Episode: 3441
Title: HPR3441: Murphy Work Bench
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3441/hpr3441.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:30:17

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3441 for Monday 11th of October 2021.
Tid's show is entitled Murphy Work Bench.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 14 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is Operator talks about hitting his head on his work bench.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
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Hello everyone and welcome to the episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
It's going to be pretty short.
I'm going to be talking about a Murphy Work Bench.
If you have a mental amount of space and you want to have a nice little work bench,
this might be the deal for you.
I set out on this because I had some electronics stuff I was working on and I had a big tray,
one of those cheap plastic trays with a bunch of plastic connectors and whatever.
And I had a curiously set on the edge of the table and that was my dining room table,
which is my work bench at the time.
My seven-year-old has knocked over stuff or messed up stuff or touched things before
Kathy's touched stuff or moved stuff around down there.
It's kind of a common area.
Slash, do whatever on the dining room table table.
And after hanging knocked over and we spent like 15 minutes cleaning up the mess,
I said, you know what, I need to get my stuff into my own area that nobody's allowed into,
or at least the seven-year-old's not allowed into.
And I don't have to worry about him knocking anything over.
And also, you know, because I'm not, you know, for two feet tall,
I don't have to hunch over stuff.
So I want like a work bench that's really high, almost eye level, strangely enough.
And I want to be able to work on and solder and look at stuff and whatever.
So I sought out to try to think of ways that I could approach that.
And first, oh, I'll go to the hardware store and buy one of those big, huge, you know,
work benches that's, you know, $800 or $300 or whatever for a work bench.
And you know, I have some drawers ended or whatever and replaced the little tiny work bench I have in the garage.
And I said, well, eight, it's hot in Georgia.
And there's like two months out of the year.
I can actually work in the garage without feeling miserable.
I take an old blower, a HVAC blower and use that as a fan.
But I just didn't want to mess with that area.
There's stuff, there's paint cans inside of this old cabinet that we were using.
And I'm using as a work bench for outside.
I said, you know what?
I want something inside that's for soldering.
And I can set up all my stuff and.
Or sorry, stand and do some soldering and some technical stuff.
And then kind of be able to shut the door or be able to leave everything where it is.
And I have to worry about anybody knocking it over or whatever.
So I started thinking about, you know, different ways to do that.
And I was like, oh, what about like a Murphy bed.
But just with a bench on it.
So I got to think in and looking around.
And I'll put them in the show notes.
This is a 24 inch folding shelf bracket,
a collectible bracket for shelves.
Well, it's about a hinge space DIY bracket for table bench.
Max load 500 pounds.
So the picture, it shows like a very small 24 inch, maybe 25 inch, 26 inch piece of wood.
My piece of wood is, I don't know, two feet, three feet long.
Looks like two and a half feet, three feet long.
And I have two, of course, two hinges.
It comes in, I think, appear to.
Or maybe you have to buy each one.
I can't even remember.
I think it comes in a pair.
Anyways, I found other ones that seem kind of goofy or whatever looking and not super sturdy.
But I saw these and they looked more sturdy.
They looked less clinky or clunky.
And I stuck with these.
And then really all you need is a piece of wood, right?
So seeing this out, woods like a million dollars or something.
I went to Lowe's and got some MVF.
This is what I've been using from my table here.
I have a, I might have done a webcast on it.
But it's a dual engine or dual motor standing desk.
And I just bought the motor and the table part.
But I didn't buy the top part, the table part.
I just bought the motors and the legs or whatever.
The kit.
Hey, buy your old wood.
Well, excuse me, I use MDF for that.
For that purpose, and I've used MDF before to extend other desks and stuff like that.
So I'm pretty happy with MDF.
You know, it does not like water very much.
So you got to be careful with water.
But really, I've had the same piece of MDF on my desk for five years or 10 years.
It starts to get rough a little bit.
But after that, it doesn't really matter.
Just from the oils on your hands and stuff, it's not that big of a deal.
And I like the sturdiness of it.
I like the thickness of it.
It's not, it's not, it feels good or okay.
So anyways, I use MDF for that too.
And I want to say it's like three feet by four feet.
I don't even know.
Like two and a half feet by three feet or something.
I wanted more a wider table, but I didn't want to stress the
the emery tree table joints or whatever.
So I figured I need a big enough space to put a couple of things, tools or whatever
I'm working on.
And then the soldering iron and whatever else.
So I figured that's about as big as I can get without, you know, questioning the
the strength of the quote-unquote 500-pound hinges.
It might have 100 pounds on it in a given time, but that's about it's ever.
It's going to have.
So put it on there, drilled it in.
Of course, MDF smells, so you've got to give yourself some space, time, whatever
to let it irrigate after you've cut it.
Now, Lowe's home depot will cut MDF for you.
More or less, the first time I went to home depot, they were about to close.
And they puffed and puffed and made some BS excuse that they couldn't do it.
So I went to Lowe's and they do it without question.
So no problem there.
And Sprite at home, set it up.
Had my kids help me set it up and so far so good.
And I've been using it for about a month.
I've used it four or five times now for various projects.
Doing the lights, eventually I'll do a Christmas tree lights episode, but that's a different story.
But what I'll say is the first time it's right behind my chair.
Like, I think I could lean my head back and hit the corner of the table.
Not necessarily.
I could, if I was, if I threw my chair back and hit through my head back,
I could probably hit my chair.
But I know the thing's over there so I won't do that.
But it's close.
It's, I can stand up and it will be right in front of me.
So if I stand up and get out of my chair, it's half a half an inch or half a foot,
six inches away from me basically when I stand up from out of my chair.
So I would say had I tied a choice, I would have moved it to the other side of the wall
where it wouldn't be in the line of fire.
So you want to put it out of the common area of the room.
So put it off to the corner or back in the corner where there's no foot traffic
or where you're not going to be moving a lot.
I put it basically in the middle of the doorway in my chair,
which is the worst possible place I could have put it, but it's the most convenient.
And I can also kind of have the screen up for my workstation and be looking at videos or something.
I thought, you know, I want to be close to the computer.
So if I want to watch a video or something on how to do something or whatever, I can have the
the the relativeness to the computer.
And I also thought it was just kind of an open area.
It looked open and there was plenty of space there.
And hindsight, I should have moved it somewhere off to the side or put it on the corner
or put it somewhere out of high traffic area kind of near the door,
near the back of the door or something.
I don't know, bad placement.
So consider placement.
I had to round the edges after I ran into it twice.
And I still continue to kind of run into it.
It's not nearly as bad obvious.
But if you know the phone rings or the doorbell rings and you get up and you dart,
you've got about half a second to decide whether or not you're going to run into the table or not.
So if you're in a big hurry, I'll run straight into it.
So just bad placement.
I rounded the edges that helped me for a while.
I've yet to run into it since I rounded the edges, obviously.
But here I was doing something on the ground.
Here my desk and I was looking for something or filtering through something or
I don't know what it was.
But I lifted my head up and hit one of the releases for the table.
And I don't know how the other one popped, which is not super promising.
But somehow I had hit my head so hard that both of the latches fell.
And it hurt my head.
And of course when the latches fell or whatever, it folded the table down and all the
shit on the table fell.
Luckily there was nothing I was working on.
I just had some stuff here on the floor that's ancillary.
But it hit so hard.
A picture fell off the wall that I hadn't secured properly that I had custom made.
And of course it fell into a bucket, which I used for my HVAC,
water and a little window, not window air conditioning unit, but air conditioning unit
and that fell into the thing and ruined the picture.
And of course the four leaf clover that I collected with it.
But that was during COVID.
I got like eight four leaf clover and put them in a frame and with my wife or whatever.
So placement and rounding those edges.
I'll say that loudness or the kind of prose is easy to clean up.
So all you do is you fold the table down and let all the dirt and whatever fall on the ground.
And if you want to just wipe it off with like a, wipe it off with like a paper towel or something,
you can get all the little bits of stuff that's stuck on there.
And then you just vacuum up the carpet and you're good to go.
The other one is that you know the height is great for tall people.
So basically when I stand up, it's kind of in my armpit right now.
The corner of the table is in my armpit.
I'm six feet tall.
So when I'm working on stuff, I don't even have to hardly move my head.
I tilt it slightly forward a little bit.
But I'm not hunched over the desk trying to work on something.
So the height is necessary.
I would even say I would like it even higher, but you know,
I don't want it so high that I can't actually work on stuff and reach crap.
So having it, you know, no higher than your arm length,
I feel like it's good enough.
So like the, where your arm height starts, that should be the highest.
Because you don't want to be like a three-year-old and like put your hands up above the table.
So you want the height to be no higher than your actual armpit kind of deal.
So I gave myself an extra six inches for the arm from the arm.
So that way I'm only looking at a six-inch pitch from doing soldering.
The other pro, I'll say, is a safe space, obviously.
Again, I went over the cons.
You know, I hit ran into it twice before I ran out of the edges, hit my head on it.
The other con is it's loud.
So, I mean, that's, that's it, normal.
That's mean normally pushing it.
So if I want to do it as quiet as I can,
that's about as quiet as it gets.
So like if you're wanting to do this at night,
you're going to have to set up buffers where all the connection points are,
so that it's not so damn loud.
So the loudness, you know, if you're trying to be sneaky or quiet or you're trying to work on
stuff at three o'clock in the morning while you're family sleeping, it's pretty damn loud,
because it hits the walls and travels.
So you might want to do some that fancy foam that they use for speakers and put that
on your mounting brackets.
So there's not a ton of, that maybe it limits, maybe a lot of help limit the noise
from moving the thing up and down.
But at the end of the day, I don't really know there's a whole lot you can do about it,
because it's attached to the wall and the walls like a giant speaker.
Um, it's pretty much it.
Um, I like it.
Um, like I said, if anything, I would have changed the placement of it,
but this has got four screws in it, and I'm not about to move four screws.
Some of them aren't flush to the wall.
For example, um, this one is got a tiny little piece of metal that I guess you could put
like a flat screw on or whatever, um, but it's, I don't know, eighth of an inch piece of metal
where the width of the frame of the thing.
So it's flush up against the wall and that's what I wanted.
But what I didn't want is a big gap or like anything, you know, anything bad,
anything hinged base or whatever.
So I wanted to be flush up against the wall so I could maximize that space if I wanted to,
you know, lean something up, something up against the wall, but other than that, um,
pretty standard stuff.
Um, let's produce it.
I had to use some wrong screws and then I filed them off with the Dremel tool.
So you'll see that and some of my handy work is I'll have screws that are too long.
I'll screw them in and then I'll sand down the, uh, I'll use the Dremel tool to cut the
screw off and then I'll sand it down with the, you know, the Dremel tool or just
sandpaper or whatever.
So you can see these little metal spots, uh, little burn marks where I've sanded down the, uh,
cut off and sanded down the, the, uh, thing.
So it doesn't have to be perfect, obviously.
I mean, you can stain it and make it look nice, right?
Um, that's pretty much it.
Hope this helps somebody out and, uh, have a good one.
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