Projects To do Around the Garage When Stuck at Home
If you’re anything like us right now you’ve got a lot of extra time at home to look around tackle projects you’ve been putting off or have been too busy to attack. There is a common theme among employees here at Eastwood as far as simple projects we’ve been tackling in our home garages during these extended periods of being home-bound. Read below for our top 5.
- Organize Spray Paints- We all have a shelf, cabinet, rack, or box of spray paints, and aerosol cans that we sift through to try and find what we want. If you’re anything like us you probably can’t stand to throw away a partially full can and they sometimes can stick around for years on end. In all reality most aerosol cans have a shelf life and paints and coatings especially can go bad even if they still spray. We like to date our cans when we crack them open but don’t fully use. This will allow us to keep track of how long things have been sitting on the shelf. If a aerosol paint can has been open and on the shelf for over a year it is likely that paint is no good or the pickup in the can tend to clog and cause issues. Solvents like PRE, Brake Kleen, Chassis Kleen, and others may last longer and don’t go bad like paints, primers, or clear coats. If a can has less than a 1/4 left it is a good time to go through and toss them out. Cans with very little left in them may be mostly the propellant and if only an 1/8 can is left a portion of that is the propellant giving you next to no coating. Toss out all of these cans and free up some space! If you want to keep your most used aerosols close to where you work think about picking up an aerosol can rack to keep them from being lost in the depths of your chemical cabinet!
- Clean Your Welder Cart- Welding carts tend to become catch-alls and you’ll find everything from used up consumables to small pieces of metal or even markers. Over the years this gets to be a mess and can be hard to sift through and find your must-have welding accessories. Go through your welding cart and throw away all of the debris that has gathered on the shelves and old or half used consumables you saved for “just in case”. This is also a good time to do a safety check on your welder and make sure all hoses, wires, and connections are in good shape and aren’t on the verge of being worn out. Liners, gas hoses, and torches can get worn out over time and now is the best time to catch it when life is moving a little slower. If you need to upgrade your welding cart we offer a full line of welding carts for you.
- Clean the Shop REALLY GOOD- Sweeping the garage floor or cleaning up should be a regular habit, but how often do you do a deep clean in your garage? Take the time to move everything you can out of your garage and give it a deep clean. Start by sweeping and cleaning as you would and then use compressed air to blow out as much of the hidden and hard to reach areas of dust, dirt, grinding dust, etc. From there you can clean the floors and surfaces of oil stains and grease ground into the floors and work benches. We like to use Oil Eater in spray bottles for work benches and small spots and the large gallon container mixed in a mop bucket with water to clean large areas. Nothing beats a clean shop and doing it now with the weather just getting nice is a great time to tackle this project.
- Organize Your Hand Tools- Now is a good time to find all of those missing 10mm sockets and those 1/2″ wrenches! If you don’t have nice sets or rails of sockets and wrenches it can become a war zone in your tool box. Make your life easy and pickup a socket holder tray to organize all of your sockets and misfit tools. These can be customized to fit less or more sockets and are easy to carry to the job to have full sets next to you. This is something everyone could use in their life.. more organization!
- Sharpen Your Drill Bits- Drill bits are one of those things that tend to get used and abused and rarely do we surface them. If you are like us you probably have a bin of half dull drill bits that you have been meaning to sharpen. A quick way to blast through all your bits and have them fresh and ready to cut is to use a Drill Doctor to sharpen each bit. It’s as easy as an old school pencil sharpener and you will thank yourself when you drill a hole in the future.