ExPo Garages: Lets see them!

dieselcruiserhead

16 Years on ExPo. Whoa!!
That is barn is just gorgeous..

Kermit I like it too, I dig your style dude...

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01001010

Adventurer
Soon to be a full blown Rover workshop...

first bay needs the gloss sealer and starting on the second bay tomorrow night...

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dieselcruiserhead

16 Years on ExPo. Whoa!!
Sorry for the length of this and all the posts but I thought you guys would enjoy.. :)


It is funny because I do not have a ton of stuff or assets (most of my stuff is beat up but functional) and I live fairly modestly, but I do have a fairly awesome shop... :) I have renting a shop for several years now mostly to feed the cruiser habit :)

I occupied the shop seen in the first photo for several years (with the wrecked 80 series) and built my first 55 entirely there, among many too many other heavy mechanical jobs. I was also making some money here and there working on people's junk. :)

It was basically a very large single bay shop for a whopping $125 a month :) My friend Damon, who is also really into cruisers and owns a BJ42 factory diesel 40 series (and the 100 series also seen below), would work on the BJ42 regularly at my shop mostly doing little things (as it needs very little) and eventually convinced me to allow him to move in... Which was also a nice perk as he has some decent tools but also made the room fairly cramped...

One day, I was recycling and finally met the owner of the center. It turned out I had been talking to for years on the phone because all his recycling trucks (at the time) run the Cummins 4BT engines and we would run things be each other and some friends have even bought some of his old trucks for various projects...

We started talking and he is an environmentalist like who is also into old cars (he doesn't know much about them though, but has built up a bunch of cool old motorcycles). He takes me on a tour of the property there and has an old Model A (I believe) in perfect condition, the beatup '29 Ford pickup seen in the photos that he is planning to turn into a rat rod, and a '58 Chevy Apache pickup, all in a shop out back of one of the buildings. He is just a couple years older than me in his mid 30's, awesome guy, originally from Belguim (but you'd never know it as he grew up in California and is So. Californian), and is also a skateboarder :eek:

After some BSing he said that he would be psyched to possibly rent out the rear section of the facility, to simply have people working on their stuff regularly, and to hopefully entice him to work on the '29 Ford (which hasn't happened yet)...

But as a result we now have a sweet shop. Damon also had a good friend moving to Utah (they are both originally from Kentucky), who I had met a few times, and is also a die hard cruiserhead, and he figured he would want to share the space... So 2 then became 3.

And finally my friend Bill, who I brew biodiesel with, started expressing interest in the shop and possibly doing a diesel swap. He is not a "full partner" but has paid the rent a few times and did his conversion there as well. He has a gorgeous clean Oregon FJ62. We just did the diesel swap, an Isuzu 4BD1T turbo diesel. So there are really about 3 of us full time.

I actually spent most of the day today cleaning the bajeezus out of it and doing other errands (such as changing the spark plugs and light tuneup on the Saab) as it looked like a bomb went off post the engine swap...

Anyway, the shop is in the gorgeous Heber Valley in Utah, about 7000 feet and the pics show the valley and surrounding mountains. One which is the massive and gorgeous Mount Timpanogos (the large looking set of peaks) which Robert Redford's ski area Sundance sits at the base of, and is about 20 minutes away.

Park City (where we all live) is about 20 minutes north of here... Pretty funny because the sun finally showed up today for about the first time in 3 weeks or so, and I found myself taking pics today...

Photos in order, L to R:

The old shop and the 80 series I am putting under a FJ55.

The new shop from the outside.

Damon's 100, Carrie & I's '77 Ford Van that I bought this year down in Moab, "Brown Sugar" which is an awesome and sweet running camper van with shag carpet roofing... And my '92 Saab 9000 Turbo, my daily driver.. Great car, great mileage, hauls ***, built like a tank, lots of typical finicky things that have gone wrong with it but keeps on truckin' and runs great still with a whopping 174K miles on it already...

And the views....
 
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dieselcruiserhead

16 Years on ExPo. Whoa!!
More Photos: L to R again:

The recycling trucks at the facility are Cummins 4BT equipped.. They were originally Frito Lay bread trucks. That actual van lost its 4BT to the troopie of the former owner of Cruiser Outfitters (before Kurt Williams / Cruiseroutfit acquired it (in about '02/3?), and how I know Kurt...

The snow storm: photo of our view from where I live in Park City, with Carrie Thompson, my fiancée, during a random late April freak snow storm... Real estate is prime in Park City and we have a great place, but no shop or room for a shop.. We finally had a out carports turned into garages this summer which is nice but not a place to do any serious work on a vehicle as we share it with our neighbor... This is where my bicycles and skis and other mostly outdoors related stuff lives.

And these are outdated pics from the summer of the shop. I should have taken some tonight, it looks like a million bucks after cleaning all day today!

The small red tool chest is my cheapo $150 Home Depot chest, It also came with all the sockets I still use regularly, and are very high quality (I have never broken one).. This little chest has just about complete mechanical capability, is well organized and I feel like is usually the go-to tool box for any specialized tools, but also houses pretty much my complete tool collection. The tools are also just as good quality and probably half the price or less of the other two expensive Craftsman chests and sets that belong to Damon and Scott (which are very nice though)... But goes back to that discussion of tools versus costs.

The welder is my Millermatic DVI machine, one of the best welders I have ever used. It welds like butter and easily switches from 110 to 220 mode, so it works for sheet metal as well as thick frame and bumper type material and is truly universal... (See pic of welds)...

To the left of it is another 4BT that Bill acquired that is similar to a Unimog engine. It uses a tractor type injection pump that auto-adjusts the throttle to match load and originally came out of a Airplace De-icer that powered large hydraulic pumps. It was originally going to go into his blue FJ62 but we ended up using the Isuzu... We sold it to a guy in California and it is now powering a boat...

Last pic shows a the work area, again pics from this summer (and we now have even more stuff/tools). Bill contributed the drill press and today we basically have pretty much a fully functional fabrication shop, dedicated to our old and new Land Cruisers... :)
 
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DaveInDenver

Middle Income Semi-Redneck
My garage is pretty small. Happens to be from front door to alley side door exactly the length of my truck (as in the 'Nest touches the back and there's about 6 inches from the bull bar to the overhead door). So when I pulled the engine, I had to wait for nice weather and roll the back end into the yard. Not to mention it's serviced by just one 15A circuit and so I have to turn the lights off when I let the compressor run, otherwise I trip the breaker. As a result, I end up using very few power tools. It's hard to use them in the dark. I've been saying for about 10 years now that I'm gonna build a bigger garage, get a welder and drill press and bench grinder and all that stuff, but just never have the extra money. Heck it would be nice to park two cars in the thing and open the doors wide enough to get in and out. But at least I'm not working in the snow.
 
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dieselcruiserhead

16 Years on ExPo. Whoa!!
When I first moved in to the new shop, we had just one bays and the entrance into the shop (but a whole lot more room than before), so rent was the same price... Damon and I decided to go even on it when we switched shops (a gueling 2 day move, I had no idea we had so much (heavy) stuff.

In April, we decided to take over the full half of the shop, when Scott came out... The '29 and '58 pickups reside in the shop for indoor storage and the owners do not mind the level of fabrication we are constantly doing.

They bumped the rent up to $200 a month (which is beyond reasonable). We really have no utilities other than electricity so Dirk (our land lord) threw it in...

When Bill, with the clean FJ62, started doing the Isuzu swap as it was a couple month long project, we basically split it 4 ways so it works out to a whopping $50 a month (we take turns paying the rent every 4 months). We also all pool tools and the rules are clean up after yourself, put everything back, and be respectful of everyone's stuff, and it has worked out great..

The shop has become a real center for activity and we kind of root each other on and help each other out with the different projects... 4 basic total cruiserheads.. One of the reasons that I am such a fanatical cruiserhead is also largely related to the friendships and way of life of being a fanatical cruiserhead... We all know each other very well and are basically close if not best friends, and again from cruisers... If I wasn't into them, not only would I not even know these guys, but honestly my life would be a whole lot different.. And I owe it largely to the cruiser addiction :)

So, we basically do communal shop living.. As long as you guys are all good friends and respectful of each other, it goes a long way and I recommend it! :)


Finally us, and all of our cruisers! Photos L to Right again:

- Bill rebuilding his Isuzu 4BD1T. Bill is the head gear designer for Backcountry.com, and designed hundreds of pieces of mostly outdoor gear for all sorts of awesome outdoor companies. REI, Leatherman, Backcountry.com as contract, Mont Bell, Cloudveil and many, many others as freelance... He also worked for Boeing for years as an engineer. He has done a lot of cool stuff including a recent dirt bike to Oregon from Washington on trails and dirt roads only (he has a Honda 650 Dual Sport also). He also saw Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Alice in chains live, many time, in the heyday of the Seattle grunge scene when he worked for Boeing, straight out of "Reality Bites" :)

- His FJ62: with Old Man Emu from Cruiser Outfitters on it now; the Isuzu diese installed, the ARB in the front... It is still on stock tires for now, and two top right photos show the Isuzu diesel installed and the motormounts I made him...

- Carrie (my fiancee) on a funky bike we picked up for Burning Man...

- Damon and Scott from Kentucky originally and great guys. One is a son of a minister eco and bluegrass nut, the other is a former decorated Navy Air Craft Carrier sailor and conservative who used to fall asleep in the intakes of jet fighters. They are both doing real estate sales and are my best friends.

- And Damon's 100 series: stock, with control arms tightened up, and an ARB bumper.
 
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dieselcruiserhead

16 Years on ExPo. Whoa!!
Sorry for all the photos; this is the last of them..

- Scott and his 80 series. This is from this summer when he installed a 4x4Labs bumper. It was delivered to Cruise Moab for us and I brought it home in Brown Sugar (the brown van seen above). Because of the shop, we were able to completely put it together ourselves and save nearly $1000 on it.

- Yours truly and Damon installing a Metal Tech cage into Damon's BJ42 diesel. This is a similar scenario, ~$500 for the kit versus your typical $1300 or more roll cage. I installed it in two nights.

- My project, a FJ55 on an 80 series Land Cruiser frame, with the 4BT turbo diesel. It is maybe about maybe 50% done, and hopefully not another year left before its done...!

Did I mention how awesome the overhead chain beam is for removing engines and such? :)
 
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Clutch

<---Pass
dieselcruiserhead said:
That is barn is just gorgeous..

Kermit I like it too, I dig your style dude...
Andre, thank you? (that barn isn't mine,though)....how do you get any work done, with views like that!?:26_7_2:
 
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FlyingWen

Explorer
Everyones garage is so CLEAN!!!!

I am jealous. Too embarrassed to take a picture of ours, but we can get one vehicle in and the rest is covered with tools and truck parts that have been shed off the Taco.

Anyone need a bumper or 2? LOL
 

TeleScooby

Adventurer
WOW...that's all I can say...WOW

I'll snap a shot tonight, but it's going to be a let down. Downside to city living, and a 1928 house...garages, if even there, are an afterthought. Add to that foundation settling, driveway repaving, and you'll see the result later...
 

lowenbrau

Explorer
For reference, you should look at Jack Rice's setup as documented on this page. Pretty clean.

As far as my shop goes... after sharing a 4000 sq ft shop in Vancouver for 8 years and a 3000 sq foot one in Calgary for five years and living in a fifth wheel camper the whole time. I now own a house and work on my junk in the alley behind it. Its a shock to the system to work outdoors and live indoors for a change but its working out.
 

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