The New Work Bench

I know, I know. I haven't finished my abacus project yet. However, this project will make all future projects much easier projects to project.

My new truck made it through its Home Depot initiation successfully transporting all the materials which included 2X4s, 1X2s, 4X4s, sheets of particle board, and sheets of MDF.

That's right. I'm building a new work bench. I'm tired of hunting down all my tools and not having room to work. I'm very excited about this one.

To prepare for this project I cleared everything away from the area, including the old bench. Before I can install a new bench, I want to put up peg board which will allow me to hang tools on the walls. The pegs themselves need space behind the board to fit so I used 1X2 spacers screwed into the wall studs. the peg board will then be attached to the spacers themselves.

In the project area are three existing outlets. Because new wall with the peg board will be about an inch farther out, I can't use the existing outlet boxes. They were permanantly installed to the wall studs when the garage was built. Instead, I cut a new hole above the existing one and will install a remodel box in the peg board later.

Here you can see I have the first sheet of peg board up and have installed the outlet. I used chrome plates for the outlets which I think look cool against the white peg board. You can see how the peg board splits the 1X2 spacer. This is to allow the next peg board to be attached to the same board.

Here I have all the pegboard and all three outlets installed. I turned the power back on and tested all three outlets and, of course, they worked perfectly first try. Eventually, I will have pegboard around the entire shop. The white peg board really brightens up the shop.

In preparation for building the actual bench, I spent some time with my trusty miter saw and cut the necessary pieces which included 12 lengthwise pieces, 48 cross pieces, and 12 leg posts. The next time I get some free time, I will put the frames together. I am looking forward to using my new impact drill to easily screw in the lag bolts. Stay tuned!

The Abacus

I was inspired by this next project as I was working tirelessly at my desk at the bank. As you can imagine, as a banker I work with numbers quite a bit. Part of my job is to maintain the integrity of those numbers, balancing everything to the penny.

As I finished double checking the total of a stack of checks, I rubbed my hand and looked at the sheet of numbers I had just written. It occured to me there must be a faster way to do this. If only we had some form of mechanical device that would assist us in adding and subtracting numbers. Such a device would completely change the way bankers do business.

I immediately took it upon myself to do a little research online and, what do you know, such a device already exists. It is called an abacus. I have decided to take it upon myself to construct such a device to use at work. I hope I don't make my coworkers jealous.

This first picture shows my design. The colors will be different depending on the type of wood I use but you get the idea. There have been several iterations in the design of the abacus. I chose this 1/4 configuration with 1 "heaven bead" in the upper section and four "earth beads" in the lower section.

My father-in-law had some left-over wood from building Abby's rocking boat so I will be making this primarily out of poplar. Here I have cut the blanks for the top, bottom, left and right, and the cross piece.

The next step will be to mark and drill the holes for the rods. I originally thought I would use wooden dowels but I need them only 1/8" thick. Instead, I found some 1/8" metal rods that will work perfect. They are gold colored which will match the L brackets I use on the corners later.

Here I have everything cut and temporarily clamped together just so I can see the actual size.

I used 45 degree angles on the corners so it will look nice. Eventually, I will glue the whole thing together and then use the L brackets to secure it.

I decided to try something I never have before. The abacus generally has marks on the cross piece separating the lower and upper decks to indicate which rods are the 1 unit, 1,000 unit, and 1,000,000 unit rods. I am going to use a small piece of rosewood inlayed in the cross piece as my marks. Here I have used my router table to cut the 1/4" wide, 1/8" deep slots for the rosewood. Incidentally, I will also be using two different colored beads as shown in my diagram above to help easily determine the value of the rod.

Everything will have a coat or two of finish. However, I didn't want to try to finish it when it was completely assembled to avoid getting finish on the beads or rods themselves. I will put a couple coats of finish on the individual pieces and then assemble them together.

You can see here I found a great temporary use of my rods, making the job of applying a coat of finish fairly easy.