General > General Technical Chat
suggestion for Lab Workbench accessories
ashkan:
Thank you all.
I think the obvious mistake here is the height of the first shelf. i will have issue to reach the buttons of equipment :-BROKE !
I can not have the shelves on the wall. However, what rdl & Berni suggest seems to be a very good and flexible solution.
The L brackets are pretty strong but what BravoV is suggesting is a good idea. I may change them.
both spot light and something like what RenThraysk suggest is a must to have too.
And definitely a cable organiser :-+
Thank you all guys.
rdl:
The shelf standards I used are less than an inch wide. They don't have to go on the wall. There's no reason you couldn't attach them to the front of your existing uprights in place of what you have now, and you'll be able to get supporting brackets suitable for the wood shelves you already have. Where I bought mine they had brackets in various sizes up to about 12" and they can handle shelves that several inches deeper.
Berni:
Yep those rails can just as easily be screwed into those wooden supports behind your bench. I screwed mine into the wall because i had a nice solid brick wall behind it, so it can hold lots of weight and it saved me some work building supports. Makes the shelves rock solid with zero wobble, tho it does make them creek on occasion because the wood shelves grow/shrink slightly with seasonal humidity changes while the brick wall does not.
That shelf is indeed too high for keeping equipment on it. Don't worry about making a shelf just above the bench, that bench looks like its 1m deep so don't worry too much about loosing some access to the back part of it. Also if it was meant to be an equipment shelf then it is rather narrow for the job. Sure it might fit the modern skinny scopes, but most other gear such as bench DMMs, lab PSUs, signal generators, frequency counters...etc are significantly deeper than that.
For example these DMMs: HP 34401A is 35cm deep, Agilent 34461A is 30cm deep, Keithley 2015 is 35cm deep
The most compact bench PSU i have is the Agilent E3610A and its about the same size as a DMM while also being 30cm deep. The ever popular Rigol DP832 is 42cm deep
For this reason my own equipment shelf is 45cm deep. The vast majority of bench equipment (non rack mount) will fit on such a shelf with enough room for cables in the back, you can squeeze by with 30cm if you choose particularly short equipment, but anything less than that will only fit skinny scopes and soldering stations.
As for the oldschool rachmount boatanchor kind of gear, don't bother trying to fit that on a shelf. Its just way too big and heavy for that. For that i would recommend buying an old used server rack and keeping the boatanchor test gear in there. Tho in Australia im guessing this sort of huge heavy gear is not so common due to US shipping. (It already costs a lot to ship to EU)
wizard69:
I have to agree with Ian here, it is the first thing I thought when looking at the attached picture.
The depth of the shelves may also be a problem and the spacing above the bench and between the shelfs may also be an issue (hard to tell from a picture).
Oh one more thing it might make a lot of sense to have space to place a large screen 4k display for your computing needs. Obviously that depends a bit upon your goals and approach to hardware but I'm thinking a work area here that is for repair, development and maybe a bit of Han radio.
--- Quote from: Ian.M on August 28, 2020, 10:11:52 am ---Above bench shelves *MUST* be able to support a high load without sagging or tipping. I'd be concerned that those brackets don't have corner braces. If they start bending they'll dump all your expensive test gear onto you, the bench or floor!
See https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/lab-storage-shelf-collapse-postmortem/
--- End quote ---
coppercone2:
a firebrick in a tray (jewelers work surface) for small things that are best done with a torch, I recommend the hard firebrick, sold for around $4, with spray on liquid rubber covering 5/6 faces + rubber feet. Ceramic tile is too slippery to be useful, maybe teracotta.
and, catalytic butane heater for teflon heat shrink (blows electricity out of the water), IMO blows a hot air system out of the water for small electronics applications. If I am doing a big box I work in the garage with a proper hot air gun, but still inadequate for teflon heat shrink.
small precision machinists vise for dead bug work on bigger packages (i.e. doing a mounted to chassis to-220 with resistors and capacitors soldered on to it directly, i.e. voltage regulator). Feel like it has to be a good expenisve one though, using clips/panavise/etc for this sucks
small ESD mat cut out for soldering on, that you ground and put on top of your normal mat, so you can use good goopy flux without destroying a big expenisve ESD cover. You can put it on top of some kind of substrate, i.e. wood, with a small bezel, so it can be handled nicely (not floppy), like a micro picture frame
small wire rack for laying finished connectors on (think of the thing above your BBQ for heating bread), what its good for is if you do a coaxial connector that you solder the shield on. They will be hot when you are done, so you can lay the hot part on the wire rack and because of the geometry round things will get slightly wedged in there so they do not roll around and cause problems/injury, I mean to make a creative one with multiple wire spacing so it can handle SMA, BNC, and N-sized things. Needs to be a little heavy so it can resist the force of the cable laying on it (i.e. LMR400 cable). So you don't hang them off the side under a book :palm:
cleaning kit : organized kit with precut towels of various sizes and types, Q-tips, wooden sticks, etc. You can chop up some kitchen towels (I recommend a mixture of the premium shop absorbent towels and more abrasive cheap scrubby napkins). If you have a few sizes to choose from you can quickly choose the right size without having to tear corners of towels and make a mess. If its available you tend to use it rather then leaving small 'problems' for later in an attempt to economize on using a single towel. Very helpful if you are using glues, obviously pair with a small bottle of rubbing alcohol (i recommend you get a 250 ml bottle to refill from a big bottle of IPA)
silicone mat : if you like to use the hot glue gun on the work bench
small 'modular' work holder for pliers, I keep mine assorted as in an armory on a top shelf, but I will usually figure out what I need to use for a particular job and it comes down to only a few, so its useful to have a temporary holder for these things
exacto tray, so you can lay a exacto blade in there safely
small goose neck weighted lamp if you are working on something that ends up having annoying shadows (it should be well lit but you might find angles in a chassis that do not light well *battery powered obviously).
typical lab bench : house with marble floor with no furniture in it
another one is a custom 'less safe' soldering iron tray, so you can lay down a soldering iron without aiming it into a hole every time, gets old with repeated work, but not have it lay on the ESD mat like people normally do when they get tired
I made this stuff so I don't know if they sell particular products for it, usually I find custom is more ergonomic
block of wood with a few holes in it for driver bits, a slot for a good machinists ruler (choose your favorite from the wiha storage box (you can't work from a bit box)
small hand held battery powered vacuum cleaner (i.e. AA) for quick clean up of small wire cuttings (say you shave a ferrule), paired with some kind of quality tray for stripping wires over.
Honestly though, I recommend a separate technician bench for as much of this as you can get away from the test equipment with. When it gets complicated/big enough, it starts to feel like having a kitchen inside of a garage.
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