techTips | setting up your home garage: part 2

The first question was, “what do we want to achieve,” and we discovered the answer wasn’t very straightforward. I hinted at the multitude of tasks and skills we would need to bring to a shop that would suitably build a bike but focused on how much space would be needed. Having determined our available space we can truly ask ourselves what we want to achieve in there.

If you’re like me, you want to do it all yourself, no matter what. It’s my scoot and I’m building it my way!

But not everyone is able to do that and most of the guys I know who do build their own bikes don’t do 100% of them. I usually find that the guys who are good at the machining side farm out the paintwork for example, or that the guys who are good at the body/metalwork/painting side get help or farm out the mechanical stuff. I don’t want to say that’s always the case because it isn’t but you get the picture, very often we get someone to either help us or we contract part of the build out. I mention this now because it has a lot of relevance on how we are going to equip our bike building shop. In other words, “what do we want to achieve in there?” If we are going to farm out the paintwork, do we need a compressor and an area for painting?

Probably the most straightforward way of looking at this is to break down the bike build into a number of sub categories. I suggest the following:

1.  Design: knowing what the bike will look like when complete
2.  Frame and tube work
3.  Sheet metal and tins
4.  Machining
5.  Sub-assemblies: motor rebuild/repair, electrical, carburetors, front ends, brakes, etc.
6.  Paint, polishing and plating
7.  Final assembly

The first thing to jump out at us is that we are going to need “clean” and “dirty” areas. Lets go back to our available space. Remember we drew a line in the sand and decided that for the purpose of these articles we had a single bay garage space available. My apologies if you have less, I’ll leave the creativity of your workspace to you but will remind you that less space means the same things are going to apply but you will need to scale some of it down and become very adept at organizing.

The first thing to consider is not tools but benches. However much of the work you are going to do yourself, you will really need to have two benches or “bench areas” This isn’t a luxury, it really is a necessity. Pretty much all fabrication is classed as dirty work. From bending tube for your frame to cleaning, repairing and assembling mechanical parts. We’ll use saws, files, drills, sandpaper, and much more. All of these tasks produce undesirable by-products to our “clean” assembly side of the garage. Get the picture? Ok, so laying out our benches and therefore our “clean” and “dirty” areas suddenly becomes very important.

Check out the image above. We’ve taken a pretty standard garage space with a normal roll up garage door at the front and an entry at a rear corner. There are benches all around. You’re all clever folk and I don’t want to get into exact instructions here, but by looking at the picture you should get a good idea as to what I find to be the ideal bench set up for bike building. Now you can see where the ideal minimum workspace comes from. The floor will inevitably be concrete. If not then it might be timber, or if you’re lucky like me it may simply be good old flattened earth. None of these options are acceptable.

A concrete floor constantly creates dust and when cleaning and sweeping the dust will invariably impregnate your more delicate parts, doing them no favors whatsoever. DUST IS YOUR ENEMY!

If the floor is concrete, the minimum you must do is paint it. There are plenty of floor paints out there, but remember if you paint it with cheap paint, you’ll paint it often! If the floor is timber, again the minimum you need to do is paint it. A good and inexpensive fix on a timber floor is to get sturdy plywood nailed down to get a decent and relatively smooth surface and then paint. If, like me, you have a pounded earth floor, you must pave it with concrete and of course, paint it.

What you must remember is that the floor really needs to be flat for safety and easy to clean. a flat and clean floor is easier to find those mixture screws that just rolled off the bench. A good and easily maintainable surface is tile. The adhesive PVC/Lino types are nice or ceramic tiles if you’re feeling ritzy and confident that you won’t be dropping anything heavy on them! The tiling option is in lieu of paint. Remember that when we are in our assembly phases, major final assembly or sub-assemblies, we are going to be scooting back and forth on our old office chairs and it’s ****** annoying when you can’t scoot straight due to a lumpy floor. Whatever you decide, make your floor flat and easy to mop, which basically means waterproof. The methods I have suggested are the best ones I know of, but by all means feel free to comment below and expand my knowledge with further ones.

Onwards and upwards to benches. We need two narrow benches, one running down each side of the garage and an open area between the two, which by no coincidence whatsoever is enough for us to walk around our soon to be growing pride and joy. At the risk of sounding a bit patronizing here, I will mention that the benches really need to be solid. This means that unless you have a large budget and can afford to shop with the Formula 1 workshop suppliers, you will be building them yourselves.

Welded steel frameworks with thick plywood tops are fantastic and sturdy, and 3″ by 3″ (or 4×4) legs and frames solidly screwed together, work perfectly. Solid wood benches will do the trick as well. I have to leave that to you. Personally I favor solid timber legs and frames and cheapo kitchen worktops because they are easy to keep clean and tidy, which makes losing things like your idle jets a lot harder to do!

Did I mention they should not be too deep? I’ll come to that in a minute….

One side will be your “clean” side and the other will be “dirty.” For the clean side, I strongly suggest that you make the bench approximately the height of your dining table. bout 30 inches high is good. A very large part of your clean work is actually assembling sub-assemblies such as the engine, gearbox, carbs, electrical stuff and more. You’ll be more attentive, more comfortable and be able to do it for longer if you’re sitting comfortably for a **** of a lot of this stuff.

Take a minute and try this experiment. Sit at your dining table, upright, back straight and see how far you can reach across without straining. Bet it’s about 24 inches before you really have to stretch. With that new found knowledge under your belt think about why you would want to make your bench any wider. Can’t find a good reason? The thing is that the larger the bench area the more **** you are able to accumulate on it.” Remember that we are trying to achieve an enjoyable workspace that is a pleasure to be in and work in. On this side try to keep the bench completely clear underneath.

Look at the image above. The ideal is to be able to scoot back and forth along the length of the workshop without smacking your knees and ankles on stuff piled under the bench.

For seating, make a couple of them. Old office chairs will do, but take the backs off as scooting back and forth around your bike as it comes together gets a bit trickier as it gets larger and you don’t want to be dragging anything around behind your back that you shouldn’t. I tend to think of the clean bench as more of a desk than a bench. I like it well lit, completely uncluttered and with hand tools within easy reach.

The left hand bench is at a relatively standard height, kitchen counter top high, which is more or less about three feet tall. This is a good height for work done while standing and is pretty much everything you’ll do on the “dirty” side of the garage.

Hammering, prying, filing, and more are all done best when we are standing up. On this side somewhere we will need a good solid vise. Think about the mounting and support of it, as you will tend to use the vise as a grip to hold stuff whilst you hammer things apart/together. Mount it sturdily. Also think about its position. I suggest in a set up like we have in in our one-bay garage that you mount your vise about two thirds of the way down the “dirty” bench towards the front door.

This side is where you want to organize all your storage. Under this bench is dead space and space is something we don’t have an abundance off. Parts bins and large stuff like a compressor, or welding machine should be under this bench. If at all possible attach some sort of doors here. Even if it’s only curtains, remember don’t use material that bursts into flame if you walk past it with a cigarette!

Other work we will be doing on this bench will include welding, so it’s good to cover a section of the bench, just a couple of feet, in metal. Steel is good, a piece of 14 or 12 gauge screwed down to the surface will be a great help when you weld anything. Tack a small piece of angle iron to the back of it as an “earth post” as well. That way if you weld something small the bench can act as the earth and you have one less clamp/cable to think about when you’re welding. Screw a length of angle iron to the wall as well. Do this above your head, over six feet high. This is to place all your clamps and mole grips to so they are within easy reach while you’re working. If you suddenly find you need another clamp in a hurry they are there right in front of your face.

A bench grinder, actually if possible have three of them! I’ll explain…. They are pretty cheap so there’s no need to go to the big expensive suppliers for these things. A good bench grinder is a savior and they can be a bit of a multi tool.

Another important piece is a wire brush and a polisher. I suggest that you fab up three free-standing platforms about four feet high if you are able. This way you are not constantly changing stones and mops. On one have a course and a fine grindstone. Use the second platform for a steel and brass wire brush and the third for the polishing mops. There isn’t anything at all that we do on one of these three tools that can be remotely thought of as clean work. Having them on their own stands facilitates moving them outside whenever possible to do the dirty work out there.

Remember to keep it narrow. We are working on and/or building motorcycles. The parts and assemblies are not the size of car stuff and we don’t need massive benches to work on. You’ll need the space in the middle of the workshop where the bike will actually be assembled, and narrow benches help out in this regard. I’m trying to keep you from having to get on with a particular task you’ve set your mind to achieving one day without having to clear a space through mountains of **** to do it.

I think that’s about as far as I need to go regarding benches. Just remember two basic rules:

Rule #1:  Keep it clean and tidy by putting things away.
Rule #2:  Keep it clean and tidy by putting things away.

Seriously though, I can’t say this often enough. These rules need to be applied constantly. You might feel that you’re spending more time cleaning up than building and sometimes you will be, but trust me that in the long run it will be quicker and you will save a s***load of time, not to mention a s***load of money on parts you won’t have to replace because you haven’t lost them.

So what else do we need in this shop?

Lighting! Yeah, I know…. No s**t, Sherlock. It seems obvious but put your Hands up now and be honest….. How many of you out there were going to go down to the nearest Kwik-E-Mart and buy a long fluorescent light from Apu? Don’t let me stop you, but before you do please keep these facts in mind. I won’t go into great detail, by all means research what I’m about to tell you yourselves.

Fluorescent light is very bad for you.

It’s bad for your eyes and it’s bad for your skin. The humming is maddening if you’re quietly working. Last but not least, it’s really bad for morale! Really. It is and that’s a big deal! Now I know we’re rough & tough bikers that laugh at danger and smile at the tattooist needle. You can check it out yourselves but fluorescent light really is a depressing light and countless studies have proven this to be so. Even Navy submarines have completely removed fluorescent lights because they were proven to be a contributing factor to submariners suicides! Air Traffic Controllers have the highest suicide rate by profession in the world. Air Traffic Control Towers no longer have fluorescent lights and it has apparently helped.

Carefully bear your lighting in mind and plan it out when you run your power circuits for the sockets around your garage. I favor halogen spotlights. They are as reasonably priced as fluo stuff and can be placed to suit different work spaces. You can have a lot or as little light as you like. Have a couple of office-type anglepoise lamps handy as well. These guys are really useful for that close up work like cleaning cylinder heads and carbs.

Now let’s look at storage and think about it carefully. You will know by now which tasks in your build you’re farming out (if any) and therefore what you need in your shop to do the stuff on your list. For example, if you plan on painting the bike yourself you know you need a compressor and that will need housing somewhere. I’ve already hinted that it would need to go under the left hand bench somewhere, but space and neighbors/family permitting it could actually go in its own little lean-to building on the side of the garage outside. Bear in mind they can be noisy. If you’re planning on doing all the welding, then a place needs to be found for the welder. Again under the bench has been suggested and that’s probably the best place. It does need to be kept dry and as clean as possible.

The point I’m getting at is that all these different disciplines carry their own levels of baggage in the way of consumables and accessories. We will also accumulate parts along the way to the finished build. Space, especially storage space, often becomes harder and harder to come by. Shelves are good but kitchen-type cupboards on the wall at eyeball height are better. Especially for keeping things separated and clean. Don’t store anything heavy up there as there’s not much that will lower your spirits to the height of a wiener dog’s ******** faster than something heavy falling out of a cupboard and bashing you in the noggin when you’re concentrating on grinding valves. Store the heavy stuff and parts below the bench. I find it extremely useful to store bagged and labeled small parts in cupboards.

The cheapest way of building a low-cost custom bike is to be really **** about your parts storage. An example is the rear fender on my current build. It’s going to require four 10mm Allen Bolts, eight nylon washers, four Belleville washers, and four Nylock nuts. These are sitting in a zip-locked bag ready for use. I do this for every assembly and sub-assembly. The amount of time and hassle it saves is incredible, not to mention the monetary savings because I only acquire these things once.

This is as far as we’ll go on about laying out your basic workshop. We’ll do one more part on setting up your home garage that will focus more on the tools needed for various disciplines.

Stay tuned mofos (as Trent would say) because believe it or not, the tool universe does not revolve around a certain very good factory in Milwaukee…

Get the best of bikerMetric directly in your inbox, once a week, every week.