I build electric guitars from scratch for a hobby, soon to be full-time with my retirement from the local Sheriff's Office in 3 working days (!) and have had eight stands / tables about the garage, each with a different machine on it. Chaos was reigning, and getting any work done was, let us say, difficult and trying.
So one fine day I stumbled onto an ad in the FaceBook Marketplace for chunks of bowling alley. The price being very reasonable, I drove a half hour and picked up an 11' long chunk of bowling alley. 42" wide and a hair under 3" thick, it is all pine, with the exception of rock maple sides, and on one end maple is fingerboarded into the pine, where the approach ended and the lane began. It's massively heavy, at almost 300 pounds.
Lesson learned - don't start a project like this right before Thanksgiving, when you've got a full-time job, and have two out of state funerals to attend, not to mention an out of state expedition with two dogs to see in-laws for 10 days.... your progress will be SLOW.
Got the truss completed, added eight drawers which I made (discovered in the process that I'm certainly no cabinet maker), a big and clear center section to stack stuff up in, a section for guitar templates to be stored, and also eight restaurant bussing tubs as drawers, partly because I was DONE making drawers, and they are convenient to pull out of the slides and take to the bench with the contents I might need.
Finally got it all completed, put the bowling alley on the top, removed 50+ years of God-only-knows what kind of finish was on it with a half gallon of stripper and a LOT of elbow grease with a big, sharp scraper (amazing how much material you can remove that way) and touched up the corners and edges with a belt sander. Finally, added some of those nifty drop down casters that you can just step on, engaging the wasters, and move the table about. That turned out to be a really needed touch.
Anyway, here it is. Currently I'm pulling additional electric into the garage (what kind of a fool builds his retirement house but only includes two 110V 15A circuits in the garage? Then hard-piping my Harbor Freight dust collector with lots of 4" and 2.5" schedule 20 PVC and blast gates, and then I'm back off to the races; I've got a couple of commissioned guitars that need making !
So one fine day I stumbled onto an ad in the FaceBook Marketplace for chunks of bowling alley. The price being very reasonable, I drove a half hour and picked up an 11' long chunk of bowling alley. 42" wide and a hair under 3" thick, it is all pine, with the exception of rock maple sides, and on one end maple is fingerboarded into the pine, where the approach ended and the lane began. It's massively heavy, at almost 300 pounds.
Lesson learned - don't start a project like this right before Thanksgiving, when you've got a full-time job, and have two out of state funerals to attend, not to mention an out of state expedition with two dogs to see in-laws for 10 days.... your progress will be SLOW.
Got the truss completed, added eight drawers which I made (discovered in the process that I'm certainly no cabinet maker), a big and clear center section to stack stuff up in, a section for guitar templates to be stored, and also eight restaurant bussing tubs as drawers, partly because I was DONE making drawers, and they are convenient to pull out of the slides and take to the bench with the contents I might need.
Finally got it all completed, put the bowling alley on the top, removed 50+ years of God-only-knows what kind of finish was on it with a half gallon of stripper and a LOT of elbow grease with a big, sharp scraper (amazing how much material you can remove that way) and touched up the corners and edges with a belt sander. Finally, added some of those nifty drop down casters that you can just step on, engaging the wasters, and move the table about. That turned out to be a really needed touch.
Anyway, here it is. Currently I'm pulling additional electric into the garage (what kind of a fool builds his retirement house but only includes two 110V 15A circuits in the garage? Then hard-piping my Harbor Freight dust collector with lots of 4" and 2.5" schedule 20 PVC and blast gates, and then I'm back off to the races; I've got a couple of commissioned guitars that need making !
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