Ikea has been trying to beef up use of their products in offices for some time now. So, am glad to see it happening. Chris and his team hacked a freestanding lab bench that looks custom built.
“I have been doing stuff like this for years at home and work and am glad that it is being showcased. I work for a product development company called Daedalus – we develop a lot of medical, lab and safety equipment for all kinds of companies. As part of our development work, we often need to perform research or functional testing on the equipment we design so we built ourselves a dedicated testing lab/room.
However, when we wanted to furnish it out with some nice looking, freestanding lab benches, we found that there weren’t any that could be had for any reasonable price. So we pulled up Ikea.com and went to work.
What we came up with was a design for a free standing lab bench that is 60″L x 30″D x 38″H, has lots of storage and is solid as a rock. It is composed mostly of Akurum cabinets – one deep base cabinet flanked by 4 shallower wall cabinets. These are bolted to each other and to a 2 x 4 base frame that we built to give it a good foundation.
The wood base is clad with some aluminum bar stock and the whole thing sits atop 4 Capita legs. We topped it off with a heavy duty laminated top from Global Industrial and even wired it with 4 GFI electrical outlets so power would always be at hand. Attest cabinet pulls and some cheap extruded label holders with some lovely in-house designed labels added the finishing touches.
We made two of them at the same time but are now thinking of making some more since we like them so much. We have had them about 2 years now and they are holding up really well. While they have been real work horses, they have also added a polished look to what is an otherwise pretty industrial space.
We are also getting started on hacking together all new desks for the whole office. We are working on a design that would have a long cantilevered work surface hanging off both sides of a 5×5 Expedit book case. If they work out well, we’ll send some pics your way.”
Jules is the author of IKEAHackers.net: 25 Biggest and Best Projects".
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