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Designing and building a workbench

We have a stack of lumber, copper pipe, and trim that has been on the basement floor in our last house and that we moved over to our new house. It's tough to keep the material organized, the pipes, trim and lumber is stacked together and tough to get at. It's not an effective use of floor space and the lumber and pipes are quite long, some of the pieces are 10' long.

If I built a 10' long workbench I could store the material below it, either on the floor or shelves, and it would provide space to work on projects and storage space for a chop saw and other tools.

I've used Tinkercad to make some 3D mockups for work projects before and it worked pretty well. Tinkercad can be used to create designs for 3D printing but in this case I used it to visualize the workbench and determine how to construct it.


3D model

Here is the 3D design that you can view, duplicate, and edit. The dimensions of the lumber in the model should be correct. Note that the scale is in millimeters where one millimeter is one inch, it doesn't look like Tinkercad can handle things in inches that are as large as this bench, entering those dimensions into the shape editor was resulting in the values being truncated.

The bench is 10' long, 32" deep, and 36 3/4" high. I also designed it with a 10" overhang on three sides except the back that will be up against a wall.

Here are some renderings of the workbench that show its construction.



Design notes

  • 3/4" plywood surface is set into the top to protect the edges that might nick or peel. You can see the v1 workbench on Tinkercad here.
  • Side pieces are 2x6, upgraded from 2x4 on the v1 design for more stiffness in the side overhangs.
  • The top of the side 2x6 pieces will be squared off by running them through the table saw to take off the rounded edge so they are closer to flush with the top surface. I'm not sure if I'll do this to the long side or the short side. I'd like to preserve the rounded edge on the outside so trimming the long side is best, even though it will be tougher to do cleanly.
  • The height of 36 3/4" could have been 36" flush but that would have meant more fractional cuts and an extra 3/4" of overall height should be fine.
  • The front overhang is a cantilever with continuous pieces for strength. The side overhangs may be slightly weaker.
  • Load bearing is accomplished by direct support where possible.
  • Screws will be used as fasteners, wood pre-drilled and countersunk to avoid splitting.

Material estimates

  • 2x4 qty 10 (I got 14)
  • 2x6 qty 3
  • 8x4 A/C plywood qty 2

Construction


The supplies for the workbench.


Part of the front support section assembled but without the legs attached to the cross beam.















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