Tag: reloading bench

December 15, 2022 – A Bench Story

December 15, 2022 /

Unless you are a coastal steelhead fisherman, the time to tie flies is the winter time. The theory is that you stock up in the down time to get ready for fishing time. At least this is what I hear from the podcasts that I listen to. Fortunately for me, I do live in coastal steelhead country so I really have no excuse to not fish or tie flies.

This is not what I wanted to actually talk about today. I have a secret. My bench in the basement began life as a fly-tying bench. The top was specifically sized so that my vise would be able to clamp onto the top. In fact, I planed down the thickness so that this would work because I had planned on making it thicker. So, this is the story of my bench.

Back in 2011, I started this project of building a bench for my basement. I needed a sturdy space to do stuff. I thought that I would use it to do house projects but also tie flies. I spent a couple weekends milling stock and planning the design. This was an evolutionary effort where I had a rough idea about what my requirements were but the design changed as the wood revealed defects and my mistakes changed things as I went. My progress ended after the first couple of weekends because the cat decided to take up residence with kittens.

That time in my life was a whirlwind. Much of my work week was spent on the road from 2010-2015. I was travelling and working and my woodworking project languished. When you live like that and have toddler aged children, you don’t have the energy or the social capitol to do non-essential things like hobbies. But, I was making some side money in the form of travel bonuses so in 2012, I decided to buy a reloading setup.

The reloading equipment stayed in the box and my bench stayed in parts. When I got my range membership in 2016, then I really started recreationally shooting. I had been carrying empty brass around with me my whole life because my dad was a reloader but it really started piling up when I started shooting monthly. I decided to get back in gear and clean up my shop by finishing this project finally in the summer of 2017.

The reloading press got center stage when I mounted it. My original intention was to remove the press when I wasn’t using it allowing me to tie flies in the center of the bench. I did a lot of reloading but not a lot of fly tying so the press stayed. At this point reloading is here to stay and so is the press. There is room to move the vise somewhere else along the edge.

It was always my plan to have storage underneath the bench. I just didn’t know how I was going to manifest it until I got near the end. The large drawer was re-purposed from a previous workpiece, my home built router table, miter bench that didn’t make the journey back from SC. Before that, the drawer was part of a dog house that I recycled.

This bench is not that old, but it certainly has seen action. Currently, I use it almost daily as the stand for my pellet trap. Guns get cleaned on the bench and a lot of reloading has been done. I have wrapped presents, soldering, chopping and a lot of junk piling too.

I had this vision of using an old computer to stream music and look-up a few things now and then, but I think that machine has entered the end of its life because it doesn’t have the memory to stream larger format items. Right now, it is not really hurting anything where it is, so it will stay there for now. There are other things you cannot see or are not worth much but a mention like a cordless battery charger, a test phone, etc.

End Your Programming Routine: Sometimes things don’t end the way that you expect and sometimes they just take a long time to get there. This has some of both. At this point, I cant really imagine life without this bench, it plays a pivotal role in so many things that I do with content generation and hobbies. I doubt that it will make a move if and when that happens but I guess that is an excuse to build one based on the lessons of this one.

January 20, 2022 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

January 20, 2022 /

Can I be honest? I suppose that I am as much of a voyeur, or lurker or however you want to describe it as I am a doer. I have talked about my disdain of social media and my real lack of participation at most of any level. I don’t care to interact and I suppose that I don’t understand the ‘rules of participation’ because I don’t.

Where is the going? I am a sucker for looking at people’s pictures of their survival backpack contents or reloading bench setup. Some years ago, I liked to periodically check-out https://www.edcforums.com/ to see what people carried with them everyday. It was as much evaluating what I did but also some people really go artistic with these things.

Somewhere along the line, I started noticing not just people’s gear but people also did stuff. I guess that is what occasionally draws me in. I probably could find as much inspiration in Pinterest, Instagram or other platforms as a lot of the forums seem pretty dead now. I am not specifically looking for inspiration, I just like the more deterministic view that forums have and I open what interests me rather than scrolling through a bunch of things that I don’t care about.

That is what leads to today’s post. Because right now, what is on the bench is not really Tacticool related. I am rebuilding a chainsaw. I use my bench for reloading, gun cleaning, Christmas wrapping, antenna building, record player rebuilding and many other things.

I actually built the bench to do fly tying and ironically, I have never done that. Fly tying is something that I have had an interest since I was a child. I actually took a community college class when I was in high school. It is also something that I haven’t done since I was in college. I still have an interest in doing it, I should probably put that on my goals for this year.

My bench was my first real woodworking project. It’s not completely fine woodworking because I used some fasteners to attach the drawer unit. However I took raw, rough cut lumber and built the bench about seven years ago. The drawer that you see is constructed of plywood that was a drawer that I built as a router table in the late 1990s. I saved the drawer but I sold the router and burned the bench because I didn’t want to move it from South Carolina.

End Your Programming Routine: The bench is a very important part of my tools. It is a space to work and I don’t have to be fussy about spills, scrapes and dents. It is probably redundant to say that people need a space to work. It needs to be comfortable height and clean. Normally, I would have done this work in the shop, but this way I don’t have to wait for it to heat up.