Salvage Work

When we first purchased our house, the unfinished basement had a small, rickety workbench that wobbled like gelatin anytime you tried to saw a piece of wood on it.  It didn't take me long to take it apart and build something a bit sturdier out of some of the pieces from it and some other scrap plywood that had been repurposed from another part of the house that we had remodeled.  It wasn't great by any means but it did the job decently enough that I used it for several years through the various house projects I've worked on.  With the recent basement overhaul, replacing the workbench again was on the list of things to do but this time, I wanted it to be more stable, look nicer, and provide more storage than the past practice of just tossing stuff underneath it.  I also aimed to make it completely out of scrap or salvaged lumber.  After moving the old workbench all over the basement as I redid walls and added cupboards and shelves, I also wanted to make this one more mobile.  

Bowling, anyone?

For the work surface, I wanted something more solid than the 1" plywood that made up the current bench top.  I began collecting scrap 2"x 4" pieces from whatever I had leftover, my neighbors, and what I could pull from pallets.  Using my table saw, I shaved all the rounded edges off and cut the boards down to about 3"in width.  Once I had enough to assemble a bench top about 6' wide by 3' deep, I lined them all up on a plastic covered piece of particle board and connected them all up using wood glue and deck screws, leaving gaps for the post tops about two layers in and about 6" from the edges.  

For the corner posts, I had some decently thick pieces leftover from a large radiator crate that the shop across the street had given to me years before.  I notched the tops of the posts to fit the gaps I left in the bench top and then attached the posts with 2" x 4"s at top and bottom which gave it some better rigidity and also help support the bench top a little more.  At the bottom, I used 3/4" OSB that had been part of the same crate as the posts for the bottom of a three compartment storage shelf and attached some heavy duty locking wheels to the ends of the posts.

It's still a mess under there but now it's a nicer mess.

Finally, I wanted to add some extra storage by adding drawers just under the bench.  The drawer faces and surround were made completely out of pine scraps from my cupboard and shelf project.  The sides, backs, and runners for the drawers were made completely out of pallet boards, some of them glue laminated together.  The drawer bottoms were made from 1/4" birch plywood scraps from the cupboard doors.  I didn't have a lot of solid pieces to make the drawer fronts so I made them each unique using different sets of pine scrap and so, while they are all of the same wood, each one has a very unique texture to it.  The runners were attached at the back of the work bench to leftover scrap plywood from my old bench.  It was some of the nasty painted stuff but very solid so it was perfect for part of the bench you'll rarely ever see.

In the end, 100% of the wood products were from scrap or salvaged from broken pallets.  Alas, the hardware was all new with the exception of the drawer pulls themselves.  For the first, I was able to use a carved bear's head I made a few years back that hadn't yet found it's purpose in life.  The second was from a combination of a replacement water tap handle that had been floating around for years that fit perfectly into a threaded bolt insert that came off of some old snowboard binding hardware.  All in all, I'm very happy with the new work-bench, especially now that it's done.  On to the next project!