OUTFITTING YOUR AUTOMOTIVE WORKSHOP

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Lacking "air," you'll find that many of the electric-powered hand-held tools used in woodworking and farmstead maintenance will find a use in the auto shop. If they tend to stay there, buy one for the shop only. A high-power, V-drive highspeed electric hand drill is essential and a bench-mounted drill press is helpful; you can get a rugged if inelegant imported 8" travel-drill press and a 3" drill press-vise to hold work on its 6"wide table for under $100-a real bargain considering what it can do.

You'll want a set of good quality high-speed drill bits. Avoid those metal boxes of cheap imports that come in dozens of X.," sizes you'll never need. They don't last long in metal. Do keep a supply of several Yin" bits (even top-quality, U.S.-made small bits snap easily) two or three X", Y", and 3/8" bits plus a good-quality V2", a 9/16", and half inch. You'll also want grinding stones in several shapes to mill down metal parts as well as steel and brass wire brushes to remove rust and scale.

A major step beyond handheld grind-stones on a drill is a twin-wheel bench grinder with a coarse stone on one side and fine-grit on the other. You'll find that you are constantly shaping metal for all kinds of auto and farm purposes. Before I got into blacksmithing, I made knives and garden tools out of saw blades and old spring steel with nothing but a bench grinder and a hand drill. Went through a lot of Carborundum...but it worked.

Get the largest grinder motor you can manage. Small fractional-horsepower hardware-store models lack torque to keep going when the work gets heavy, and their high-rpm wheel will kick out or chip thin work like knife blades-and it revolves so fast it can heat metal faster than it grinds it down. Electric motors last practically forever and a huge, old, slow-turning, 1hp motor picked up for a few dollars at a barn sale is ideal even if it needs a spin of the wheel to get started and takes a while to get up to speed. Replace an antique power cord if it's a dry and cracked rubber-insulated wire covered with frayed cloth, ending in an ancient Bakelite plug.

You'll need a sturdy table or work bench to mount the grinder on, but it needn't be level, square, plumb, and flat like a woodworking bench. I use an assortment of oak-plank benches and old (recycled) fiat-faced, solid-wood entrance doors bolted to the shop wall in back and supported in front on wood-post legs. The bench should also hold the biggest steel jawed bench vise you can manage. Buy, or fabricate from sheet stock, a set of copper vise jaw-plates to hold plastic and soft metal that would be marred by the vise's roughly-serrated steel jaws.

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