John Pollman
Member
- Messages
- 1,338
- Location
- Rochester Hills, MI
Howdy folks!
Long time no talk. But it's just because I've finally been pretty busy lately. Things were dead for a long time but a few weeks ago I picked up some decent work. Actually, for the first time in a long time I was working on one job and have product on site for another job waiting to be installed and yet another job waiting to start. That's a GOOD problem to have!
My son is an avid skateboarder and has been for about four years. He does most of his skating at a nearby indoor skate park. It's a nice facility with an indoor park and a nice pro shop too. But they've outgrown the pro shop space and they rented some retail space right on Main Street in down town Rochester. It's very close to their park too. I know the owners pretty well and have done work for them at the park and in their home too. He needed a hand with some things to get ready to open. I figured it would be a few odds and ends. It turned out to be MUCH more than that. They took over the building and pretty much prepped and painted the walls and it was pretty much a big empty space. That's where I came in. I've pretty much done the entire build out. When they open tomorrow and customers walk in, just about everything they see in the way of displays is my work. I built the sales counter, their shoe display area, the clothing display racks and cabinets, all of their board display racks, and I even designed and built their light fixtures.
They wanted to display their graphic boards vertically instead of horizontally so I designed a rack system that works very well so far. I spent a LOT of time cutting, bending, and threading 1/4" steel rod for that portion of the build. I thought they just wanted a couple racks but after getting the prototype done, they loved it and decided that they wanted space for 130 boards! That's cool, but I'm not set up as a machine shop so it was all done with a vise, angle grinder, a small sledge, and a die wrench. If I ever build more of these, I think I'm going to find an easier way to thread the rod than manually!
Tomorrow afternoon is the grand opening so I'm going to head over there in the morning and take some pictures. I'll post a few tomorrow evening. Overall it came out very nice. Anyway, about three weeks ago before I started this job my garage was clean and in pretty good shape. But the way they kept on adding to the job I had to go from one project to another and didn't have time to do a complete clean up so my "shop" got WAY out of control. But again, because of the circumstances that's a GOOD problem to have. Here's what my "shop" looked like last week just prior to starting the final phase of the project....
It's good to be back! I should be posting more now.
Take care
John
Long time no talk. But it's just because I've finally been pretty busy lately. Things were dead for a long time but a few weeks ago I picked up some decent work. Actually, for the first time in a long time I was working on one job and have product on site for another job waiting to be installed and yet another job waiting to start. That's a GOOD problem to have!
My son is an avid skateboarder and has been for about four years. He does most of his skating at a nearby indoor skate park. It's a nice facility with an indoor park and a nice pro shop too. But they've outgrown the pro shop space and they rented some retail space right on Main Street in down town Rochester. It's very close to their park too. I know the owners pretty well and have done work for them at the park and in their home too. He needed a hand with some things to get ready to open. I figured it would be a few odds and ends. It turned out to be MUCH more than that. They took over the building and pretty much prepped and painted the walls and it was pretty much a big empty space. That's where I came in. I've pretty much done the entire build out. When they open tomorrow and customers walk in, just about everything they see in the way of displays is my work. I built the sales counter, their shoe display area, the clothing display racks and cabinets, all of their board display racks, and I even designed and built their light fixtures.
They wanted to display their graphic boards vertically instead of horizontally so I designed a rack system that works very well so far. I spent a LOT of time cutting, bending, and threading 1/4" steel rod for that portion of the build. I thought they just wanted a couple racks but after getting the prototype done, they loved it and decided that they wanted space for 130 boards! That's cool, but I'm not set up as a machine shop so it was all done with a vise, angle grinder, a small sledge, and a die wrench. If I ever build more of these, I think I'm going to find an easier way to thread the rod than manually!
Tomorrow afternoon is the grand opening so I'm going to head over there in the morning and take some pictures. I'll post a few tomorrow evening. Overall it came out very nice. Anyway, about three weeks ago before I started this job my garage was clean and in pretty good shape. But the way they kept on adding to the job I had to go from one project to another and didn't have time to do a complete clean up so my "shop" got WAY out of control. But again, because of the circumstances that's a GOOD problem to have. Here's what my "shop" looked like last week just prior to starting the final phase of the project....
It's good to be back! I should be posting more now.
Take care
John