Assembly Table
A bigger, more functional assembly table for the workshop.
Background
I’ve always wanted a monster-sized assembly table. They are great for spreading out your project and doing all kinds of things, from cuts to glue-ups to finishing.
While I loved my previous assembly table, it was kinda small, only about 2.5 feet by 3.5 feet. Projects just wouldn’t fit on it, and it was always a worry that something, either a workpiece or my favorite tool, was going to fall off the end. There is nothing like being able to spread yourself out, visualize your work, and do it with confidence.
Design
It was a long project and a detailed one. It took about two months to get through the design process and another month for the actual construction.
The Frame
After watching countless YouTube videos on large assembly tables, I did the basic design.
Since this was a pretty big undertaking, and my aluminum skills are near zero, I decided to work with a company called Vention for the next stages of the design work. They are based in Montreal and specialize in “Industrial Automation”, but they will take on orders and projects of any size. They also have offices and distribution capabilities in the US and Europe.
They are totally awesome and fantastic. They did all the detailed design work in their CAD tooling, with lots of back and forth until we got all the bits right. Then they made all the parts and shipped them to me on a couple of large pallets. I cannot recommend them any more highly, so if you are in the market for anything of the aluminum extrusion variety, you need to give them a try.
Weekend Warrior
The basic frame took a couple of weekends to assemble.
Having not done this kind of thing before, I went through a fair number of assembly, oops, disassembly, and reassembly cycles. One has to make sure everything is square in all three dimensions; otherwise, you are setting yourself up for trouble down the road. There was plenty of that.
The Shelves and the Top
Pull-Outs
The pull-out shelves were another project unto themselves. There is a lot of extrusion holding them together, so they are super strong. But there are 19 of them, eight on each side and three in the front, so assembly time on those was at least a couple of evenings.
The Top
The MDF top was yet another whole project. The 4x8 sheet of MDF was used to create an MFT (Multi-Function Table) table, in the style of Festool MFT/3, with 20mm diameter holes spaced 96mm apart. There are 288 of these holes. Let me say that again, there are 288 of them! I know this because I drilled each and every one of them. A smarter person would have gotten them drilled on someone’s CNC machine, but I don’t know anyone that has one of those, and I haven’t added it to my shop yet. Yet.
Anyway, there is a special jig you can get from Lee Valley called the Mk.II Parf Guide Drilling System which lets you drill the holes with perfect spacing and squareness. It is very cool.
Materials
- Aluminum - Lots and lots of it from Vention in Montreal
- MDF for the top from the big box store