The £20 Workbench Challenge, Part One: Thinking Big

by | Jan 15, 2013

Hello my chaotic followers.

Today, I've set out on a challenge, to come up with an awesome 40k workbench, for all my WIP projects, paints, and such. This has been decided for two reasons:

1) It's all over the house and I would like a nice little place for it

2)It's taking over the house



My budget would just be short of buying you this (the Paintstation+ is £40!)


I've also made it a little more difficult: By having a budget of just £20. Not much it seems, but considering a GW paint-station costs  a tiny bit more than this, it will most certainly be an interesting challenge. It will be fun seeing what kind of creation I'll come up with. As a brief, I have come up with the following:
  • It needs to be within the set budget of £20
  • It needs a dedicated space for paints and tools, current work-in-progress models, and storage areas.
  • It needs to be easy to move around
With that in mind, I set to work finding suitable materials, and I came across this in a charity shop, a cool little side-table. Charity may not be the most obvious place to look, but you can find some interesting things. And it was cheap, and I mean really cheap. This Ikea special cost me a while £3 sterling. A bargain in any circumstance.


It meets the criteria: It has plenty of usable space (Land Raider shown above for scale), of which I can use to meet the second criteria, and whilst it is on the heavy side, it ison wheels. Well, was: two broke off during transit. Which means I need to buy two more, or be forced to replace them all. but still, at £3 I'm well within budget.

Note the missing wheels....
The next stage is to come up with a plan for this beast, and buy those new wheels, as well as any cheap materials I can find to build the paint/tool storage areas.

Potential shelving space?


Current spend

Budget: £20

Small bedside table: £3

Remaining budget: £17


(paintstation image property of Games Workshop)