Tag vehicle project management

Hi folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Today I’ve got a bit of a problem, and that problem is right back here. It’s this thing. Obviously, it doesn’t run. How am I going to move this from here into there, past all this? And I’ve got, I mean, it’s not real bad, right? But it’s a little bit of an incline there, and that thing is really heavy. So how am I going to get that into the garage?

All right, well, don’t you worry, guys, because I’ve got a plan. It involves a little bit of ingenuity, a come-along, and some new toys. Hello!

All right, so aside from my garage being a real mess, what’s the problem? Well, obviously, I can hook that chassis up to my newer F-150 and tow it out of there. That’s not a problem. I can move the camper, get it out of the way, use my other truck to tow it up. Right? If I had to, I can swap the wheel. I got the wheels from my ’85 that I took off a long time ago, and they’ll bolt right up. Same bolt pattern, so that’s not an issue. Um, and moving it, you know, once it’s in gear isn’t really that hard, although it’s really hard for one person. The hard part is how to get it in here because there’s a little bit of an incline, uh, out in front of the garage, as you saw. And then how do you get it up the incline and into the garage?

Now, like I said before, I’m a one-man show here, right? And, um, I could ask my wife to help me, but you know, that gets sketchy. And she’s a great helper, but she’s also going to watch the kids, and you know, I don’t like asking for help. So I want to figure out how to do it myself, and that’s what I’m going to do.

So unfortunately, I can’t tow it into the garage. There’s no way to obviously hook up a tow vehicle and get the tow vehicle in here. And then, I mean, maybe I could go through this door and do some weird stuff out in the backyard, but there’s a patio back here and a lot of stuff, so that’s not really an option. Uh, now I could hook up a come-along over here somewhere, but I got nowhere to hook it. You know, I mean, you can’t hook it to the wall, tear the wall down, right? I got nothing in the floor to hook it to except, so try to ignore the dirty floor, guys. But this is the plan.

I got myself a bolt-on hitch receiver. Usually, these are for bolting to a bumper or underneath a vehicle chassis, uh, but in this case, I’m going to be bolting to the floor of my garage. And then I got this handy-dandy shackle, which will go in there, mount right up, and then I can use a come-along right here, and that should be able to get that chassis in here without a problem.

Now, the chassis itself is going to be heavier than the load rating of whatever this is going to be bolted to the floor, but because it’s a rolling chassis, a lot of that weight is going to be transferred to the wheels and going down because of gravity. So I shouldn’t be pulling nearly the weight of the chassis. It’s just, uh, the weight that takes the chassis to move forward. And before I move it, I’m going to take all the driveline stuff off, uh, so the transmission is not even going to be in play. It’ll just roll.

All right, so what’s the plan for this? How is this going to work? How am I going to get this onto the concrete? Well, I’ve already got a couple spacers here, uh, all set, just the little rulers to space away from the wall. And what I’m going to use are these. These are threaded concrete anchors, and you drill a hole into your concrete. This is the correct size bit for these. Drop these in. The set comes with a, uh, a hammer punch that you go inside here with. You hammer it down, it spreads these little wings out on the bottom, sticks it into the concrete. And now once you got that done, you’ve got, I’ll have four of these threaded anchors. And then when I want to mount this guy, I just bolt them down just like so. And when I don’t want him here, I can take them off, and I can thread in these. And once I get them down all the way, these should go flush to this, so it caps it off so dirt and debris doesn’t get inside of there. Yet it’s smooth so that I’m not going to stub my toe on it when I’m walking into the garage. Not that I would walk over here very much, but still, uh, it’s good to make it look nice and flush.

So that’s the plan. First, I just got to mark where my holes are going to go, and then I got to drill them. So I don’t really have a good punch that’ll go down through concrete that, um, I’m okay with sacrificing for this. I’m just going to use a, uh, a big lag screw. All right, and that thing is trash, but it served its purpose.

Okay, so a couple things to note. A cordless drill is not the perfect choice for this. This is a hammer drill, so it does work, um, but it just takes a little bit longer than like an actual, uh, corded hammer drill or like a real nice setup. But it’s what I’ve got, so it should work. You want to make sure you get out as much dust from inside here as you can. That’s why I’m running the vacuum and blowing it out with some compressed air. Um, I’m just using an air duster, but you could use an actual air compressor if you have one. I just don’t feel like firing mine up, so let’s drop this in and see how it works. Almost there. I think I might go a little bit deeper. There we go. Now I just got to hammer it in. Hammer it till it doesn’t move.

All right, let’s make sure it doesn’t spin. Seems to be doing pretty well, and it’s not moving, so that’s good. And let’s make sure that we’re still on target with our other holes. And we’re not. Okay, so that’s one thing to make sure of is that that thing walked on me a little bit. So I think what I’m going to do is get this spaced and bolted with the one hole that I’ve got started, make sure that I’m the same distance from the wall on both sides, and then I’m going to remark these other hole locations, and I’m going to pre-drill them with a smaller masonry bit because this bit I’ve got here will not go through these holes. It’s too big for that.

All right, I got my holes started where they’re going to be, and now I just got to drill them out. All right, so I got this hole here done, and I got a couple more here. Um, pretty much pretty close to being done. It’s slow going with this cordless drill, but, um, doing what I can. I’ve had to stop and charge my batteries, so this is day two. That side’s just the one, and I’m not, yeah, well, let’s see. Can I get that one? No. So these are not super precise, and these holes are exactly the right size on this hitch receiver. And even though I used the hitch receiver as a template, I got a couple of holes that are a little bit not quite where they need to be. So I need to drill this receiver out just a little bit to make these holes bigger so that I can fit all four of these and get them tightened down. So I’m going to go do that, and I’ll be back.

All right, so I got my holes reamed out just one more size on the stepper bit, and hopefully that’s enough to make sure that all these holes line up enough for me to get these bolts in. That is not going anywhere, and now I got something I can hook my cell on to, and I should be able to use this pull that chassis in here lickety-split. And then when I don’t need it anymore, I can just take it out, and now that’s nice and flat. And I can also use these. That’s a little bit of a pain to get down here on all fours and screw and unscrew this, so I honestly don’t know how often I’ll be changing this configuration. This is right up against the back wall of my garage, right next to the back door, and so I don’t really use this space for much of anything. I put my toolbox right next to this, and, uh, other than that, sometimes I lean some stuff up against this wall right here, but I don’t really use this floor spot for anything.

There we go. Now what I’m going to do is I think I’m going to come back here, and there’s some gaps around. Let me, uh, okay, so, uh, you can see here that there are some gaps around where the anchors went in, um, and obviously there’s some busted concrete right here. U busted concrete and epoxy right there to get those down to being flush. So I think what I’m going to do, I think what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to get some, um, rock hard water putty, mix it up, and, uh, fill that, uh, fill around these cracks in with that. And then I can sand it smooth and paint it blue, and with all the flex and everything, you’d never even know that was there.

All right, guys, so in preparation for putting the putty in here, I’m just going to go ahead and thread these down. That way I don’t inadvertently get any putty into the threads, and if the putty does roll all the way up to, uh, where the threads are, I can just unthread these bolts later, and it’ll leave the threads right there in the putty. So, and then when I’m ready, I can sand it down.

Okay, so this, if you’ve never heard of it before, is Durham’s rock hard water putty, and, uh, it’s great stuff for interior projects, filling in holes and gaps. Um, I mean, it’s not going to, uh, carry any kind of a load or hold a load or anything, um, but it does fill in things and, uh, does some pretty good repairs. Just make sure you don’t use it outside because if it rains, it’s water soluble, so it will wash away. So found that out the hard way on a different project.

All right, I don’t need very much. That’ll do to start, and I’m going to want it pretty watery so that I can squirt it in here. Now I’m using a, uh, children’s medicine sorter here because I got a whole bunch of them, and they come in really handy. You know, uh, that’s one nice thing about having kids is you get some stuff you just have laying around for kind of forever anymore. I want it to be just thin enough that I can use it through the syringe. This is not for any kind of structural integrity, just so you know. This is just to, um, cover it up and make it look better so these gaps don’t exist around the edges and so that I can go in later and paint. I mean, it may add just a little bit of structural integrity around the edges, but I don’t, that’s not what I’m doing here for. That’s not why I’m doing it because you can sand this stuff. So once it dries on here, I could sand it all the way down to where the floor is and then paint it, and any sort of structural help it gives me is just a bonus, but I’m not planning on that. These aren’t moving at all in the concrete. Um, I tested that already when I put the, uh, hitch receiver down. I tightened them pretty tight, and they didn’t move at all, so I don’t need any structural help. This is just to make it look nice because I’m kind of a perfectionist.

This is working great. This floor is full of flex anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. Here we are 24 hours later with the, uh, around the holes filled in with the, uh, the rock hard putty, and it is all dry, and it’s pretty close to flat, but not quite all the way there. So I’m going to go ahead and just sand it down, and then I’ve got the same color blue paint that I used on the door here. Uh, it’s not a perfect match, but you wouldn’t even know it from a little ways away, so I’m going to paint that, and then once that’s dry, this project should basically be done.

And there we have the finished product. It may be the prettiest thing ever, but, uh, from far away, you can’t even really see it, and it’s, uh, completely flush with the ground, so I’m not going to trip over it or have anything get snagged on it. Yeah, and so there it is from far away. I mean, if you know what you’re looking for, you can see that it’s there, but other than that, pretty good.

All right, guys, there we go, all done. Uh, pretty simple this time. Just four bolts, four anchors, a hitch receiver, and a shackle, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. Just some time and a hammer drill, you know, you get the idea. So, uh, yeah, hopefully this will allow me to now use a come-along and pull the chassis into the garage. And it’s not just a chassis. At some point, I’ll be pulling the engine out of my F-150, so, uh, that won’t be under its own power for, could be a few months or longer depending, uh, and that’s going to have to move in and out of the garage. We use the garage for other stuff. I mean, it’s my garage. Sometimes, uh, we use it for family stuff, garage sales, that kind of stuff. So I may have to move vehicles in and out, and if they don’t have an engine mount under their own power, I got to have a way to do that. So that is what this is for.

And the cool thing about this setup is that I can actually take the shackle out of here and get a hitch mount tray for a 12-volt winch if I wanted to and mount the winch to the tray, slide it in, and now I’ve got a powered winch here instead of just a shackle. Now there’s an outlet right here behind my toolbox, and you got to get a 12-volt converter that was pretty hefty for a winch, but they make them. And so I could do that and, uh, get the winch in here, and now I can winch things into here. Um, and with the exact same setup, if I wanted to, I could get just another receiver like this and do the exact same thing to my driveway, uh, outside the garage, and that gives me a way to pull things back out if I wanted to make things a little bit easier. I just pop one out there too and do the exact same thing. Uh, you can use this pretty much anywhere, and once the, uh, the bolts are out, when I got the little, um, flush plug bolts in there, I mean, you don’t really even notice it from the other side of the garage. You can’t even see it.

So I’m pretty happy with it. Again, it was a simple, fairly cheap mod, uh, to do, and hopefully, hopefully it’s going to work. So as always, guys, uh, if you learned something, uh, if you found this interesting, give me a like, give me a subscribe. I really appreciate that. If you want to watch me, uh, use this system to pull the chassis into the garage, that’s coming up pretty quick, uh, so stay tuned for that. Uh, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. If you think that I am going to destroy my garage and yank this concrete right out of the ground when I’m pulling my chassis in here, drop me a comment and let me know. Uh, we’re going to see how this works. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be fine.

So fam, that’s where we’re at. All right, thanks again for watching, guys, and we will see you next time. Take her away, getting shine at Bullnose. She’s considered divine. Thanks again for watching. We’ll see you next time. Thanks again for watching. We’ll see you next time.