Don's Blog - On the Workbench

Two other projects that I wrapped up over the holiday break were a drawer unit and mitre saw stand. I needed to finish the drawer unit before working on the workbench so that I determine the proper height to set the workbench; I wanted the drawer unit to be able to slide underneath the workbench. For both of these projects I had a a design constraint to only use wood that I already had on hand. I had a bunch of scraps and miscellaneous wood that had been in my wood pile for quite a while. The wood was actually very usable too; my buddy who owns Eaton Designs had given me a bunch of excess wood and I thought these would be good projects to use wood. Here's the finished drawer unit. For the drawer unit, I started by buying a base unit from Home Depot. The drawer unit had 4 drawers initially. I wanted to put an additional tabletop on the top of the unit and intended to put the drawer on wheels. Knowing that this would make the unit very high, I decided to lower the unit by removing o...

Well here is the first blog entry. I thought that this would be a good way to document various projects underway. Since I'm titling this blog "On the Workbench" I thought there would be no better first project to show than the building of a new workbench. There was an old counter surface in the garage that was already in the garage when we moved into the house many years ago. The counter was nice and long, however there was a lip along the outer edge that made clamping or any other sort of operation where I needed a good, straight edge hard to accomplish the task at hand. Additionally it was not quite deep enough for a lot pf projects and it given the space it was in, it the bench could have been about a foot longer. A little before Thanksgiving I removed the old workbench (and some old wooden shelving above the workbench) to have a clean slate to start with. I spent a while drawing out some design concepts ... ... and made a trip to the hardware store and IKEA. At IKEA I...