Quick and dirty but awesome creeper

[jere]

I have put up with a hft low profile creeper for about 2 years now. Was a step up from coroplast but not by much. The whole plastic body always flexed changing the alignment of the abysmal castors. The casters would get snagged on the smallest pebble or cat littler crumbs (cheap oil absorbant) that got missed by the broom. Combined the two problems and the confined space under the car make for a miserable experience. The plastic and head cushion arent any more forgiving than coroplast in concrete. So when the $20 creeper cracked its castor mount my day was made.

I am generally struggling to pay the bills, so i have come to do as my grandparent's parents have done in the great depression era. Save everything i can use later on, "waste not want not". While the new creeper i made is not made with new materials or pretty in the least to look at, it cost nothing but time to make. All its parts are pulled from old would be junk. It is also stronger, more comfortable, and rolls across the floor like an astronaut in a space odyssey!

The frame is made from parts of a curbside treadmill frame, a log rack from a 1940s school house wood furnace, and some random scraps of emt tubing. I could have welded the frame together but i have buckets of old screws / bolts salvaged from the gambit of house hold appliances. The castors are a combo of rollerblade wheels and the defacto hft creeper castors. I drilled out the rivets holding the old non bearing hft wheels and replaced them with the dual bearing rollerblade wheels. This lowered the overall center of gravity of the creeper , (as the rb wheels were shorter) and makes the creeper roll like a mechanic s dream. The creeper will actually roll to low spots on a basically flat garage floor. i can rotate 360* holding a suspended brake rotor with one hand

The cushion is still a work in progress as i need to find some fake leather couch and harvest its vinyl (for now it is covered with some old hotel pillow cases for now). The foam is from a saabs back seat trimmed to fit.