OK – so we’ve just about finished the new upstairs office, shipping, bathroom, guest room, E-Type man cave – whatever you want to call it… Actually, someone who came over here called it “The Cockpit” – and I might stick with that.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but most of my friends and family think the word “monocoque” is hilarious – I can remember them making fun of it in high school! They all call the business “Cockworks” for short…
Anyway – I realized a couple of weeks ago that now that I have this room built, I don’t have any furniture. I need a desk, shelves, some kind of packing table – alot actually. I got ahold of a shipping supplies catalog, and they had these steel “packing tables” in there, and I thought, “Hmmm – that looks like it would work pretty well – I should get one of those!” And then, “Hey wait a minute – those look EXACTLY like the steel tables I bought last Spring!”
When I went down to Hendersonville, NC last Spring to pick up the English wheel, I also stopped and spent a few days with my parents. My father had picked up some steel tables for his shop, and they caught my eye right away. He said they had tons of them down at the resale shop, come on, I’ll take you down there!
Well, I had the truck, and these were pretty heavy duty steel tables, so I bought the best 4 they had for $75 each, and we spent a couple hours taking them apart and loading them into my truck. Those, plus the English wheel, made for a pretty heavy (but typical) load on the way home!
And then they just sat up against the shop under a tarp ever since. I had ideas about using them for benches downstairs, but then I thought I might like wood instead and there weren’t enough and blah, blah, blah… But then when I saw this packing table idea, I got the bright idea of cleaning them up and painting them and using them for upstairs furniture.
Well, that worked out great – IF you consider that my time is worth about $5 an hour, because as usual, this took ALOT longer than I expected, and of course, I went WAY overboard on the level of detail… But I do have nice strong tables upstairs now!
After all of this was done, I stood upstairs and looked at these and thought, “I need more of these – this is the answer for the new shop downstairs.” So I called I contacted Lyon (these are Lyon benches – highly recommend them…), and the local rep gave me a quote on everything I need for about 40 running feet of these with shelves and drawers and the whole bit. It was WAY less than I thought it would be, and proof that I was nuts for restoring these. Oh well, sometimes you just have to pay your dues to get something good in the end – God knows these E-Types are that way!
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- Here are the tables and the English wheel – all loaded up last Spring. This was a beatiful day and a fun trip!
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- Here are the tables disassembled and leaning up against the shop – where they have been for over a year.
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- Brent and I scrubbed them with Simple Green and Brillo pads on a sunny Friday afternoon a few weeks ago.
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- Here is one of the tops – after I trimmed it down from 5 to 4.5 feet. I needed a 9-foot long packing table for my space upstairs. Now, and normal person would have cut one 5-foot table down to 4 and done it that way, but I’m just too picky for that, so I cut two down 6 inches each…
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- Here is another one. These came from a high school auto shop in Pickens County, SC. So they had some pretty tough wear on them, and I welded up several holes, vice mounts, etc., and then ground off any sharp edges, etc.
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- Here are the drawers – the resale shop had these tables all over the place, and it was funny, they acted like they were new in the way they sold them – “You get one drawer and one shelf with each table.” This is the back of the new shop – I envisioned sitting on that deck in the mornings sipping my coffee and talking to customers on the phone each morning while taking a break around 10:30 or so… SOME DAY I’ll get there – I hope!
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- These had seen better days, and it was at this point I started to realize the INSANITY of this restoration project! Do you know how much surface area is here to paint!
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- Not to mention that I already scrubbed the grease and oil out of all of these!
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- Here are the shells… Everything got scrubbed clean, scuffed, primed with red oxide on the rusted or bare metal areas, and then 2 coats of finish paint.
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- Here is the new 9-foot “packing table” just about assembled. We’re putting the drawers in – and of course the stock brackets weren’t good enough for me, and I made up new drawer brackets to make them “sturdier”… These drawers will have packing tape and labels and stuff in them, but I made them so you could fill them with lead bars – what is wrong with me!?! The table tops are 1/8” steel – believe me when I say these are STRONG and ROCK SOLID! What can I say, I like to build things right – once – give me a ring if you want your E-Type shell built that way!
