This is a shot of my quiver. Storage of said quiver has been a mess. Up until yesterday, I have slumped all my boards in a corner of my garage. It was a mess to say the least. I have ding repairs to do right now because of it. I also have a lot of silly wax jobs because in the summer that side of the garage would cause all my wax to melt. The end result was a tacky mess of drip wax that was as sticky as a smear of Crisco. My boards range from a 9'0" Stewart Comp Hydro-Hull to a 5 ' soft top that my 4 year old uses. So in a strange spell of motivation, I sought to solve the problem. WITH POWER TOOLS!!!!.
Except I know nothing about using them.
I took a trip to Home Depot and bought a 8 x 4 x 2 plank of wood and a 15 foot dowel that I cut cut into 5, 3 foot pieces, some Elmers wood glue some bolt screws, a circular saw thingamajig that attaches to my drill, and I was good to go. I had an idea, but I didn't really exactly know how I was going to execute it. I also had the tools. We recently put my GrandDad into a retirement home, and I kind of inherited a bunch of his power tools. Some are old school, and as it turned out, some of the old-school lo-tech solutions are way better than their battery powered equivalent.
First step. Clear the boards out of the space. This is the picture of the space that I was working with. As you can see, I had to keep that circuit box open so that I might be able to add a light or something there later, so the board had to go above that. Also, since the board was heavy, I absolutely had to mount the board to the studs, otherwise the thing could come down, pulling the drywall off with it.
My personal stud finder is one of those battery powered devices. It sucks. I can never tell if it's detecting a stud or if it's battery is running out. Once I thought it detected stud and then I hammered a hole in the drywall. Well in my GrandDad's stuff, I discovered this magnet thing. It was attached to a small chain and had a yellow rubber cap on the tip. I didn't know what it was for many years. My neighbor saw the tools that I was working with and offered to lend me some of his, but I told him that I kind of wanted to finish the project using my GrandDad's tools. He looked through them. I pulled him aside and asked him what this magnet thing was, and he told me that it was a stud finder. You swing it across the wall and it stops on the nails in the studs. Simple. Lo-tech. Genius. This tool was the best discovery of the whole thing. I've since chucked that stupid battery bleeping piece of crap.
Once I marked the studs, I then had to hold up the plank and mark the plank up so I knew where to drill the screw holes. Then I had to evenly space out the holes for the dowels. I figured that I would put a dowel every 16 inches. So I had to mark that on the board too. So that made for a total of 3 screw holes and 5 dowel slots. So after scratching my head I busted out my trusty Dewalt drill and drilled the holes on board. There's something very satisfying about drilling. Not sure what it is, but I like it. I wanted to drill a bunch more, but I refrained myself to the 3 that I marked.
The next step was drilling the holes for the dowels. A 1 and 3/4 inch diameter hole 5 times. This was the first time that I used this drill saw thing so I was kind of nervous about trying it out. I wanted to make a rack that could stand proudly in any surf shop, so I didn't want to f it up too badly. So I made sure that each dowel slot was marked to be the exact center of the board, and attempted my first hole. My trusty Dewalt cordless drill was not powerful enough to do the job. So I busted out my GrandDad's old fashioned plug in Black and Decker. This thing had way more juice than my cordless. It cored these dowel slots like a champ. In fact, the friction was causing smoke to crise out of the wood. My garage smelt like a campfire. The real trick though was getting the hole started. The saw thingamajig kept bouncing and chewing up the wood around the pats I marked. Eventually, as you can see in the pic above, I got the holes cored. Although, not all of them were exactly center of the board, as you can tell from the pic.
Once I got everything drilled, the next step was cutting the dowels. I measured the dowels up against my widest board and figured that 28 inches would be good. So I got out GrandDad's circular saw. I measured the length on the dowels and proceeded to cut them. One funny thing about dowels is that they are round. When you combine that with a circular saw, it creates a something like a pair of clock gears. The dowel was hard to hold down while I cut it. The resulting cut was uneven and rough on the edge. Then in my GrandDad's stuff I discovered this old hand saw. "Buck Bros. Made in USA." It worked so much better than the circular saw and created nice smooth cuts.
The next part was mounting the board to the wall. This was going to be difficult because the board was long, awkward to work with and quite frankly heavy to hold for extended periods of time. Additionally I didn't have a proper wrench to tighten the bolt screws so I had to use this flimsy flat wrench, and skateboard truck-tightening key to mount it with. After an ordeal and with the help of my son, Kaito, we got the board on the wall. It took a lot of effort to line the holes up with the ones I drilled into the wall, but it worked nicely. I secured the middle bolt first and then the two sides. As you can see from the picture though, not every dowel hole is exactly center. Still it creates a nice Dr. Suess effect, so I'm ok with it. LOL.
The next part was the dowels. I cut them to be 28 inches long but looking at it, I realized that I could go way shorter. So I cut them to be 24 inches long. This worked out better. A little handy work with the good old Buck Bros saw, and I was better for it. I coated the hole with Elmers wood glue, and then I also coated the tip of the dowel with glue too. I stuck them in the holes and waited for the glue to dry. This was a frustrating venture to say the least. I'm not a patient man. Waiting for the glue to set was a long process. Especially since it was cold, wet and rainy outside. I ended up running inside and grabbing my wife's hair dryer to finish the job. The trick worked nicely. The dowels set pretty strong, if I don't say. I'm pretty happy with he way they came out. Had to tend to the drips a little bit. Today, when I checked, the dowels gave a nice strong boing, so the power of Elmers came through.
So after a few hours of drying I put the boards in there. I immediately noticed that my longboard didn't fit. Crap. Like a dumbass I forgot that the only way my longboard will stand there is if it stands flat against the wall. So I looked to the rafters of my garage. After pulling a few nails I discovered my longboard tucked away in the rafters nicely. Kind of cool. My buddy has like 30 boards stored in his rafters so I have room to expand when GAS hits. So this pic is the finished product. The one below is the finished product with a few strategically placed hooks for hanging other crap like our dive fins, booties, helmets, kaito's life jacket and crap.
