The Wooden Duck

The dumping area of a garage has now become a fairly useful space, with some pretty handy work surfaces, storage and toolage. After making the first workbench I decided that I liked it so much I would make another one, and then make another one. This post is basically a quick rundown on what I’m calling Workshop V1.2.

The first addition was another bench, which was an upgraded version of the first version. This bench would feature a proper plywood top and a grid of dogholes. The plywood had been rescued from a beastly pallet by a mate who then donated it to me!

Once again I used pallet wood to create my 2*4-ish lumber which I then cut down and formed a frame. After boshing some casters on it I needed to cut down the plywood for the top and bottom worktop/storage-shelve. The ancient circular saw I had quickly gave up when cutting the chunky ply. In the interest of wallet-preservation I purchased the cheapest tracksaw that I could find. I wasn’t expecting much but the Silverline performed flawlessly when trimming down 14-layer ply wood.

Link to SilverLine tracksaw https://amzn.to/3BX0Ohn

Another wallet saving trick I discovered was modifying Irwin quick clamps for use in dogholes. I’ve seen people cut and bend them so they can be angled through the holes but then you can’t use them as regular clamps. I just replaced the bottom bolt on the clamp with a wing-bolt so you can unscrew it by hand and remove the lower half of the clamp, then drop the clamp through the hole and re-attach the lower half. Takes around 15 seconds to remove and reattach the lower half for use on the bench, so not too bad IMO.

An old neglected chest of drawers had imploded with the weight of 40 years worth of jars filled with”odds N sods”. So it was time to make a new storage solution, with more modularity and using only scrap material that was festering in the garage. It can also double as a band saw feed table which is cool (oh yeah I bought a bandsaw!). I had some scrap plywood left over from the other workbench which made a decent worktop. There’s about 5 different types of MDF from various discarded flatpack furniture and more mismatched screws than you can shake a push stick at. It’s an MDF Mongrel!

The drawers are not on rails so it’s more of a box storage unit but it does exactly what it needs to. The drawer-less bits are for storing bigger things that are easily grabable, the track-saw fits in one of the gaps perfectly (almost as if I planned it), but I may add some more box-drawers at some point.

Going through the many Branston jars and sandwich-bags full of flatpack accessories I found a bunch of mismatched handles which really completes the “cobbled-together-out-of-a-bunch-of-shit” look.

There’s so much scope for improvements and additions to this space but for now I’m very happy with V1.2! It’s also worth noting that everything is made of reclaimed/recycled wood so no dough was spent on materials.

Here’s a few before and after pics for garage-workshop space:

And for no reason at all, here’s poorly edited video of the garage slowly turning into a workshop: