– I've had a lot of van trailer
truck set ups over the years that I've been in construction. And this is by far the best
setup that I've had yet made a couple of huge improvements with the new pack-out drawers. I got a ramp, a hand truck,
couple really cool things, man, custom dolly that I
wanna show you in this video, it's been an awesome
system to work out of. I've been using it for about
three or four months now, basically since I could get my hands on the pack-out drawers, but I'll show you what I've got and see maybe if you can
use some of these ideas for your own setups. First off, I apologize in advance if the lighting isn't perfect, trying to film outdoors with
a bunch of white surfaces and then inside a dark van
is not ideal conditions, but I'll do my best.
First thing you'll notice my
side door right here opens up. I've got my hand truck strapped over here. We'll see more on that in a bit
tool belt on a hook up high, keeps it out of the way. And then over here this time of year, gotta have the golf clubs
on the van at all times for emergency situations. So I like to just deploy those quickly, just real quick on and off the hook for whenever I need them. So we'll just take those out for now. Levels are always one of
those difficult things to find a good storage
for here on this wall is where I keep mine, keep them on the vertical position.
And I made these custom
blocks to hang them on. So you can stack them too
deep with this little block one on there so if I've got
one of these levels off, it still won't fall off in transit. And then if I want to put two on and just slide the other one on there, it's not going anywhere. As we go straight forward
into the van here, this is where the major
improvements happened with the new pack-out drawer systems. You can see I've got two different stacks and they're on a custom dolly that I made that I will show a little
bit more of in the video. As we move forward into the van, this is where the real magic happened on the newest upgrades. We've got the pack-out drawers, mostly two drawer units. And then at the bottom here, you'll see these custom dollies that I made those work really well. And they tie into the design
of using this hand truck in this whole system.
And then on my partition wall here, I've got this folding ramp and that's a really key component
that I'm using now also. A few considerations when designing shelving for your van. One of the biggest things for me is I wanna be able to
quickly deploy my tools, but one of the things that
tears us up is tradesman is stepping up in and out
of a vehicle all day long, multiple times a day. And then also on your arms carrying these huge boxes
full of heavy tools, I think just tears the
crap out of your shoulders.
So anything I can do to
mitigate those two things, less stepping in and out and less carrying things with my arm, less weight on my knees as I'm stepping in and out
of the van, that's a win. So, as I tried to design my van I wanted to keep as much
stuff on a wheels as possible. So I divided my partitions up
to as many bays as possible where I could keep tools on wheels. You'll notice right here, I've got my table saw it's on wheels, moving down I can't put the vertical bays here with things on wheels
because of the wheel wells. So you have this center area in the van, which I just kinda have
to do whatever with that. But then down here, we've got two bays with
pack-out drawer units. So I'll show you a little
bit how these are in place and don't move around and transit.
It was pretty cool what
I came up with for that, but so rolling units
here, rolling units here. And then as we come down
around to the other side here I've got my one remaining
stack of Festool stuff that is on there, Sys Roll cart. And again, we've got the
wheel well issue here. So nothing on wheels in this area. Then moving down here, I have what I call my power tower, which is my custom pack-out dolly with my air compressor, microwave and complete charging
station for batteries and stuff like that.
That'll
also roll in and out. The absolute game changer
with the pack-out drawers was it allowed us as
tradesmen to have drawers the whole way up the stack
and have wheels at the bottom. Whereas before you had to have
the pack-out large toolbox with the wheel base on it, so then in that situation, you
had the lid on that tool box. And if you wanted to get into
what was inside that tool box, you had to unstack
everything from on top of it, which was a huge pain.
So beautiful thing about these units is you can access everything
while you're in your van and you don't have to unstack any boxes. Same from the job site. I can roll these into a closet
that I will deadbolt shot and lock my tools up at night or whatever. And it's just a really tall stack. So it's not taking up
a bunch of real estate on the job sites, same thing over here, just easy to access stuff. So all that being said, that
creates another problem. We've got these awesome tool boxes. They are big and they do get very heavy. So how do we get these
beautiful drawer units on and off the van again without tearing up
our bodies in the process, that is where the ramp comes in. My good friend, Justin has
been using a ramp for years and I should have listened
to him a long time ago because I bought this
folding aluminum ramp.
And it is an absolute game changer. I considered a few different places where I could store this ramp and up against my partition
ended up being the best place that I could find with the
existing setup that I had. So it's pretty lightweight
just one strap up here, holds it in place, no big deal. And then as you can see, I'm
doing this all one handed, we'll just pull it out. It's really easy to set up, just unfolded. And I drilled some holes
up here on the front because you don't want
this sucker slipping off whenever you're walking on it or rolling something up and down, you could injure yourself really bad.
So I've got a hole up here where
I just stick a bolt through and then the ramp can't go anywhere. Next, I'm gonna simulate
my tool deployment as if I was rolling up to a job site. I'll probably speed this up
in the video a little bit, but let's just see what time
it is and how long it takes to roll out all these tools it's 9:21. So we'll see how long this takes. (upbeat music) So there we go it's nine
just rolled over to 9:26, five minutes to roll all this stuff out. And I've got basically all of
my tools on the job site now. Now, obviously it'd be a little bit longer if you're farther away from your van, but the other beautiful thing
about using the hand truck is you've got your tools on the wheels.
So you're really good to go unless you've just got some
really, really rough terrain. And I don't usually
run into that too much. Usually I can get my van
fairly close to the job site where that's not an issue. The other huge thing that
you have to take into account is that I did not physically
strain myself at all to get all these tools off.
This is a ton of weight in tools. And to be able to get that off of your van without having to
physically exert yourself or look, I mean, we just pull them up. Look at these boxes are huge. You try and carry those around. It's just a ton of weight on
your knees stepping in and out ton of weight on your shoulders, twisting and turning
with these big handles. I think having things on
wheels with a hand truck with a dolly base makes so much sense. I looked around a lot
at different hand trucks to use with this dolly
system, what would work well? And one of the things that I needed was I needed a hand truck that I could still stack stuff on and pull it up into the van
even if I didn't have my ramp. So believe it or not, this hand truck is actually made by Milwaukee. And what I really like is it's
got this stair climbing kit, I guess you would call it, but it runs all the way down the side.
And it's got about an inch and a half, two inch offset with the
back of the wheel here. And that's what you need to be able to pull a
stack up into your van, without the wheels
hanging up on your bumper or your floor with other hand trucks. I tried that in a previous video, some of you might remember
doesn't work well, puts a lot of strain on your back, but this hand truck
works well for that case. So I'm gonna put this stuff away now, but before we do that, I wanna show you the retention system that I came up with
inside the van partitions to keep the pack-out stacks from coming out of inside
of their partitions or falling over during transit, but it still gives me
access to all the drawers.
So I'll show you that next. As you can see here, I've got this odd bungee
cord arrangement here, but it works awesome, whenever I slide my pack
outs into this partition, all I have to do is grab
this strap with my finger, pull it forward and hook it on to the front of the pack-out drawers. And it works really well. So it's just one bungee strap.
And then I use plumbing fittings. Those are half inch copper fittings. It's just what I had on hand at the shop. Whenever was trying to figure this all out and works really well
to hold those in place. You probably could come up with something a little bit better that might not cut into
the bungee cord as well. But like I said, this was
just what I had on hand whenever I was trying to
come up with something to keep these things from
moving around in transit. These stacks are super heavy, so I like to grab my
partition with one hand, just to give me a little
assist and pulling it up, but it's not too bad. The other nice thing, is that whenever you have
the dolly underneath, you really just need the hand truck to get the stack into your van.
And then you can just wheel it around on the floor into place. Come on now, there we go. So then all I gotta do
is grabbing my straps, strap this thing in place, and I've still got access
to everything in my drawers if I'm working out of my van versus deploying these
all on the job site. There are also locks on the
caster wheels at the bottom. So I'll go ahead and push those down also. And that'll also help keep
prevent the wheels from moving. Now, after you're done with your ramp, I just pull the bolt out right here and I just leave that up
front here, fold it over. And the ramp stores away
up there pretty nicely. Final thoughts. This is the best system
that I have personally used and customized for
myself of all the things that I've done over the years I love it.
See these aren't coming out, whenever you're doing
punch work we all know we don't wanna get all
of our tools out at one. And that's where the
Milwaukee pack out drawers are a game changer. I just can't say enough good about them because I've been able
to work out of my van without having to move the boxes out. I can just come right in
here and if I need a nailer, I can open a drawer in
the middle of this stack. If I need my clam clamps, I can come down to the bottom of the stack and open a drawer and get to my stuff. And that is something that
I have not ever had before. So absolutely love this. If you've got any more
questions, let me know. I'm also gonna make a video showing you what I put in these drawers.
So look for that video to come
out sometime after this one. And I'll show you how I've got my tools set up in these drawers. And I think you might enjoy that also. So hope you enjoyed the video. If you're new here don't
forget to subscribe for more content like this. Give the video a thumbs
up and drop a comment. If you've got any questions, let me know what you think
of this whole system, appreciate you watching and
we'll see you on the next one. (upbeat music).
