, and completely welds the joints "air tight", closes all ends of the roll cage "air tight", such that the entire roll cage can be pressurized. He then drills and threads holes for a pressure gauge and schrader valve, and pressurizes the roll cage with nitrogen. As long as the roll cage holds pressure, its good to go, but if the pressure drops, you know instantly the pipe or a weld is cracked!

slimpickins said:

Nice job on the tube bending. FWIW - Not sure if its common knowledge in racing circles as I've never been directly involved in racing but a friend of mine is and ... when he builds roll cages, he drills a hole in the pipe between joined sections of the cage, and completely welds the joints "air tight", closes all ends of the roll cage "air tight", such that the entire roll cage can be pressurized. He then drills and threads holes for a pressure gauge and schrader valve, and pressurizes the roll cage with nitrogen. As long as the roll cage holds pressure, its good to go, but if the pressure drops, you know instantly the pipe or a weld is cracked!

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Thanks

That's a great idea, very clever. I wonder if I can get a drill bit past my roof and go through the outer and inner tubes, then weld up the hole on the outer one. That way I could do that even though my hoop is already in place.

I've also got a bit of an idea to put a low door bar in, but I'm not sure how much use it'll actually be. To get it high enough to do anything would make it really difficult to get in, and interior space is at an absolute premium in these little cars.

I'll see if I can indent the door to keep some interior space and get it high enough to protect, but low enough to be able to get in and out. It is a road car after all.

In case you guys somehow think I'm hard done by with a teeny-tiny garage (I'm most definitely not, I'm the luckiest git alive), I thought I'd take you on a tour of the family house (or the garage buildings at least).

If we start at my latest project: a parts shed/car storage building wedged into the available space by the top border of our property. I've put up the shuttering, filled it level with ******** and we should be mixing concrete for it in the next couple of weeks.



Think of it like a 9'x27' square building for car storage, with a 13'x19' triangle stuck on one end to follow the fence that borders our land. It's on a bit of a slope, but I've tried to confine that to just the parts triangle. The parking area is level. Annoyingly, if I'd been a bit quicker fixing my daily drivers I'd have had access to a digger we'd hired and could have got it level. Ah well.

This will house two of my Spitfire rolling shells (with my overhead hoist idea) and my sister's boyfriend's old Peugeot 106 that came off the road due to severe rust at the front end and has been waiting for a sheltered area to come available to start welding it up.

Moving right, we come to a pretty shoddy shed that houses the homeless junk that you tend to accumulate when you move house. Eventually it will get replaced with a better structure and the junk organised/thrown out. Part of the reason for posting this is that we've just come over the top of the 'peak junk' bell-curve so it'll be nice to look back and see what it was like



Move right again and you've got my sister's boyfriend's garage (he lives with us, likes cars and bikes. We approve). It's 13'x20', and rather taller than we'd planned (it looked reasonable when we put the walls together on the ground).






I was told that I wasn't allowed to include the floor in the picture as a job was mid-way and he's much more concerned with clutter than I am! He's got a similar overhead storage area to me, and a neat tire rack/storage area off to one side that's a lot less haphazard than mine.

Next to that is a temporary tent that houses his 106 GTi race car. Eventually it'll have a proper garage for it in that space as the tent's not particularly waterproof.



Move right again and you've got the other major building work that's in progress at the moment: a garage for my dad. At the moment, his two Maserati Biturbos, Porsche 914/6 and MG TC (that his dad built from a chassis upwards) are all outside which is not the place for rust-prone vehicles to be. It'll be lower than the other garages in the area, but a lot bigger floorplan. Should be 29'x23', with another small 6.5'x5' square tacked onto one of the sides to make best use of the space available with a slanted fence at the back.



Bordering that is my garage, which is actually 11'x23' but I can't change the title of my thread :S there's a little flower bed for our grandparents tacked on the side. Once creepers climb up the wall it'll look rather nice I think provide some much-needed insulation too




Continue up the path and we've got a small woodworking garage. It's pretty cluttered as it's got everything from a larger woodworking shed at the old place crammed into it, but a reorganisation is on the list of things to do. Opposite that is the entrance to our house, but I forgot to take a pic of that :S




Continue back the way you came and there's the extension to our house we built for my grandparents. The only way we could afford such a fantastic place to live is by selling our house combined with the sale of my grandparents house. They had a huge 3-story Victorian house in the suburbs south of London that they bought for £1600 when they were young. They'd only been heating a couple of rooms as they couldn't afford the upkeep so we hatched a plan to benefit the both of us



Below that is a large area that will be a patio but is currently a collection of ********.



Spin around and there's a pond that we installed and some decking that reaches out over it. Eventually there will be a little hut down there to house some speakers and other bits and pieces. The overflow tank from that also provides water for our toilet system.




Move up from the pond and there's a barn that we built for my mum and sister. They're both horsey people, and there's a field to the left and a sandschool below the pond for them. They have a couple of spare stables that they charge livery for to help provide a bit of money for upkeep. although only one is occupied at the moment. The concrete base for this is the only base that we didn't mix ourselves and it shows. Nothing against concrete companies at all, but I think we just had a bad crew. They were rushed and a bit haphazard so the mix isn't as consistent as we'd get it and in some areas the surface is crumbling.




To the side of that is the main area where we park our cars. As you can see it's rather full! I do have designs to put open-faced car ports here once the majority of the junkers here are housed within the garages we're building. It should produce a bit of a courtyard effect which I think will look rather nice.



Dead behind the stables is a wood store that I built! Dug the holes for the posts, built the framework, hit my pinky with a hammer while I was putting roof sheets on in the dark and had to go get it stitched up. That backs onto my parts shed and we've come full circle!



If anyone's read through all that waffling then I'm surprised! I'll post updates on anything that we do as you can probably tell, we're not a family of completer-finishers, but eventually we'll run out of big things to do and actually get round to finishing off some of the detail finishing and it should all hang together much nicer

BiTurbo228 said:

Thanks the pic below gave me the idea, but a square would be much more efficient use of space than a hanging tube:

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I used PVC, 10' under my pallet rack shelves and 3' straight up for shorter pieces.

I agree square would be better optimization but 4" PVC is relatively cheep and widely available.