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In the year 2000, Ben Heckendorn built his first mod.
“Ben: We can rebuild it smaller, better, portable.”
Since then he has continued his work helping those in need with creating new projects. If you’ve got an idea you’d like to see built, why not send it to The Ben Heck Show.
“Ben: Hello and welcome back to The Ben Heck Show, in this episode I am late to work so it is going to be up to my assistant Allison to get the files ready to route the new portable workbench we are going to be making.”
“Allison: Uh, where is Ben? Where are you, we have to get this project done.”
“Ben: Allison its Ben sorry I’m late.”
“Allison: What’s the code?”
“Ben: 6 – 9 – 4 – 3 – 6.”
“Allison: All I see is a fish, what do I do?”
“Ben: Click on the icon for AI that is Adobe Illustrator.”
“Allison: There is an error message, what do I do?”
“Ben: Do whatever it wants.”
“Allison: It’s open, what’s the file name?”
“Ben: It’s under portabench, it should be the highest revision number. Do you see it?”
“Allison: I see it.”
“Ben: Go to the right and hit the layers button, how many eyeballs do you see are any missing?”
“Allison: There are only four.”
“Ben: That is not enough eyeballs, engage all eyeballs.”
“Allison: All eyeballs engaged.”
“Ben: Okay, now all layers are visible. Zoom in on the main area of the drawing.”
“Allison: Zoom.”
“Ben: At the bottom you should see a top view of the case, do you see it?”
“Allison: I see it.”
“Ben: Okay, you need to do a marquee selection of the main area, the main work area. Okay hit Control C to copy it, have you copied it – okay good. Now, go to the lower hand corner of the screen and Paste it, Control B now.”
“Allison: It’s done, but Ben we don’t have much time.”
“Ben: Never doubt the odds, delete the top part of the hinges, delete the extra layers, delete everything we don’t need to route, delete it – select the things on the left.”
“Allison: Could you be less obvious?”
“Ben: No I can’t be any less obvious than that. Select them and move them to the left.”
“Allison: How far?”
“Ben: Okay, you have to move it far enough so the drill-bit has space between the two objects. Now do the same thing for the objects on the right. Okay that part is ready to be routed. Go back to the main layout. Use the hand-tool to drag the screen around and Z to zoom in, we need to take apart the main structure of the unit. Zoom in on the top of the unit. Go to the layers tab and deselect all the eyeballs I took for the top.”
“Allison: All other eyeballs are turned off Ben.”
“Ben: Select the items, copy and move to the bottom corner.”
“Allison: I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Ben: You have got to try.”
“Allison: I did it, I did it. Why are we pulling apart the design?
“Ben: We have to separate the design parts so we can route it. It routes in two dimensions, the parts have to be in two dimensions. Okay you see the pieces on the screen glued together?”
“Allison: Yes.”
“Ben: How much wood do we have?”
“Allison: What a coincidence I measured this morning, we have 32 x 48 and a 38 x 48 piece.”
“Ben: Okay draw a box that size around the objects, does it fit? Does it fit?”
“Allison: It fits.”
“Ben: Breathe Allison, you did it. We are ready to route, I will be there in one second. Oh gosh, sorry I’m late.”
“Allison: The files are ready for routing, but how do you design this? Do we have time for a flashback?”
“Ben: I think so.”
“Ben: The first porta-bench was pretty cool but it had some design problems, for one thing the locking mechanism was overly complex. It looked like an anti-canter mechanism or something. Another thing that was too complex about the old design is how the arms opened up. The old design had a sliding mechanism that went over a bolt. You had to lift it up then open it. It would be a lot easier to use a hinge. I brought the old design into a new file and revised it from there. I had to use several views, most importantly a top down view which you may remember Allison from our phone call, and a front view so we can see how it goes together.
The absolute most important aspect of this build is hinge placement and where the access of the hinge is. You have to accurately reproduce the hinge into the computer in order for it to work properly when the workbench is assembled. It must be completely accurate *within like 1000th of an inch. Here is the end view of the hinge, there is a center point on it, I had to make sure it would rotate on that center point so everything would line up correctly.
I had to make sure there was the right amount of space between the work surface and the main case, so when the work surface folds up into the case it’s flush with the edges. Also I wanted better tool placement so I scanned some tools into the computer and got the measurements from the image. I then used this to create a better bracket system so the tools can be placed nicely inside the case. Those are the main challenges that I face when I redesigned the portable workbench. It was a long hard journey that took approximately three hours. But somehow, I survived.
“Allison: That was very edifying.”
“Ben: Oh thanks, next we should get the files ready to be outlet to the router. Now we have this program that is called ‘Part-Works’ and it is also called V-Carve. Part-Works is what they call it when you get it with a shop box. We will open up the existing file that we just saved which is an AI file. Now here it wants to know how thick the material is. Here is a scrap piece from there, you go to Menard’s you ask for ½ inch plywood it is never exactly what it is supposed to be. This one is more like .47 inches so we are going to put that as the thickness. You see here the Z-0, you see that at the top of the material not at the bottom. It is extra important to have your thickness right because the machine will judge the thickness of the material based off the top here, so if you have the material too thick, the bit will actually cut into the table.
The thing we want to do next is start to draw our drill pass. We want to start with our drill holes, our screw holes – there are quite a few 1/8 inch screw holes in this so we will select all these and those will be the first things that we route. Next we are going to set up some V-groove. We want t have little groves on our workbench so we can set pencils and screws into it. On our screen we have these spaces mapped out but there is a vector here which indicates where the line’s going to go. Basically it is just a line, so it is like find that line and hit it with a V-bit. Now here we have an area where we are going to catch some of the solder gunk’s – so we are actually going to make a little tray that inserts so we need to do a clean out on this.
There are two different depths, there is the depth of the tray itself and then the finger holders. The final thing to do is to cut out the perimeters of all these pieces. So we are going to take the perimeters of these objects, and same thing cut depths at .47 we are going to go outside this time but we are going to add taps. Now since there is no knacking system on this table, we will leave little tabs like this on the piece so they will stay in place and you can just snap these out when we are done. There you have it, you can see all the pieces and how they are going to be cut out.”
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“Ben: So Jones why don’t you tell us what you did today.”
“Jones: Well we got these amazing rubbers to put on the flippers finally so they look pretty cool and now we replaced crappy leaf switches with real micro switches and now the buttons actually work like you would expect them to.”
“Ben: Now we can show you what this rapid system will actually do. So we lift up this grate here and then we put pieces in to create great shots. So now we are going to put in more of the basic geometry – the standard pinball area you see here, that on most machines is called an Italian layout, so things like the sling targets and these objects will normally change so we can build that into our board later – it is all this, this is what is variable. Alright, we have come up with some shots and I think this one is pretty good. If you shoot the left here, it turns kind of a randomization – and I am looking for my big loop that would be right here.
See how it keeps turning, the flippers are definitely orders of magnitude. They are more powerful than the Paxton ones. Okay so we have this to simulate a ramp. I know it doesn’t really look like a ramp but the idea is if you can hit the ball into here that means it will go up the ramp. If you were drawing this on the computer, you would probably never think this angle would work, but even like a weak ball shot will clear the ramp. Okay so we are thinking of having this be light-cave over here. Jones is attempting to see how easy it is to hit that. Yeah, that probably would have gone in. We have the rapid pinball prototyping, it is working pretty good now and we can test all our shots. The nice thing about this system is you can pull all the geometry off the board like that and as you can see we haven’t drilled any holes at all in this board. So once we figure out the geometry for one game, the base geometry for one game – we can use this board to do another game. We will see you next time on pinball wars.”
“Ben: Here are all the pieces to make the portable workbench, and now it is again be man of wood unlike tin straw like the original one. So yeah, I am just going to have a dry run at putting this together before I stain the pieces. This is always my favorite part of a project, because it is like Lincoln logs meets Jenga meets building a house of cards meets machinery. What more would you want? I can’t think of anything more, maybe spaghetti. In this area we will put some power supply so we can have some real voltages, very useful – that is where the button will go to activate it. So that is the base. Then we have these rear arm pieces and these rotate like this when we are done, but for now we are going to assemble it in its closed position.
There is an inner wall here and there is a hole in it because here we are going to have a power strip for the tools, it will go down here into this hole and here is where we will have the extension cord which will go out the back. So that is the side of it. Then we have this part here, which fits. Now you can see why taking the design apart in the right order was important. You have to make sure all the stuff fits. Here is the top, alright and then the sidewall this won’t actually go right into place, this is actually going to be right about here. Then we have another back wall piece which fits here, and we have this thing – it is a little different because we are going to have a Velcro stop here which we will see later on. Okay then we have another piece here, and as you can see there are holes drilled so these pieces can attach into the sides like that.
This is kind of fun because it is hard to make this stand up without it falling down like a deck of cards. But it is an interesting challenge. The handle is going to go right here, see how the sides come apart, because what actually holds the work surface in place are the two side pieces. They fold in like this and see how they are higher than this. So when you put it all together, hopefully this won’t fall down – when you put it all together, those pieces are held in by this. See how that works, and that is what keeps this from opening up when it is all put together.”
“Ben: Now it is time to stain this puppy and make it look nice and put it together for real.”
It is very important that we install the hinges to match our computer drawings, otherwise things won’t fold together properly. To avoid splitting the wood I first drill a pilot hole. I then countersink it to fit the head of a screw flush against the wood. Finally the screws themselves go in. The machine drilled holes along with keeping the edges of the wood flush allowed me to assemble most of this without measurements. Spending time getting the computer drawings right will save me time here. I guess I should have countersunk these before I stained it. Oh well, hind sight is 20/20. Finally I assemble the arm chambers and the Portable Workbench Mark II is ready to go.
“Ben: Alright it is all ready together, so let me give you a demonstration of the features. You undo these latches, and this opens up here – remember this from the computer how we talked about, see how that misses just barely misses. Once those are open it allows this to come down, then we can open it up. Over here I have added a hinge so this comes out reveals our screwdrivers, this comes down and reveals a bunch of parts and a little multi-meter we have in here.
Then we have some drill bits, hot glue gun and a bunch of pliers. So yeah, it’s a lot neater and cleaner than the old one. In here we have a PC power supply with a bunch of leads so you get a bunch of rail powers you can use 3.5 – 5 volts and we can also hold some extra wires, solder and then what we have here is a power cord it goes into the PC power supply but also the power goes over here to the right to the power strip and we made a little custom thing here on the wall to stick, you see how the things slot into it so we can hold our soldering iron and there is room here for a drill and Dremel as well. Then we have, remember the finger holders – finger holders means you can reach in and pull out this cartridge to dump all the solder crap and you can stick it back in. Then we close it back up the same way but in reverse. So now I am ready to go make the world a better place.”
“Ben: I’ll fix you. Don’t thank me, thank the portable workbench.”
“Ben: If you enjoyed this project you can find plans to make your own portable workbench in the March issue of Popular Mechanics Magazine. You can also find the plans on element14.com /tbhs. In our next episode we are making a retro styled X-Box 360 laptop. It came from the 70s as part of a promotion for some upcoming Atari games. We will see you then.”
The Ben Heck Show is made possible by our sponsors at element 14, for more information on all my projects and for a list of all the parts I used today – visit element14.com. We will see you next time.