Super Work Bench 2009

In my continued efforts to put IKEA out of business, I present “Super Work Bench 2009”

As usual, it’s designed to fit in a specific room. For more pics and a rundown of the features (a piece of wood with features, that’s right, only on Benheck.com) click below.

One kind of superflous feature is a rotating work surface. I’m sure 9 times out of 10 this will be useless, but since it might be handy someday (get to the other side of a fragile project without lifting it, for example) I put it in.

The surface is an 18″ diameter circle (big enough to fit an Xbox 360 laptop coincidentally) and it is suspended by ball bearings inside the assembly. Openings and toothed edges allow you to rotate from the bottom, under the table. Now I can reinact the “the deal was for the diamond” scene from Temple of Doom whenever I want!

“You call him Doctor Jones, doll!”

Here’s the desk before I piled crap on it. My new apartment has those dumb baseboard heater things, so the legs of the desk actually have openings to fit over those, allowing it to go right up to the wall.

The three tools I admire most: soldering iron, desoldering iron and hot glue gun.

This is probably my favorite part. I found a 3 circuit switch at Ace and wired it to some power sockets under the desk. This allows me to turn on my tools easily, instead of manually unplugging them which was obviously a major inconvenience. I wouldn’t call it “going green” (soldering irons are fairly low-power in the grand scheme of things) but it’s very handy. Dremel and drill, already having switches, are plugged into a standard power strip.

I have had this damn Radio Shack project box sitting around for years and I finally found a use for it – bench power supply. A couple months ago, while working on the new C64 laptop, I bought an old computer case just for the ATX power switch. Ridiculous, I know. But now I have a use for that extra PC PSU as well. I get +12, +5, -5, -12 and +3.3 out of this thing – enough to power anything! There’s a couple of LED’s, one a really bright white one, so I won’t forget it’s on. You know, in case I can’t hear the fan.

Some shelves to stack projects on. The white thing is one of my new Xbox 360 laptops that I should have on the site soon.

Well that’s about it. Stay tuned to Benheck.com for more exciting projects and a cool new section of the site as well!

16 thoughts on “Super Work Bench 2009”

  1. Very nice, Ben. God, I’d love to design and build my own furniture. Don’t have the tools and stuff though. Perhaps I need to make friends with some one who does.

  2. This might come as a surprise to you Ben… but I (and I think a lot of your readership) honestly love this sort of article.

    Seriously.

    This is really cool. I do a bit of carpentry, and I can honestly say this is really well constructed.

    Please! More like this! 🙂

  3. It’d be cool if you could have drilled holes in the rotating piece, and holes in the stationary bottom piece of the rotating piece, with pins that could be locked in place to hold it still after you’ve rotated it where you need it.

    Being able to rotate a delicate piece of work without physically moving it is really useful, but a delicate piece of work accidentally rotating while doing precise work on it can be annoying.

    Just a suggestion.

  4. Ditto what hossrex said. Very big, efficient, and innovative. In addition to being able to lock the rotating piece, it might have been nice to have a small rotating piece, and a removable platform to put over it. Still, awesome work!

  5. Awesome work good sire of the nerd gods. I wish i had the time for ability to do this kinda stuff.

  6. That work bench if the shiznos! I wish I had the space to build an epic desk like that. I’ve got the tools and the talent…but not the room lol.

  7. Oh I forgot to mention, behind the rotating thing there’s a portion that lifts up, so can you prop an LCD against it or something while you work on things. I need to get some friction hinges first, so right now it just sort of sits there.

  8. Woah, we both redid our workstations at the same time 0.0 Of course yours pwns mine, I’m really just commenting for teh lulz, and to see if I can still post on here in my bannage.
    @bbot Rat shack cheapies rule! They’re cheap (duh), work for a while, and are easily replaced! :mrgreen:

  9. If you hooked us a little motor to the lazy Susan, you could make cool videos where the laptop slowly turns like showroom cars do.

  10. Ben, do you have the plans or dimensions and a parts list for this work bench anywhere? I’m looking into building a custom computer desk that will fit into a corner and I like how simple & practical yours is. If you can’t find it, no worries. Thanks!

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