A tiny project to enable more tiny projects

from Exhaust, by Lewis Collard

I have a workshop. It's nice, and it's also fucking cold in the winter, and also cold most of the year after the sun goes down. Sometimes I want to stay inside in the warm, and I don't want to work on my desk because there's not much space left after a keyboard, mouse, two 27" monitors, a cat cushion, and a cat.

My cat Gertrude. She is asleep and her head is on the edge of my keyboard.

So I wanted an indoor workbench for working on small, clean projects. I could have bought one, but none did what I wanted a bench to do. I wanted mine to be a 70cm square and allow a desk chair to go under it. That's why I made one.

Instead of buying the brackets for it, I welded two pieces of 50x50x2mm steel angle together, with some 20x20mm box section to reinforce it.

Two pieces of 50x50x2mm angle steel welded at right angles to each other, with some box section going at a 45 degree angle towards the ends of each of the angle pieces to reinforce the diagonal.

That got some dimples in it, because race car shelf. I did that partly for weight saving; I don't want the workbench to pull itself out of the wall. I mostly did that because it looks cool.

The same brackets as above, but with 3/4-inch dimpled holes.

The brackets got welded onto a sheet of 700x700x1.5mm galvanised steel, with some 10x10x1.5mm angle section along the width to keep the horizontal spacing while I fitted it to the wall. That meant some of the galvanising got burned off, but that's better than having none of it galvanised. Also, it's indoors, so it shouldn't rust much anyway; I left the angle brackets unpainted because they didn't need to be.

A view of my welding table, with a 700x700mm sheet of galvanised steel clamped to it, with the brackets welded on.

After rounding off the corners I covered every edge with this door protector strip that I had left over from making my day-job-office desk chair. That keeps me safe from the edges, but that also stops small screws from rolling off the edge.

A demonstration of the corners of the worktop; they have been radiused and edge trim has been added to it.

I needed a pot for pens and small tools. If I ordered one online I'd have to wait until the next day, and if I went into town to buy one I'd have lost about an hour. Instead, I welded some bits of 3.5mm-thick steel box section together and added a 2mm steel plate on the bottom, all of which took me probably less than an hour.

My over-engineered pen pot. It is made of a piece of 100mm box section about 5 inches high, welded to a piece of 50mm box section about 3 inches high, and another piece of the 50mm box section about 1.5 inches high.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when your happy place is one with a MIG welder and an angle grinder, most problems feel like they need to be solved with steel. This weighs well over a kilo and a half. I don't think I'm jinxing myself by saying that my cat will have difficulty pushing this off the bench.

A finished view of my workbench, with 700x700mm work top, over-engineered angle brackets holding it to the wall, a full pen pot, and an LED lamp.

As you can see, I added some peg board behind the bench. I've started replicating some of the tools I can't be bothered to go down to the shed to fetch. That started with a selection of pliers; I'll do screwdrivers next, after I figure out which ones I use most regularly.

I also added a small box storage rack behind it. Because it'll have nothing heavy in it (unlike the ones in the workshop, loaded up with bolts and probably dangerously over-capacity) I could go for the cheap plastic racking.

See you next time.

Published on 2026-04-02 and filed under Tiny projects