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YSOSLO's Garage Mahal

YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
Well, after 5 months of waiting, the barn mats finally went on sale this week! I picked 'em up and installed most of them. I have a few more to install, but 3 of the 4 need a foot cut off the end and I wasn't about to run a circular saw in the rain today (will this winter-mix crap ever end?!?!). The pics below show some different angles.





In the pic below you can see the thickness and texture.




 
YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
I haven't fastened the mats together yet. It was so cold and crappy out that I want to give them a couple of weeks to warm up and lay down nice and flat at the seams, and in the meantime I'm going to try to find those flat metal rectangles that pre-fabricated trusses are held together with. The mats weighed over 75# each (I'm definitely feeling it today after laying down 14 of them!), so I don't know that they are going to move around much anyway. I love how quiet it is when I walk around in the garage now, as opposed to how it sounded before with sand crunching under foot etc. I'm definitely very happy with how well it turned out.
 
YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
I picked up some "truss plates" to fasten the mats together and I think they're going to work really well! My little rubber mallet isn't quite up to the task of hammering the mats down into the spikes on the truss plates (little rectangular metal plates with spikes on 1 side, like companies use to hold pre-fab picnic tables and trusses together), so I'm waiting for a 4lb dead-blow hammer to arrive (amazon.com), so I can really get them nailed down. I'll take pics of the finished job once the weather gets decent.
 
T

Turbotalon1g

Guest
That looks great, but what about when you want to work on the car and have to jack it up?
 
YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
Turbotalon1g said:
That looks great, but what about when you want to work on the car and have to jack it up?
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This is a great concern, and I had the same one myself. What I ended up doing was saving the chunks that I had to cut off (three 12" x 4' sections from the ends of the 3 rows of mats that go from the front to the back of the garage), so i have ample mats to allow me to jack up the vehicles and get under them with a padded mechanics' crawler. Had I not had those, I would think a must-have would be one extra mat cut in half (cuz they're nearly 80lbs full-sized!) to allow you to deal with the under-the-vehicle work.

Now the only thing left is getting the rubber thresholds caulked down and it's as done as can be until I tackle the third stall and remove the service door that I have my wall-mount vacuum attached to on the right in the pics from November of last year, higher up on this page.
 
T

Turbotalon1g

Guest
Oh damn you live kinda close to me, I'm in blaine behind the best buy on 65.

I'm worried about the lip and the jack moving and getting stuck on it or something like that.
 
YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
Turbotalon1g said:
Oh damn you live kinda close to me, I'm in blaine behind the best buy on 65.

I'm worried about the lip and the jack moving and getting stuck on it or something like that.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I see your point. I guess, worst-case scenario, I can always pull the center column of mats, so I'm back to a flat floor all across the center of the garage, so clearance wouldn't be an issue. It would be an extra step, but a small task to make life a lot easier for jacking up the car without using the extra smaller chunks.

You must live really close to Big Nate's old place. I think he used to live on Buchanan. Great to know another member from the north metro!
 
YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
dmention7 said:
I think the clear solution is a 4-post lift.
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Jay, I read your post to my wife and Jess' response was 'Tell Jay to shut his pie hole!'...lol If I had a higher ceiling in the garage I'd consider it, but I don't think I'd be able to stand up under a car on a lift in my garage. I'd love to find a cool solution for a lift I could driver over the top of or something. How cool would it be to find a lift that lays flat with 3-4" clearance that I could hook up to the air compressor and jack things up a few feet with the flip of a lever or something?
 
YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
Max Jacks have 2 huge posts, rather than a low-profile scissor jack that one could leave under their car on a daily basis. That would be awesome!
 
YSOSLO

YSOSLO

is the word, beotch
That looks pretty sweet too! Compressed air would mean less clutter, although my wife would laugh at that one. I really like the look of this though....dang it Tom, for making me want to buy another toy!
 
Picklz

Picklz

SUDO Make me a SAMCH
Nice thing about the maxjax is it's portable so you can store the posts in the corner till you need to do some work, then put them in place. I was looking at a scisor lift similar to what Tom linked, but a bendpak brand. Both were tempting but my garage is just too small, going to wait till I can put a real 2 or 4 post in.
 
dmention7

dmention7

Hater
Those scissor lifts seem nifty in principle, but it seems like it would prohibit too much work (especially on RWD cars) to make it worth the investment, unless you were in the situation where you already had a lift or two, but wanted something portable to be able to move around the shop for misc jobs.
 
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