Reorganising the Workbench

I have been struggling for a while with switching between projects for painting and basing and finding everything to do with the modelling side of the hobby.  Stuff is stored in various different places and I often find myself searching several drawers and boxes for certain tools or paints, etc.

My painting desk has been a bureau that I inherited from my parents which I first adopted when my painting area was in my games room and I wanted to be able to close it up and ignore customers orders when I wasn't working.

It worked well, but it has a very small work area and thus for basing I was using other tables and also couldn't store all the tools, glues, etc in one place.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and do something about this.  I have had my eye on the Hobbyzone modular workbench sets for a while and decided to take the plunge and order some to see how well they worked and what size drawers would be useful.

They have a wide range of paint racks, drawer sets, sprue holders, etc available. I don't need paint racks as my paints are already in racks which were on top of the bureau.  Now the painting area is in the hobby room rather than the games room I have been able to place them on the windowsill.

I ordered 3 different drawer sets (2,3,and 6 drawers), the sprue holder, the paper towel holder and the tool and brush holder.

They are produced using a CNC machine rather than laser cut and are built from 6mm MDF with holes for magnets which hold them securely to each other.  They are thinner 2mm mdf drawer fronts and backs, etc.

The instructions are pretty good and I watched a couple of videos first before tackling the modules.

You need to remove the CNC tabs that hold the pieces togetehr first but then it is simply a case of assembling the pieces in the suggested order using wood glue.  I used Gorilla woodglue which dries in about 30 mins and taped everything together with masking tape while it dried.

I enjoyed putting these modules together and found them quite satisfying to assemble.

The end result:

As you can see, the painting desk is now larger (5' x 2') and well organised with stuff within easy reach which I hope will remove some of the frustrations I had been feeling.

I am looking at adding 2 corner units with 2 open shelved paint racks on them to hold the glue, varnishes, etc.