Worktables

16 Mar 2011   tools   shop   eaa   workshop   firsts   worktables   eaa1000

With much effort - and dollars spent - the garage has been transformed. With a beautiful new epoxy floor, freshly painted walls, and dedicated electrical installed on the shop half of the garage, I now have a very nice shop to work in. Well…. almost. What I don’t have yet are workbenches & shelves. The first is easy enough to resolve, if perhaps time consuming. As for shelves? Well - I still need to figure out what sort of shelves I want to put up. Easy enough once that’s sorted out.

For the workbenches, I decided to build the EAA Chapter 1000 Standardized Work Tables. By using a couple smaller tables instead of a single larger table, I get a good bit of flexibility in their usage. As a bonus, I can actually reach all the way across these 2 foot wide tables, which would be uncomfortable with any wider of a table. Following the plans directly yields 2 tables that are 2’ by 5’ each. I added an additional 6 2x4s to the plans to take advantage of the leftover plywood from the 2 tables to build an additional table that is 2’ by 4’.

                           

All said, the short table took approximately 5 hours to build from start to finish between Sunday & Monday. The finished product is rock solid and is perfect height & width for me to work on. I’m actually using the shorter work table to build the full size tables, which, combined with the practice building the first one, is allowing the second table to come out even nicer.

The larger tables took around 4 hours each to finish. They didn’t come out perfect, but they should be close enough and it should be easy enough to shim out some of the variance anyway.

Also on the planning list, smaller dedicated workbenches for the drill press, bench grinder, and DRDT-2 dimpler.