Six steel tables and a shop that finally looks like one
We bought a lot of mid-century drafting tables to outfit our own workspace. Here is where that project actually stands.
We bought a single 42-item cleanout lot for $239.62. Seventeen of them are staying in our own workshop instead of going up for sale.
That is unusual for us. Almost everything that comes through the door is inventory. This lot was different because a chunk of it solved a problem we actually had: a shop that still looked like a garage.
What is in it
Fourteen drafting tables with drawer pedestals, eight wood-frame and six flat steel. A teacher’s desk, a round laminate table, and a folding table round out the seventeen. The rest of the lot, mostly stools and wall cabinets, did not make the cut for the shop and is not part of this project.
The plan for the fourteen tables is to turn them into a matched set of workbenches. The six steel ones are being stripped and refinished: down to bare metal with abrasive discs and a rust converter where needed, a self-etching primer, then paint. The eight wood-frame ones are staying closer to original, and their monitor mounts turned out to be the most interesting part of the whole lot.
The good discovery
The wood tables came with monitor arm mounts, and the base plate looked at first like it might be a proprietary part, the kind of thing you either hunt down secondhand or give up on. It is not. The base is a straight pole on a four-bolt round flange, paired with a cast oval mounting plate, and the flange looks like an ordinary pipe floor flange. If that holds up once we confirm the pole diameter, replacement bases are an eight to twelve dollar hardware store item, not a parts search.
The complication
The other candidate source for that hardware was Dazor, a maker of the drafting-lamp style arms these tables originally used. Dazor shut down. That closed off the OEM route before we got to it, which is exactly the kind of thing that happens mid-project and is worth saying plainly instead of pretending the plan went smoothly.
Where it actually stands
Paint has not been decided. The leading option right now is a racing green body with an ivory top and brass hardware, chosen over several other combinations we are still weighing. Nothing is finalized. Before any base gets ordered or printed, the pole diameter on the wood tables still needs to be measured with calipers, because a wrong guess on hardware this cheap is not worth the reorder.
Neither of those is finished, and we would rather say that than dress up a project that is still in progress as more done than it is.
The point
Outfitting a shop on a budget is its own kind of sourcing problem, separate from buying inventory to sell. The same instinct that finds an underpriced lab instrument at auction also finds a $239.62 lot that furnishes a workshop, once you stop assuming everything in it has to go back out the door. Not every lot we win ends up on a listing page, and this one is a reminder that some of the best buys are the ones that never leave the building.