When I moved to China a few years ago, I got rid of or left behind most of my workbench space. I haven't really had a garage since, but last month we moved to a house with an awesome garage, and I found myself short of benchspace, especially bench space with built in storage.
On the bright side, just before the move, I bumped out a show
that was tossing a whole lot of steel in the skip. Not even
selling it for beer money! In my book, thats a crime, so I brought
some home:
Actually, the gal is from a mate of mine, and is a thinner wall thickness, but the angle iron and the blue legs are nice and solid. Looks like a workbench to me, just need a benchtop.
Fortunately, the new garage came with some inherited lumber.
The previous tenants had lived here 30 years, and moved out when
the gentleman had a stroke. Looks like he was something of a
handyman, and he left behind a couple of 4.5 metre lengths of
basically old hi-plank. 45mm thick, 170mm wide. So I cut those
down and had a 680mmx2200mm benchtop:
It's cut oddly to work around some flaking at the ends, and some
nails that are too much effort to remove. I'll end up with a bench
basically 2 metres long when they're trimmed.
My plan is to use the angle iron at the ends across the wood, weld legs to that, and use the gal as bracing. The wood is probably solid enough to use without the gal, but this way I can probably dump a 88 CI Harley engine on it and not worry about whether it'll handle it. Besides, I've got the gal, might as well use it.
The next step