{"id":1269,"date":"2014-01-12T10:02:45","date_gmt":"2014-01-12T18:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1269"},"modified":"2014-01-12T10:29:34","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T18:29:34","slug":"the-bench-and-workspace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/?p=1269","title":{"rendered":"The Bench and Workspace"},"content":{"rendered":"

I live in an apartment so I don’t have a garage or basement to turn into a workspace. I do have a spare bedroom which I mostly use as a home office but which had room for a small work bench, so I decided to make a corner of that room my workspace.<\/p>\n

First, one needs a bench. If you’re going to do anything other than the most basic jewelry making, you’re going to need to solder and anneal things. That involves using a torch, molten solder, getting pieces of metal red-hot, cutting\/sanding\/filing, and other messy tasks. You don’t want to do things like that on any item of fine furniture you don’t want to ruin with burn marks and dents.<\/p>\n

I chose Harbor Freight Item No. 60723<\/a> as my bench. First, it’s small for a work bench, demanding only 4 linear feet of space. That’s important; most benches take up 6 or 8 feet. Space is at a premium for me. Second, it has a pegboard back. That lets me have a pegboard without drilling holes in my landlord’s walls and getting zinged for damage when I move out. The latter point was a huge plus for me since a pegboard was a must for me and I was trying to design a way to have a one without drilling holes in the walls. When I ran across this bench, I knew instantly my quest for both bench and pegboard had been resolved.<\/p>\n

The downside is it’s not a top-quality item. That’s OK for me, because I’m not in my long-term home yet. I don’t want to spend lots of money on anything which might end up being suboptimal in whatever longer-term home I move into in the coming year or two. The bench is sturdy enough.<\/p>\n

Next comes the floor. Or rather, the carpet. I will<\/em> be producing metal filings and occasionally dropping globs of molten solder or red-hot metal items onto the floor (the latter two not deliberately, of course, but “Oops!” happens). A single such “Oops!” and there goes a chunk of cash when I get zinged for having destroyed the carpet in the spare room at move-out time.<\/p>\n

My solution was to purchase a standard 4 by 8 foot sheet of plywood and have it cut 2 feet from the end. The big piece went on the floor under and extending 4 feet in front from the bench. The small piece went on top of the bench to provide a surface to protect the one the bench came with.<\/p>\n

I’ll add a photo soon showing the completed set-up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I live in an apartment so I don’t have a garage or basement to turn into a workspace. I do have a spare bedroom which I mostly use as a home office but which had room for a small work bench, so I decided to make a corner of that room my workspace. First, one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metalworking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}