Here on Berm Peak, the garage is the heart of everything but what you don’t see as
much in these videos is that this garage is an office as much as it is a shop.
Which is why we place such an emphasis on keeping it organized.
When every tool, bicycle, and piece of gear has a home, it’s a less distracting, more
pleasant place work.
But this space isn’t quite finished.
Our camera gear is organized chaos at best, and the bike gear section is, a refuge for
wolf spiders.
I’ve been meaning to get around to these two sections, but now is not the time to “mean
to get around to” anything.
In another week, this garage will be part of a docu-series which I’ll announce at
a later date.
Although a workspace is never really finished, it would be nice to knock out all pending
projects before any—documenting takes place, so that’s what we’re doing today.
I’m putting Curtis in charge of the camera gear.
Building the wood shop freed up a ton of space in our rolling toolbox so, he’s gonna de-rat’snestify
this while I work on something else.
The gear section.
In a rare departure from our use of framing lumber, we’re getting crafty and building
this gear station from maple plywood.
That means I need to plan this out carefully instead of jamming more 2x4’s wherever something
needs bracing.
Mistakes are more costly with this stuff and I’m not in the mood to buy another sheet
of it.
To hold this together we’re using glue and pocket holes.
To make a pocket hole you use this little jig which holds the drill bit at an angle.
For me, this took a little figuring out and yes—a ruined piece of maple plywood.
I didn’t realize you need to put this stop on the drill bit to keep it from going too
deep.
But after cutting a new piece and doing a little testing with the pocket hole jig, I
managed to mess it up again by drilling the holes on the wrong side.
But once I got through the cut list and drilled all the holes, things started coming together
a bit smoother.
As we complete the overall structure of this mountain bike gear station, Curtis is finishing
up the camera section.
And oh how glorious it is.
With everything clearly labeled and plenty of space for expansion, it should be no problem
to keep this clean and organized.
But we still have a lot left to do on the gear station.
These little dowels are going to act as hooks for hanging helmets and packs.
But we need a way to keep items from sliding off the ends.
Using the drill press and a hole saw, we can cut these little circles out of pine which
should fit nicely on the ends.
After a little measuring, I figured out the spacing of the hooks, taking into account
different sized helmets of course.
To fix these dowels in place, all we need is a 1” paddle bit and some glue.
Now for the hard part… mounting this thing on the wall.
We need to locate 4 beams, pre-drill holes for lag screws, and then copy that same layout
on to our gear station so it all lines up.
Oh, and we need to make a cutout for the electrical outlet on the far right.
I put the chances of this all lining up at about 50/50.
Now, this gear station is really starting to take shape.
As you can see, the top is measured to fit these crates.
We’ll end up with a few empty ones for guest storage.
At this height, I can reach them which means everyone should be able to also.
In the past we kept the chargers for my bike lights and wireless shifter batteries over
here with all the camera stuff.
That’ll be going in the gear station.
We’re using a cable concealer, to run a power strip from the outlet to the underside
of the shelf.
This long piece on the front not only adds strength to the shelf, but also hides all
the stuff we’ll be mounting here.
Since a lot of what we’ll be charging is USB, we’ll mount this hub here as a power
supply and then run all the light charging wires through another cable concealer in the
center.
To store and charge our bike lights, we’ll use these metal baskets.
For the wireless shifter batteries on the Sync’r Carbon, we’ll mount the archer
charger to the right for quick access.
With the camera gear organization finished, we can fix this rat’s nest of wires behind
the tool box.
This power strip is so large that it actually needs to be mounted on a diagonal.
But we need those outlets for all the camera, drill, drone, and AA chargers that power our
gear.
Another thing we had in the old gear area was the shoe rack we built back at Berm Creek
from 10” PVC pipe.
I’m breaking that down into two racks: one for shoes, and one for pup gear.
And finally, we’ll add a little fun to our gear station with an obligatory RGB accent
light.
And now we can stare at it.
Maybe you don’t get as excited about organization as I do, but this has been a long time coming.
Gear storage, helmet storage, light charging, bike parking, and all of it is up off the
floor.
I think we achieved what we set out to accomplish with this mountain bike gear station.
And now the old gear area is available so….subscribe to our other channel, Berm Peak Express, to
find out what we build there.
And after that, it’ll be a long time before we need to build anything for the shop.
This space is finished—for now.
Next week I’ll be traveling but when I return we’ll be continuing our work on Rhodorooter,
hopefully with drier weather.
Until then, thanks for riding with me today and I’ll see you next time.