What better place to post pictures of progress in my new shed! I started welding up some solid workbenches. I'll make two of these, and maybe one more but slightly shorter and possibly on wheels. I might use it as a welding table yet. For these I reckon some Form-ply would work well.
Looking good Chris! Dunno what you are intending to do on those, but I'd probably also add some bracing/legs in to the middle so you can belt the snot out of things without getting too much bouncing around. My father used 6x2(?) turps (I think) on top of the bench in the old place. He worked at the mill at the time, so we got it cheap. Trouble is they were slightly green prior to fitment so we ended up with gaps up to 1/4" - wonderful for losing carburettor parts! You can get heavy ply for the base, and I'd probably put a thinner sacrificial layer on top. Once it gets chopped up, unscrew and resurface. I'm am rather fussy like that though.
Yeah I thought about adding some extra legs in the middle, but I probably won't use these as the 'bashing-shit' benches. That's the role of the third one, which will probably double as a welding bench. I bought a couple of sheets of Formply for the top, and a similar, but slightly cheaper kind of sealed ply for the lower shelf. Smooth, hard, and somewhat water resistant.
Structafloor (BLUEtongue) sheeting is great for workbench tops/shelves. Water-resistant, no need to seal cut edges, comes in 3.6 x 0.9 x 25mm and costs about $70/sheet.
Finished them both - still yet to work out the best arrangement but they will work for now. Oh - I mowed that green stuff in front of the shed too. I think the septic does a pretty good job of keeping it green.
I have half the panels up now. The racking was easy enough to install, but there's a bit of height to this shed - have to be careful when lumping panels up.
I've finally got all the solar installed so it's happily saving me a bit of money each day. This is a second hand kit I bought off Gumtree for $1100 (12 panels and the inverter, plus most of the racking gear). After one year of service at the last place we were renting it's paid for itself, so it's free power from now on. Another job I had was to build a battery pack for the local uni student FSAE team. They have these open wheeled cars the students work on all year and race them in a gymkhana sort of competition. The motor they are using is like Voltron's little brother, and they need a battery pack for dyno testing and tuning on the bench. However, being a student team they also suggested I build it so they can drop it into the car if they needed to. So it's ready to power the car if they want (albeit for a short distance - not a big deal as most of the gymkhana stuff is all pretty short duration). So I finished this 355 volt, 10 amp-hour battery complete with isolation contactors, pre-charge relay and resistor, and a battery management system. I can't charge enough for this work...