Jack stand rack

Good Morning from Classic Cars and Tools! I’m Dne’!;)

You know, jack stands are a necessity in any shop, but a pain in the buttocks when storing! If you have a small shop like mine, they would normally be lined up on the floor gathering dust and dirt, cords get hung up on them, and I know I’ve tripped over them countless times!:(

In this pic, you can make out the jack stands along the wall. Since the purchase of my fabulous MaxJax car lift from GESUSA.com, I don’t use the jack stands nearly as much, but now and then, I do, however need them to be handy but out of the way!

Back in the Pre-maxjax days, jack stands were needed for projects, but I tell ya~ I hate rolling around on a creeper! Have you ever had your hair get caught up in a creeper wheel! It’s not a pretty sight!

So, off to ACE hardware! I’m not very good when it comes to how much material is needed, so I bought a bunch of angled flat bar. It’s like angle iron, but cheaper, and cheaper is good sometimes!

Also time to pull out my Northern tools welding table, and Northern tools 135 amp mig, and my Everlast multi-purpose machine. The Everlast has a plasma cutter which came in handy for cutting the metal vs. a sawzall. OMG~ look at that messy workbench!:( It goes from messy to clean often!

Actually, the racks were pretty easy to make, and I got to weld~ I love to weld! I probably should have been a welder. I’m not a great welder, just as I’m not a great seamstress. For some reason I think of welding like sewing.

The rack being worked on in the next pictures is for my Low Tall jack stands. These come in handy when having a car up on the lift to stabilize the car for safety, or once I used them having my 59 Chevy truck up on them for an extended amount of time. This is great as I can remove the MaxJax column, one of a great benefit of the Maxjax~ unbolt it and move it out of the way;)

Or here’s another example of stabilizing something on my Maxjax~ Mom’s lawn tractor!;)

Moving right along~On my workbench is a Northern Tools auto-darkening welding hood. It worked great, at least I thought it worked great. But I kept getting a bad flash from the initial arc, and I’m not going to stand for that!

So, I took some cash down to my local welding supply and bought this Miller auto-darkening hood! It’s called America’s Eagle, Digital Performance series, 250 bucks! Probably wasn’t the best deal in town, but if it goes wrong I can take it back. However, I’m terribly pleased with it! OMG! I can weld much better now! Funny how we humans can be, we’ll spend a great deal of money to buy a decent welding machine, but skimp on the welding hood~ hmmm. Go figure;)

The dash panel as I like to call it is very simple. With the touch of a button, I can switch to Weld, Cut, or grind. Set sensitivity and darkness levels!

OK OK, enough on the welding hood~ so I just put my stands on the angle metal and marked where  the cuts need to be, the used my lazer beam! lol I mean my plasma cutter to make the cuts.

Once welded up, a test fit, and success!

Add a little red spray paint~ and a left over decal from something, and they look great! and work great!

The same process was applied for all my stands, then mounted them up and out of my way! I’ll eventually mount my two creepers on that higher set of stands rack.

I guess it took me a day to make all of them and a worthwhile endeavor! Being organized is so wonderful and such a time saver and promotes efficiency in the shop.

I hope you like my little blog about the jack stand racks. If you do something like this, send me a pic and I can add it on my blog. Or show me what you’ve done.

I can be contacted at www.Classiccarsandtools@gmail.com and would love to hear from you! Hey, don’t forget to subscribe to my blog for updates!;)

dne’;)