Portable Workshop Project

Hello!

Sorry that it's been a monumental amount of time since the last update - it's been Christmas and in the little spare time I've had I've been frantically building projects or doing necessary things.

I built a portable workshop!

I's not great. It's not evidence of my best woodworking skills. It was designed as a quick-for-what-it-is and easy portable workshop build to allow me to make parts whilst I was away for Christmas. Basically, I was planning on receiving the final parts for Christmas, and I wanted to play with them before I got home :)

Firstly, I built 3 frames.

One was large, the other two were small (exactly half the size), so that they'd fold together to become flat. I didn't do any proper wood joints - I just slapped the two bits on top of each other and carried right on.


Next, I attached white plasticky hardboard to the dips in the middle. This would form the work surface. I cut the board slightly wrong on one of the pieces, so there was a 5mm gap at the edge. I could tell that this was just going to be a pain in the back side, so I cut a piece of acrylic on the scroll saw and screwed it down. This would also form a handy straight edge (as I used the factory-cut edge on one side so it was arrow-straight).

The built-in Acrylic Straight-edge

Shiny!

The strange paint

I then found some unopened but pretty old 'Aluminium Paint' which looked cool, so I gave it ago. By this point, it was about 11 PM and the project had to be done in 36 hours before I left, so I had to be quick. I didn't bother masking the hardboard (in hindsight, I should have just painted it before adding the hardboard), so it now has silver splodges on it. This is annoying - silver paint won't come off, no matter how many solvents are desperately applied. Scouring just removes the plastic, so I just left it.

I decided that I needed some tool storage, but since all tools will live in my 'shop permanently, and I have different needs each time the portable workshop is used, I decided to just install a redundant tool box. This was what I got given my first ever tools in (A hammer and a tape measure if I remember rightly, along with an ancient hand-me-down hand drill), so it was nice to put it into use. This was screwed onto the frame. The toolbox has a little lift out tray for screws and things, but as it would be jiggled about I didn't want them all muddled up so I scroll sawed a small piece of the white board to secure them. I also produced some acrylic-topped MDF spacers so that it is forced into position.

Toolbox in situ

 I also then fitted an extension lead (which I accidentally drilled through the cable of and took me ages to strip it and re-insulate it), so that I could get some power for my tools. At this point, time was running seriously low. I didn't have time to build a permanent flip-out storage box, so I just used an old red stacker box. Sometime soon, I'll build a nice flip-out tray at the back (Like the one in The Ben Heck Show's portable workbench. I might also salvage an old PC Power pack if I can find one to use as a PSU, and maybe install some component storage or something.


This project is not really finished yet - it was held together with bungees instead of by using a lock like I planned it to. However, it served me well over the Christmas period.


Although I often really want a 3D Printer/CNC/Laser cutter, this project was undoubtedly better hand-made. I'd have had to spend hours drawing concepts and parts, which would never have fitted anyway, and it's much easier to adjust it now and upgrade it in the future. There are some applications where CAD-CAM is great (for example if you're building an enclosure for specifically sized parts like I am with the Laptop project), but this really isn't one of them.