I am lucky in the fact that I have some very handy friends. When I moved into my new house, I was set on making a workshop in my garage. I needed a place to work on my metalsmith projects, and open flames in the house were just not going to work. My good friends Sean and Stuart built me this bench. It’s about 12’ long and 2’ deep. The perfect amount of workspace for all my projects.
On one end, I covered it with cement board and set up my soldering station, the rest I covered with canvas cloth I bought at JoAnn’s Fabrics. This covered the rough surface of the plywood, but is still durable enough to stand up over time. Don’t worry; the flames never get close to the fabric part of the bench. (Trust me, it’s not this clean anymore 🙂 )
They notched out a space for my bench pin, but I was missing a catch pan for all the shavings and scrap from my piercing. Today I decided I need to make something. I was tired of sitting there with my legs propped up and my apron spread out hoping it would catch anything that fell. I went to Sears and bought a couple of dowels and eye screws and made something that I am hoping will work. IF you want to do this, make sure to get the screw tip and not the bolts. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time screwing them in. Size doesn’t matter; just make sure your dowels fit in the hole. I have 1 ½ inches to work with so I got the 1” ones.
The dowels also depend on the size of your bench. Like I said mine is 2′ deep and the ones I bought were 3′ so I had to cut mine down. I didn’t want them poking me every time I walked by.
The fabric I had laying around. I’m surprised at how much fabric I have that I haven’t even used for anything. Yet another project to tackle down the road.
The spacing of the braces is 2’ so I used 2 ½’ of fabric to have enough of a dip that would allow me to use my saw without bumping every time.
The whole project only took about 20 minutes, so simple, yet so effective. The only problem I can foresee is that when I push the dowels back out of the way, the fabric gathers up and I have to stretch it back out when I go to use it, but that’s no biggie.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the advise. The front isn’t really a problem, it’s just the unscrunching it to the back that might become bothersome. So far so good!
Secure the fabric in front on dowel, and back to eye bolt, and let it scrunch – unscrunch as you pull -push. Another thought… maybe put cross struts on the very back of dowels and just in front of forward eye bolts for easy pushpull. one hand