Friday, November 22, 2013

Building a workbench - part 2


Part 1 can be found here if you missed it.

Well, I may have lied yesterday about what I’d be writing about today.  Unfortunately I didn’t get to install the shop light on my workbench last night because I failed to realize that I didn’t pick up the eye bolts that I needed to hold it to the structure.  Today’s post will be short and sweet as I show you the pegboard and outlet strip I installed last night.
Yesterday you saw the finished bench with very tall posts on the back end.  Those posts are there to hold the pegboard on the backside of the bench for easy access to commonly used tools.  You’ll see in this next picture that the pegboard is installed on said posts.  Again, I had lowed cut the pegboard to the right lengths.  All I had to do was fasten the pieces of pegboard to the back of the posts.  I took some of the 1 ¼” woods screws and fastened a 2’x6’ piece of pegboard perpendicular to the work area of the bench.  The screws went right into the holes of the pegboard and went on very easily.  I stacked the second 2’x6’ piece of pegboard on top of the first and fastened it the same way.


That was easy enough.  Next I installed the outlet strip on the front of the bench.  You can see it in the first picture.  It’s 4’ long and has 12 outlets on it.  Enough outlets to power anything I’ll need and then some.  It’s probably a bit overkill but I liked the idea of this strip rather than a smaller one you’d find behind most people’s entertainments centers.  It looks nice on the bench and it was cheap.  I bought this one for about $20 at Harbor Freight Tools.  I know some people have a bad opinion about Harbor Freight, but they do have some nice stuff.  
When I put on the strip I measured the front of the bench and also measure the length of the strip.  I subtracted the length of the strip from the overall length of the bench and divided the remaining length by 2 to see how far in on each side the strip would need to be set for it to be centered.  Once I found my points I secured each side of the strip to the bench using 4 – 1 ¼” wood screws.  I did one screw on the top screw hole of the strip on one side, set a torpedo level on top of the strip, made sure it was level and secured the strip with one screw on the other side.  I then used the final two screws in the final two holes to extra security.


Next came the task of running the power cord for the strip to the back of the bench and keeping it out of site.  I ran the cord up and under the bench and fastened the cord to the underside of the bench with cable clips.  These are pretty self-explanatory as you’ll see in the next picture.

Now the bench has power access!  This was a short post today, but I hope you enjoyed it.  I promise to have the light bearing structure built this weekend and will have a new post for you on Monday!  Enjoy your weekend and Go Big Red! 
-Curtis

UPDATE: link to part 3

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