It seems there are many here who are building or have built their own benches. I have always built my own benches too. Partly because I didn’t want to spend the cost of a commercial bench and partly because building your own lets you have the exact size and features that you want.
In post #3187 JustSquareEnough showed a picture that had a drawer unit later identified as a Harbor Freight end cabinet for roller chest.
A couple of years ago I was shopping at a local tool store where they were having a closeout on Clarke tool chests. They had two of the end cabinets similar to the Harbor Freight ones. I really liked the blue color. I immediately thought that these could serve as the pedestals on the ends of a new workbench. For some time I had been thinking of building a new bench as a totally modern work area – a flexible bench not committed to any one type of work.
Although at first I intend to do mostly audio related work here, the idea is that test instruments and other equipment don’t ‘live’ on the bench but are stored elsewhere and placed on the bench in whatever configuration meets the needs of the current project.
The bench I built is about 9 feet long and 40 inches deep. I would have preferred a little deeper but was limited by the door on the right of the bench. The bench top is supported by a frame of 2x4’s that are attached to the drawer units and to the wall. The top is comprised of three sheets of oriented strand board covered with oak and finished with several coats of Old Masters satin poly.
The work surface is an anti-static bench mat obtained from ebay seller canvu0-0. They will make custom sizes to exactly fit your bench. Electrical is provided by Wiremold outlet strips across the front of the bench and along the back edge of the top. These have outlets at 6 inch centers. All are supplied through GFCI.
The area under the bench is partially enclosed to serve as instrument storage. The doors and the CPU cart are finished in enamel color matched to the drawer units by a local home center.
On the wall are two Infinity speakers that can be used to listen to equipment being tested. Each of the four LCD monitors has two interfaces. Between them, all the common standards are natively supported – VGA, DVI, HDMI, and displayport. The monitor on the far right displays an internet connected computer that lives on a CPU cart under the bench. The monitors on the left can be connected to equipment being tested, can serve as displays for instruments that have no display (e.g. R&S UPL66), or they can mirror instrument displays for easier viewing.
The current configuration shown here is testing communication headsets used by public safety dispatchers.