Monday, January 19, 2009

Weatherproofing the Rolling Wood Rack


The rolling wood rack I built must sit in my driveway to allow me to work in the garage, so eventually it was going to get rained on. At first I just threw a tarp over it which worked fine for several months, but this wasn't a perfect solution as had to be fastened all the time making access difficult. The rack sat outside for several months, while I was renovating the garage, and eventually the plastic tarp started to deteriorate from the sun and get pin holes from the wind abrading it on the corners of the wood. Naturally the day before I was going to do this project, a storm went through ripped holes in the tarp's weak areas and some of the wood got wet, leaving food for the fireplace.

I got a new tarp and decided to build and upper frame to secure the tarp in place and keep it away from the sharp wood corners. -Read More

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Securing Lumber Loads


HTML clipboard Carting all that lumber home can sometimes be a challenge, if not secured properly. Nothing ruins a day, like leaving your expensive lumber all over the highway and calling your auto insurance company. A few commercially available tools have come on the market that are designed to keep your load from sliding out the back of your pickup truck bed. They take advantage of the gap between the bed and tailgate. Even though these are made just down the road from me, I could not find a retailer that carried them. The other problem I noticed was that the "Load Latch" bowed the plywood sheets and could damage pre-finished plywood. Not to be deterred I came up with my own version, that was a lot cheaper too. -Read More