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Photography and renderings by Charles Platt

WILDERNESS WORKSHOP

Build your own inexpensive yet sturdy worktables and shelving.

By Charles Platt

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Recently I had a problem and an opportunity. The opportunity was to move my little prototype fabrication business from an industrial park in Southern California to a beautiful wilderness retreat in Northern Arizona.

The problem was that I didn’t have much time or money. Could I establish an entire workshop within a couple of months, starting from bare earth and finishing with all the tools and benches in place? And after I paid the construction costs, could I install the fixtures for less than $1,000? (I already owned all the tools.)

In some ways this challenge was a blessing in disguise. If you have to be fast, you can’t be fancy, and if you have to be cheap, you can’t be selfindulgent. This would not be one of those jobs that drag on for months because the details become an obsession in themselves.

I specified a work area of 19'×24' to allow ample space for lifting, rotating, and cutting 4'×8' sheets of plastic and plywood. To minimize heat loss, increase security, and maximize wall space, I decided not to have any windows, but I did include a massive sectional roll-up garage door. The climate where I live is so benign during most of the year, you can work comfortably with a door wide open. And during the winter, a sectioned door on tracks can be quite well-insulated.

After establishing the basics, I stepped back and let the contractors get to work. There was no way I could do the construction myself in the time available.

Free-Standing Benches

In less than a month I had a bare box standing on a concrete slab. It was insulated, drywalled, and painted. Now for the interesting part: I wanted to avoid all the frustrations and errors associated with the workshops I had used previously over the years.

The big central work area allowed me to place 2 free-standing benches of a design that I had always wanted but had never seen. They would be stocky tables, each 4' square. Placing them centrally would allow me to walk around them while building heavy items such as furniture, and a 2" gap between them would facilitate saw cuts.

I stopped using a table saw a few years ago when one of them kicked a piece of plastic at me that almost shattered my arm. Since I don’t have enough money or space for the kind of vertical panel saw you see at Home Depot or Lowe’s, I like to lay the wood flat and use either a handsaw or a handheld circular saw, which I run along a clamped straightedge. My plan was to align these cuts with the gap between the tables. This would be like using sawhorses, but much more accurate and less aggravating.

With my helper Shawn Hollister, I built the tables lower than a typical workbench, so that we’d be able to reach across them or climb up onto them when making long cuts. We gave them protruding lips so that I could apply clamps easily, and made them heavy to minimize vibration (Figures A and B).

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Fig. A: The tabletop is a 4'×4' sheet of ¾" plywood, braced and edged with 2×4s. The table legs are 4×4s.

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Fig. B: Two tables a couple of inches apart allow long cuts across big sheets of plywood or plastic, by running the saw through the gap between the tables. The extended table edge allows quick, easy clamping.

Plastic Bins for Tool Storage

For tool storage, I’m unenthusiastic about the usual options. Tools hanging on pegboard pick up dust and dirt, and when you buy an extra tool, you have to move the others around to make room. As for tool chests, they’re expensive, and you have to walk to and fro every time you want something.

My preferred method is so cheap, it’s almost embarrassing: plastic tubs from the local big-box store. I group tools in tubs by function, so that when I want, say, a metal file, I pull down the tub containing all the various shaping tools and put it on my worktable. Now I have a full range of options within arm’s reach. As for small items such as screwdriver bits and hole saws, I put them in small boxes inside the tubs. At the end of a job, everything is returned to the tubs and stays clean and neat, with the lids snapped on tight.

Shelves That Don’t Sag

Where to put the plastic tubs? On shelves, of course, above the side benches where I have a drill press, compound miter saw, band saw, and belt sander, the four tools I consider indispensable for the kind of work I do. But how should the shelves be built? Quickly and cheaply!

Since I don’t like the look of sagging wooden shelves, I chose steel shelves of the type sold for warehouses. A standard length is 4', so you don’t need many uprights to support them, but they still take heavy loads without bending. You can bolt them to wooden uprights instead of the ugly perfo-rated vertical bars that are normally used.

I chose melamine-coated particleboard for the end pieces, because it’s available in exactly the same 11¼" width as the shelves, and it’s prefinished, requiring no painting. I cut the melamine board into sections, drilled them to fit the holes in the ends of the shelves, and bolted them on. Then I cut 2×4s into rails 47" long and screwed them into the wooden studs behind the drywall in my conventional framed construction. We hung the shelves on the rails, adding a couple of nails to prevent the shelves from falling off (Figures CE). That was that.

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Fig. C: The simplest, cheapest, quickest, hang-on-the-wall, non-sagging shelf design.

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Fig. D: Front view of shelf assembly, with the front edge of the shelf cut away to show relevant features. The inset shows consequences if bolts aren’t tightened sufficiently: the bolt can chew right through the wooden upright.

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Fig. E: Cross section showing how the shelf is attached to the wall.

The horizontal rails must be a full 47" so that the load carried by the shelves is spread across the entire wooden support. Any unsupported metal section will tend to bend.

NOTE: Since melamine board is made from compressed wood chips, it can come apart, so you should use pine boards for uprights if you intend to load your shelves very heavily. Or place an additional 47" rail beneath each shelf.

Tighten the bolts to the max, to take advantage of the friction between the end of the shelf and the upright. Friction is proportional to the force perpendicular to the surface, and it supports a load more effectively than just the shaft of a bolt in a hole drilled through wood.

A Wood Rack on Wheels

Another problem was how to store materials efficiently. I have to stock wood and plastic in bulk, because the nearest retail sources are 50 miles away. I dislike stacking sheets against the wall where I can’t pull anything out easily, so my answer was a wood rack on wheels (Figures F and G). I’ve never seen this elsewhere, but it seems an obvious idea to me. When you don’t need it, you roll it out of the way, into a corner. I used heavy galvanized wire to make dividers in the rack, so that I would lose as little horizontal space as possible, and I put a flat top on it, where I could stack small pieces of scrap, with even smaller pieces in some more plastic tubs.

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Figs. F–H: A wood rack was made from pine 2×4s with 2½" wheels attached. Galvanized wire separators are secured with screws and washers.

As for seldom-used, bulky tools such as bolt cutters and reciprocating saws, I stashed them all in plastic toolboxes that I placed under the benches against the wall. The boxes aren’t strictly necessary; you can just scatter your tools on shelves. But I wanted to keep them clean and categorized. In a shared workshop, when all storage is labeled, you’re less likely to misplace things (and less likely to argue with each other when you can’t find something).

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Figs. I–L: With the big door open, it feels as if you’re working outside, and eastern exposure gives a nice view of the full moon rising at sunset. Ample floor space will allow the accumulation of miscellaneous junk in the future, or additional work areas. The floor is a concrete slab finished with two coats of epoxy paint. The exterior of the building is covered in Hardie fiber cement siding, which is fire resistant, stable, and durable.

1.3 Kilowatts of Illumination

The last consideration was in some ways the most fundamental: lighting. If you can’t see what you’re doing, you can’t do good work. I splurged about half of my $1,000 fixtures budget on some GE Ecolux 54-watt high-intensity daylight-spectrum fluorescents, and suspended them from cables stretched from wall to wall below the track of the garage door. When all 24 tubes are glowing they draw almost 1.3kW, and so to reduce energy consumption I installed a separate pull-switch on each fixture, with a chain dangling, so that I can obtain light only where I need it.

During daytime, we don’t need the lights at all. We open the huge door and feel as if we’re working outside, which is an absolute delight compared with the basement workshops I’ve used over the years. It’s also a lot more pleasant than the industrial park that was my previous environment. When the breeze wafts in and I can look across 30 miles of national forest to a distant mountain, it definitely alleviates the tedium of cutting and shaping components. Bees from a nearby nest sometimes invade the space, but to discourage them we simply sprinkle some xylene on a rag and leave it lying around. They dislike the smell of this industrial solvent even more than I do.

My workshop isn’t going to be featured in Architectural Digest. It was obviously outfitted on a budget. But I couldn’t be happier with its functionality. Tools are easily accessible and don’t get lost, the space is uncluttered and easy to clean, the lighting reveals every little detail, and as a result, the work flow is fast and accurate. Most important, the pleasure of working in an outdoor ambience is very special indeed.

It certainly justifies the hassle of moving everything from California.

Charles Platt is the author of Make: Electronics, an introductory guide for all ages. He is a contributing editor to MAKE, and he designs and builds medical equipment prototypes.

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