This week I decided that the back ache I was getting from bending over my current 40 cm (15 inch) high workbench was too much of a nuisance. It was so low that I was already doing some work on a small and lightweight plastic picnic table instead. Jobs like soldering wires on stuff, where you need to be close enough to see what you are doing without kneeling. The summer being firmly over, the picnic table and chairs that normally reside in the back of the car moved into the garage, and the combination of picnic chair and table has proved comfortable, relaxing even. A cup of coffee from a flask, something to nibble on, quite the home from home.

My present workbench had been knocked together from unwanted furniture elements found in the basement passageways in our block. It has done good service, but the other day I found the front from a large bathroom cabinet leaning against our dumpster. I assume it was from a bathroom, deduced solely on the basis of a sink and shower cabin base abandoned close by, but I could see it was the perfect height for my workbench. Conveniently, I also had a couple of pieces left over from the pallet (or 'palette' as the translators I work with insist on spelling it) and the single but smaller door left over from my bicycle tool and parts 'stockroom' project. Much of the material I can get hold of dates from the PRL era, from former lounge and and kitchen cabinets that someone probably had to queue outside the shop all day to get. The queues became so endemic that it was common practice to make a queue list so that you did not actually have to stay there all the time. Having a retired member of the family around was handy: they could get down to the required shop at dawn and wait around most of the day chatting with their friends, a tactic especially useful for meat shops with their irregular deliveries.



The original version of my workbench, complete with unique and surprisingly useful brackets that came with the board.

With most of the major projects on the bikes complete, I was feeling at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I have come to enjoy my time in the garage, away from my apartment and the ever-present work computer there. The world is run by managers who are promoted by other managers because they talk well in a meeting, while problem solving before the problems arise takes a different kind of thinking. How much of our day is spent running to meet manager targets, always with the excuse that such and such cannot be done as there is no time or money. If we were to spend more time thinking about how to do something than actually doing it, then we could predict change better, that at the moment no one wants to hear and yet comes anyway, in a flurry of chaos and panic. The pleasure of minimising one's work space and tools is that everything becomes a fresh challenge that leads to surprising opportunities, largely free of chaos.

I sliced through the current legs of the bench, also known as former drawer carcasses. They were up to the task for the original workbench configuration, but now they were far too thin for the larger forces. Instead I have used them as convenient brackets to which the new wood can be mounted, minimising the need for tedious measuring and holding things in position. Growth, like the wood I am using. It goes without saying that my minimalist collection of fasteners was inadequate to the task, which meant holding everything together temporarily with whatever I could find lying around while I drew up a shopping list.

So there we have it, a bathroom cabinet front as the new front support for the workbench, two pallet timbers as the rear legs, and a sawn up PRL-era cabinet door as two stiffeners. The latter are just the right height to support a shelf under the bench top, and it should not be too hard to find the material.

Indeed I soon had a whole load of former cabinetry, mostly for a home office project, but certainly there should be enough left over for continued workbench development. The home office project was far simpler than I had imagined, now that I have a decent bench and no more kneeling on the garage floor like back in the spring. With a shelf I now have somewhere to put my two power tools and the radio that wifie nearly threw out, without them getting in the way while I do other tasks. You might be thinking that things are getting luxurious, but then another dumpster yielded a black vinyl office chair with only minor splits to the seams of the seat cushion. Now I can sit comfortably to drink my coffee, with my feet up on a workbench clear of tools, listening to the radio - or tape cassettes if I could find any.



Raising of the workbench. There were no stiffeners or shelf fitted yet, and more fasteners were required, but it was ready for an initial test here.

Still to do is to replace the pallet parts and add some features to make working on the bikes easier.