A tiny project to enable more tiny projects

I have a workshop. It's nice, and it's also fucking cold in the winter, and cold most of the year after the sun goes down too. 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.

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 brackets to mount a worktop to the wall, I welded two pieces of 50x50x2mm steel angle together, with some 20x20mm box section to reinforce it.

I made some dimple holes in it, because race car shelf. I did this partly for weight saving; I don't want the workbench to pull itself out of the wall. But mostly, I did this because dimpled steel looks cool.

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. The work surface has a chance of seeing liquid, so galvanised steel made sense. Welding burned off some of the galvanising, but that's better than having none of it galvanised. I left the angle brackets unpainted because they didn't need to be painted; unless something is frightfully wrong with the weatherproofing of this place they are unlikely to see any liquid.

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, and stops small screws from rolling off the work surface.

I needed a pot for pens and small tools. If I'd ordered one online I'd have to wait until the next day, and if I'd gone 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.

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.

As you can see, I added some peg board behind the bench. I've started a second collection of the same tools I have down the shed, because if I don't have to go down the shed to get a tool for a job I'll be more likely to do that job rather than put it on the Procrastination Pile. The collection 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 went for the cheap plastic racking. It's good enough, and it's not like me to overkill anything, right?

:)

See you next time.