Skip to main content

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.















Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Debugging an imprecise bus access fault on a Cortex-M3

This information may apply to other cortex series processors but is written from practical experience with the Cortex-M3. Imprecise bus access faults are ambiguous, as noted by the term "imprecise". Compared to precise bus errors, imprecise errors are much trickier to debug and especially so without a deep understanding of arm processors and assembly language. Imprecise and precise flags are found in the BusFault status register, a byte in the CFSR (Configurable Fault Status Register). BusFault status register bits The definition for imprecise and precise bits is: [2] IMPRECISERR Imprecise data bus error: 0 = no imprecise data bus error 1 = a data bus error has occurred, but the return address in the stack frame is not related to the instruction that caused the error. When the processor sets this bit to 1, it does not write a fault address to the BFAR. This is an asynchronous fault. Therefore, if it is detected when the priority of the current pr...
5 comments
Read more

Travelling on Spirit airlines out of Boston Logan airport? Here are some tips.

I attended CES 2017 in Las Vegas. Booking the trip late I ended up on Spirit airlines. It was both non-stop, making it six hours to Las Vegas from Boston, and affordable, less than $300 for a one way trip compared to around $700 with JetBlue. Here are some tips that might help you when travelling on Spirit from Boston Logan airport. Eat Spirit is located in the B-terminal, gates B-37 and 38, with its own TSA security checkpoint. While it does have restrooms and places to sit the food selection is limited to a single food stand. I'd recommend eating at the Legal C Bar (number 77 in the image below) prior to going through the terminal security checkpoint. The food and service there were great. Drink The water and other drinks are cheaper if you buy them at the food cart rather than on the flight. Seats The seats on Spirit don't recline. They do this to reduce weight, seat cost, seat maintenance costs, and so seats don't impact the free space of other passengers,...
3 comments
Read more

Yocto recipe SRC_URI for a BitBucket / GitHub ssh git repository

This is a particularly geeky post but because Google searches didn't turn up any information I thought it would be helpful to document the issue and solution for others. I was writing  Yocto recipes that pulled from BitBucket git repositories in ssh form and ran into several issues getting a SRC_URI that worked. GitHub uses the same syntax for their ssh repositories. A BitBucket / GitHub git url, in ssh form, looks like: < username >@bitbucket.org:< account name >/< repository name >.git a more concrete example for a git repository in one of my BitBucket accounts looks like: git@bitbucket.org:cmorgan/somerepository.git Yocto recipes can pull from git repositories by setting the SRC_URI variable appropriately. Unfortunately you can't just do: SRC_URI = "git@bitbucket.org:cmorgan/somerepository.git You'll get errors because the Yocto won't know what kind of url this is. You need to specify the protocol for Yocto to k...
2 comments
Read more