I like to use white melamine-faced particle board for my worktables. The tabletops are smooth and hard and easy to clean or drill holes in. It’s sold at the big box home supply stores. They’ll cut it for you if you don’t want to wrestle with it yourself. But if you do, the Forrest Duraline HI-A/T table saw blade cuts it nicely.
The edges can be sharp, so be sure to deburr them. Sandpaper or a file does the job. I’ve also used a round-over bit in a router.
It’s economical to make two tables that are about two feet wide using a sheet of the material. However, I’ve found that a 30-inch wide table is much more useful. The ones in these photos are only 24 inches unfortunately.
Make the tabletop a bit larger than the table frame, so that you can clamp things to it.
I don’t permanently attach the table frame. Instead, I screw a couple of 2×4 battens to the bottom. These are sized so they fit snugly into the frame, yet they are easy to remove when desired. Simply relocate the battens from an old top to a new top, and in minutes you’ve got a fresh table surface.
One of the handier shop tools is a robot vacuum cleaner. Mine is a Roomba. I had an old one and made my tables high enough to clear it, and then bought a new one. Surprise-the new one is bigger and doesn’t fit.
Don’t let that happen to you-measure the robot you’re actually going to use.
Finally, if you’ve got a lot of drilling and you don’t want to drill all those holes into the table, use a piece of scrap.
