Refurbishing an Antique Metal Workbench

 This is one of those projects that I massively underestimated...

I won an antique metal work bench in an auction for $50 (along with the tooling cabinet I showed in a previous post).  

With drawers removed

Pretty sure it was a Craftsman because of the dark gray paint + red drawers, along with the fastener type. It was stuffed with metal chips, rusty, a drawer was jammed, bent up, and the MDF top was soaked in machining coolant. Also had a bunch of bolts/nuts in it, as well as an almost complete Crescent-brand wrench set, which was a nice bonus.

I removed the top and threw it away. I made a new one by cutting two 3/4" plywood rectangles with a circular saw, then bonding them together with wood glue, using temporary short screws and clamps to apply pressure. I then evened-out and rounded the edges with a palm sander. 

(pic)

I had the plywood and glue already, and the screws were cheap. This part took about 3 hours. I'm planning to do a white or grey epoxy coat on top. I really like epoxy tops for work benches; it's durable and easy to repair: fill holes with putty, sand, re-pour epoxy. 

I then disassembled it. Took lots of pics so I would be able to put it back together. 

Next step was pressure washing all the gunk off, which took about an hour. This also stripped off some of the paint. It's not like I could make it much rustier, so I just let the parts air dry.  

Then I took a two month break from working on it. The next step was sandblasting and grinding all of the rust and loose paint off. I started with sandblasting with soda with my little hand held gravity fed sand blaster, but it's not really powerful enough to get scale off, even with glass beads instead of soda. I ended up switching to a wire brush on an angle grinder for everything except hard-to-reach places. This strategy worked well on the heavily rusted air tank, and it worked well for this, too. I didn't take any pics of this step, but I set up a large plastic tarp on some saw horses to kind of form a bowl to contain the blasting soda and paint/rust flakes. Super messy. Essential safety gear: arm-length leather gloves, face mask, goggles, face shield/hood, long sleeve shirt, jeans. Total time for this step was about 6 hours. I wore out a wire brush and used about 10lbs of soda, so total cost was around $15. 

I didn't strip off paint that looked well-adhered, but I kind of wish I had. After stripping, I used a hammer and vise-grips to straighten, flatten, rebend, etc. all of the parts. I then wiped everything down with a damp cloth, and then with denatured alcohol to get the grime off. The alcohol would dissolve some of the paint I didn't strip off and make leave streaks, which was annoying. I should have spent the extra ~hour to grind off all of the paint I could reach. I then taped off the drawer handles, door hinges, and lock. These steps took about 2 hours. I went through a lot of shop rags. Results: 

Prepping for paint

Table saw and old shop-vac make an appearance

This was my first time using a paint spray gun. I bought a harbor freight air powered purple HVLP gun for $10 (on sale, normally $16). It comes with a gravity feed 20 oz cup and 1.4mm nozzle. I used it to anti-rust primer everything, as well as paint everything gloss black (except the drawers and drawer slides). The drawer slides I left primer-ed, and tried not to get primer in the tracks, which will be greased anyways, so shouldn't rust. I sanded all of the primer with 220 grit sandpaper. This was very necessary, the primer ended up being pretty rough. I decided to spray paint the drawers "regal red' (pretty close to craftsman red) with a rattle can, ended up using 3 cans. With the sprayer, I used one whole 32 oz can of primer and [will end up using] one whole 32 oz can of gloss black.

My thoughts on spraying vs rattle cans: Paint spray guns are nice. You can get a very consistent spray, and you can spray a lot more paint, faster than with a rattle can. The paint is also cheaper than rattle cans. One 32oz can of paint will cover about 5x the area that a rattle can can. Rattle cans are about 12oz, but about half of that is propellant. A 32oz can of paint is $9-10, while a rattle can is about $4-6, so the spray gun paint is about 2-3x cheaper, more so if bought by the gallon. However, spray guns have some major downsides: You have to buy the spray gun. You also need a large volume compressor (mine's 63 gal, 6HP, and it could just barely keep up with continuous spraying), a hose, and regulator to run it. The spray guns also clog fairly easily, but I luckily haven't had a clog yet, probably because I filtered my paint and cleaned mine regularly. Paint filtering is a pain, especially primer, which tends to clog the filters. The paint filters are cheap luckily, as was the stand to hold the gun and filter (actually more than the gun, which was also cheap) during paint filtering. I started with 120 mesh, but it was way too slow, so switched to 60 mesh, which might let particles large enough to clog the gun through, but it is what it is. You also might need to thin the paint, depending on what it is. I thinned the oil-based paint a little with acetone. Latex paint has to be thinned a lot, with water, to use in a spray gun. Cleaning them is a pain, takes about 10 minutes, and requires a lot of acetone, gloves, and shop rags. You have to wipe out the cup with acetone soaked rags, and if you don't get all of the old paint out, it will dry and cause clogs, or mix with your new paint causing your color to be wrong. You also have to clean the cup's threads, the internal filter, the spray gun nozzle, needle, and spray gun body. You're supposed to disassemble the whole gun to clean the insides, but I haven't done that because harbor freight stopped including (and never sold) the super thin 19mm wrench required to take the nozzle off/needle out. Instead, I just spray a few ounces of acetone through it into a box after cleaning it. The result of all of this is a bag of trash after every use. I wiped the nozzle on mine and left it sitting with paint in the cup for about 4 hours once, and it didn't clog, but I don't think I would let it sit for longer than that without emptying the paint cup and running acetone through it. Did that and left it over night a couple times, no problem. I suggest a full clean if it'll sit longer than 12 hours. Because spray guns use compressed air to atomize the paint, they move a lot of air, which means that any dust within about 5 ft of what your painting will end up in the paint. Also Florida bugs love paint, ugh. Rattle cans don't move as much air, so dust is less of a problem, and since they are disposable, you don't have to worry about cleaning them, except maybe flipping them over for a few short bursts of propellant to clean the nozzle. Final conclusions: 

1. If you already have a spray gun, stand, filters, cleaning supplies, large compressor, regulator, and hose, then it's worth the effort to use the sprayer if your project will use greater than about 5 rattle cans worth of paint. For example, I plan on re-staining/sealing my wood fence and deck eventually - that will be a good project to use the sprayer on due to the large volume of sealer needed and long-duration sprays. 
2. If you already have the large compressor, but not the spray gun, stand, filters, cleaning supplies, and don't plan on doing many large paint projects, I suggest buying cases of rattle cans up to about 12 cans...over that, probably worth getting the spray gun.
3. If you don't have the large compressor or any of the spraying equipment, use rattle cans up to about 12 cans. If you're doing a large paint project, you can buy a decent airless sprayer for about $100. They have the same clogging and cleaning downsides, but they're cheaper than a full compressor set up (unless you're in to repairing old tools like me). 

I found out about the dust and bugs problems the hard way...first coats of black on the frame ended up covered in dust and bugs:

Speckled...eww

I painted the sides I wouldn't see first in case something went wrong, but it still sucks. I'm taking a break from the project at this point...really stopped being fun. Eventually, I'll sand all the parts down after the paint hardens and try again, maybe with the parts standing up and only doing the top halves, then flipping them over, so I'm not painting near the ground. I finished the drawers (rattle cans), though, and they came out nice.

I have about 4 hours invested so far in the painting, about $35 of paint, and about $50 in supplies, including the spray gun. It'll probably take another 5 hours or so to finish painting, will update this post when I work on it again.

Estimated total cost and time: ~$150 and 25 hours. Working min wage, I could have afforded ~2x new work benches for the time and money I've put into this one. That's not really the point, though, it's all about the love of the craft...yeah....sure... Note to self: Don't do a project like this again.

At least I learned a lot, and I will have a really nice work bench by the end of it. 

To do:

• Sand paint, finish painting black
• Re-assemble
• Epoxy top
• 3D print TPU rubber feet to prevent steel bottoms from scraping/rusting.