Garage workbench - island??

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Hi folks,

My turning-the-garage-back-into-a-garage project is trundling along, helped by my having a week off work

I'm seriously getting stuff laid out now; I did plan to build myself a standard sort of workbench along one wall. I've got a load of chunky decent wood and a couple of sheets of 12mm MDF for the top to work with.

But the garage is big enough that I realised I could have racking down both sides, and a nice big (maybe 1500x1200) table as an island in the middle.

Anyone else got a setup like this?



I thought maybe it would be nice to be able to get around all sides of a piece of work.

Then I also considered power... maybe having a wire coming down from the ceiling to the island would be good, rather than across the floor?

And I also thought it might be nice to be able to push it around sometimes... I wouldn't want it on castors all the time for stability; these things are neat but way too expensive for this project; maybe fitting solid wheels like these sticking out the ends of the legs, so the wheel is more-or-less touching the floor and the mounting plate is sideways onto the leg, would let me lift one end and wheelbarrow it around a bit?

Any thoughts?

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dhutch said:

See no reason why not, it's common in a woodwork shop to have table saws etc in the middle with a top you can work on.

Presumably it's a large double.

Power from ceiling makes sense. For good casters look at the Blickle website, cracking range, top end.

Else another thought if you have mega spend, what about a lift table? Depends if you could make use out of it, but for the sake of the life and civals to make the pit for it to sit in, flush floor upto 1.5m or so, 1,5T lift capacity.

http://www.edmolift.co.uk

Daniel

It's a good sized tandem double. I have to lose one corner to the remains of my wife's on-line company which has had it as an office for the last 10 years, but there's around 5m x 4m available for the workshop end once the car is in. So racking down each side and table in the middle is the thought, otherwise I can have a couple less sets of shelves, the traditional wall-placed bench, and lots of floor space. An island table might also let me store my pushbikes a bit more out of the way on one wall (at the cost of a rack-ish)

I'm afraid this project is a micro-spend rather than mega- though... car/fun savings budget was severely hit earlier this year when every single normal reasonable age-related problem choose the same month to appear on my car (new coils, new rad, new lower track control bushes ball joints and droplinks, new front shocks, new front tyres) and it hasn't really recovered yet
I've already had to downgrade fitting the best part of £300 of LED tube lighting to simply replacing all the rubbish 40W reflectors with 15W LED daylight bulbs (£30. Looks OK though!)


When things are looking better I may get a scissor lift (although I will have to check headroom carefully) or those long jacks that sit along the sills.



Photos if it helps people work out:

The car will come to just about the end of the black racking on the left in the first photo (right hand edge of frame in the second pic).
Big block of racks at the back (with big laser printer front centre) is the office stuff, has to stay.
Chest freezer going by the back door and the single black rack moving to join its friends.
All that junk in the middle needs to go back on the racks (shed is now almost empty!). Junk (gardening stuff, scaffold tower, chairs, etc) at front end of garage will be going in the shed.
Computer and desk are staying (Youtube now better than Haynes! Also, internet radio).
Looking at the second photo, I was going to put the workbench were the small table is (with pillar drill on) under the window, but I could easily get 2 more racks there and then space for bikes (probably 2 on hooks, 2 on the floor) if I go with an island bench.

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biggiles said:

I use a couple of sturdy trestles to put up a big table in the middle of my workshop when I need it. And when I need the space, the 8x4 sheets and 4x2s go back "somewhere else". While it's handy having a big island in the middle, sometimes you just need the space! I'd keep flexibility if possible.

This is why I'm thinking of wheels on it to pack it into a corner. After all, I can leave the car outside on the drive like I have for the last decade when/if I need loads of room... Realistically, I suspect if it wasn't an island, I'd either work as best I could on a bench against the wall, or just work on the floor. I've been used to working on the top of an old chest of drawers with just enough room to shuffle about a bit in my shed for years now... or out on the patio for bigger jobs.

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paulrockliffe said:

Have a look on my renovation thread, there should be some pictures of the island I made about 18 months ago. It's great, miles more useful than the benches I have against the wall.

Can't find that one on a quick scan through your profile...

paulrockliffe said:

I looked at wheels and moving it around but couldn't find anything sensible, I have stuff on casters and they're just not solid enough to work on, so you need to be able to lift the bench one way or another. I looked at caravan stabilisers, but couldn't get second hand ones for less than £50 a pop. They would have been great.

Decided to bite the bullet and get a set of powertec castors, ordered on ebay.com as it's cheaper than ebay.co.uk or amazon - they all come from America anyway AFAICS. They really do look like the only way to do the job at all right. I'll be mounting them on the inside of the legs to avoid a trip hazard and connecting each side's pair with a metal tube across the levers as suggested by some people who have them already, meaning I should just be able to stick my foot under the table, push down, and lift each end.

paulrockliffe said:

I don't have that at the moment, though I'm about to add a bank of cheapo kitchen wall cabinets, on feet with a row of drawers above and a worktop on top to sort that out. I'm making a partition in my workshop at the moment and if I remember I'll take a picture of the mess on my bench so you can see why having a complimentary bench within reach is really useful!

I can already see that with the small table that is due to be thrown coming in handy during the move.
I was thinking that maybe I would leave an empty self on the racking at hip height to do the same thing. (And clear all the stuff off it back to where it should be every 6 months or so ).

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anonymous said:

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I've got enough to double up (so 24mm!) and I will give it some support underneath.
At the moment, it's really mainly a case of using what I have to hand... If it turns out to be a problem, it'll be easy enough to swap it for something else in the future.


In other news, I have managed to get all the garden stuff out of the garage and into the shed; there's nearly room to move in the garage now!

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Vincecj said:

If you're still looking for wheels, I have a few of these you can have.

Cheers, but I've splashed a little cash on the job now

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paulrockliffe said:

There's a renovations WiKi thing at the top of the Homes and Gardens forum, mine is the second one on the list.

Ah, found it now. Too many of those pics are very familiar, we renovated a lot of our house when we moved in... although your DIY skills are some way beyond mine! I get sent out to work to pay for it instead

paulrockliffe said:

Those castor things look good, though I'm 50:50 on whether they're robust enough, would be interesting to see how they end up. What surface will they be operating on? The wheels look a bit small and the metal a bit thin, but it's hard to tell or judge the weight of what yo'll be putting on them.

Hope so, £70 for them just doubled or tripled my budget for this project!
They look OK: installed here.
The garage floor is (mostly) tired old cheap slightly damp laminate; it should roll OK
I notice there's a "new and improved" version for an extra $20 knocking about... AFAICS, the improvement is to add screw holes at each corner of the mounting pate, so guess what I'll be doing when I get them?!

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OMITN said:

OP - make sure you post plenty of photos..!!!

OK, you asked for it:

All the stuff in the mess above came out of the shed, who knew it was so big empty?



Soon filled it back up with stuff from the garage though





Great, now we can crack on with the garage with only the mess required. Lots of sorting, stacking and a couple of fully-loaded trips to the tip later:



Room to work.
The raw materials for the bench are the remains of the wall that previously cut the end of the home office off from the up-and-over front of the garage (you see where the laminate, white paint, etc ends). The some of the wood has already done other duties, hence the black paint; it all has gripfix remains and screw holes all over. So beauty is not really an aim of this!




Cut to size



Well, I say cut to size. I measured the empty space between the racks and thought a 120cm wide island would be OK. Once I started to lay them out, after filling the racks and moving some stuff about a bit, it was bloody huge and far too wide. Reduced my ambition to 80cm and had to cut some again. Length is 150cm.


Made a quick jig to get the legs square while turning 2x4 into 4x4




Assembled the top, and then shelf supports, with right-angle brackets to hold it all in place-ish and get it squared up




Hit a snag - no wood drill long enough to go all the way through the legs+rails... some very careful measurement followed and it went OK. All bolted together with big bolts (then right angle brackets removed).




Woodwork vice cut in, recessed and plenty of support provided - these right angle brackets are staying, even though I think it would be OK without, but belt and braces for this bit (mainly braces).





Messed up cutting one sheet of MDF as I assumed the edges were square on one corner (it looked OK compared to the other end), but it became obvious that this was not the case as I cut...

The MDF was slight bowed form storage - I stood on the middle of the shelf to hold it down while screwing in, and knelt on the top to do the same (roof height ) - not a creak or complaint; I weigh a bit under 16 stone, so I'm happy I'd have trouble breaking it in normal use!




And finally, with the car in, too




Quite a difference to the start of the week!

The thing is bloody heavy to drag around, even without kit on it. The castors have been received at ebay's gobal post centre, email told me today, so I'm looking forward to those



Jobs to do:

I've not arranged power to it yet (I have the sockets ready to screw on.

I will varnish the MDF... which is, frankly, a bit rubbish for the top. The fact that it's old and has quite a lot of screw holes in already doesn't help. I looked at it and couldn't be bothered attaching it neatly from underneath, not worth wasting the brackets! Something better will be found eventually, but it will do for now.

Make vice-clampable bases for my bigger tools, then store them underneath.

Fit a PIR LED flood I picked up from Home Bargs today (for the massive price of £12) so that when I open the main door, I can see to park without having to go all the way down to the far end. And I won't be able to forget to switch it off, either!

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Skyedriver said:

When the new kitchen arrives, I'm ripping out the old one. Most of it isn't worth hanging onto but there's enough still in decent enough condition to make either a 1000mm long unit or 1600mm long unit for the soon to be built garage.. I was going to fix these to the wall but now considering free standing on casters following this and the brilliant Lanchester house restoration thread. What would you recommend. 1000mm or 1600mm?

If you make it 1600mm and it turns out to be too long, would you be able to cut it down? That'll probably be easier than trying to extend a 1000mm one!
I'd say keep all the bits you can and chose once you can see how much space you have to work with.
I've just binned a load of very old kitchen units - they were manky/greasy/grotty as anything and ripped out long before we actually did the kitchen as my better half basically refused to use them - but they have done good service for storage in both shed and garage, where she never saw them, at zero cost for the last 10 years!

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anonymous said:

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There seems to be some debate about this (even before mentioning handedness)... and, to be honest, I didn't really think about it that much, just stuck it on a corner. I don't do so much proper woodwork as just sawing, so sticking out to the right is good for me. I actually expect to clamp tools down on boards with it, and i was looking at it after and thinking I'd prefer them to my left, so I may rotate the whole table 180 and have them come forward across the table. Or I might end up using the other side of the table as the "front" anyway... the joys of an island!

I think my favourite comment was - to be on the safe side, put vices on each corner, and on both ends

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Ok, the castors have arrived from America (quite impressed by delivery speed) and somehow I managed to find half an hour to fit them.

What can I say? Basically, a Ronseal product - just does what it says on the tin

They are a bit thicker/chunkier than I worried they might be - made of some real stuff:



The screws provided seemed pretty beefy, too, so I decided not to worry about extra holes and go with them as presented. I can always take them off and start drilling if these fail at all.
I had kinda hoped to fit these pointing inwards and use a metal tube to join the tops of the cams on each end so that you could push down in the middle to get both to go up at that end, but it was clear that there would not be enough room under the shelf to get my foot in when the bar was up.
Also, the central screw hole would put the screw into the join between the two 2x4s rather than solid wood, which would not be ideal.
So I decided to fit them on the other inwards faces, to avoid having sticking-out toe stubbing hazards.
Drill pilot holes and screw 'em down tight




Then bolt the castors themselves on



And, as if by magic, floating bench




Going up and down is a bit lurchy, but they are solid once they're down and seem happy enough with 16 stone of me on the table so will probably be OK with a few tools, bench vices, etc The bench just rolls around easy as you like.
Not the last word in refinement and a touch expensive for my taste, but I would say they are completely suitable for the job. As the castors bolt onto the cam plates, I guess you could easily change size/quality/material of the castors if needed (these are 50mm, it says here, although bigger wheels would obviously mean moving the mounting plates up the legs as appropriate (and they might not track all the way around it they are offset like these).