When I was about 25, had this romantic idea for a mobile bench that would fit into my VW Kombi Camper.

I wanted to make it into a complete jewelry workshop, with a roller, polishing, melting and hand making sections.

That basically limited my space to 1250 mm long x 730 mm wide x 930 mm high.
Also, it had to be able to be rolled around.

I had this vision of cruising around South Africa.

I would start in Pretoria in the summer, drift down to Durban in the autumn, do the wild coast during the winter, then ease into Cape town during the spring and summer and float up to Namibia and back to Pretoria for the next summer.
All the while I would make jewellery and sell it at shows and on the beach front and just live a wandering type of life for ever.
I did do that, more or less, but not exactly like I thought.

The first bench I made that was truly mobile was in Pretoria at my friend's place Tommy Dreyer, but then life happened and I then I opened up a shop instead, so the bench went in there.
I had a partner, Debbie, who was also a goldsmith.
She started having mental problems and eventually was not able to be self employed so there was no option but to buy her out of the business.
I had to sell my Harley Davidson to get the cash and part of the agreement was that she takes my mobile bench.

No matter, I decided to build another one.

The one I gave to Debbie was not exactly what I envisaged, because it was stationed in a fully equipped workshop, so I didn't carry on with the mobile development while I rather concentrated on running my shop with three employees.

When I sold that shop, I had to work the new owner in, and so I decided to build my second work bench which would be my complete jewellery workbench and shop.
At the time I live about 20 k's outside of Pretoria and so I built it in the house I was renting at the time.
It kind of was a good place to start because I could do contract work making jewelry for diamond dealers, and my own customers and also keep a low profile from the gold police, because in South Africa the gold is strictly controlled and I had already sat an hour in jail because I didn't have a ten buck jewellery making permit.
To this day, the jewellery industry in SA works under a vicious permit system.


Anyway, this was the second bench, and with the experience of the first bench I made, it was, in my opinion a really cool workshop/bench.
The pictures of this bench were in the pre digital age, and I was quite poor, so taking a million pictures was not really an option.
Also these were scanned from negatives, so the are nowhere near today's standards.

The left side was my drawers with my metals, engravers and general tools and a watch making area.

Acids, pliers and files were on the right hand side.

My best friend Tommy, helped me design the wheels under the bench, so that just two levers could raise the bench up onto the wheels and lower it back to the ground.
This bench was unbelievably heavy, what with a roller, and all the draw plates and blocks that are part of any jewellery work shop.

I built an extraction system for it.
This was a major mission, and it was built using only hand tools, ( in fact, the entire bench was built with hand tools only) and while it worked OK, my third bench's extraction system works much better.
Nevertheless, there was no polishing dust floating around the house, which was a big plus when one works in small enclosed spaces.

The oxygen bottle and propane gas configuration were, at the time, unique to South Africa, made by a company called Afrox, and suited the bench perfectly.
Bottom left was where my crucibles and melting powders were kept and above the oxygen bottle was my melting pad.
The roller was a Calvin, which because of me using it outside the manufacturing specifications, had cracked the frame, hence the heavy secondary frame around it. Ahem.

This was the living room of the house I was renting at the time.
A bit short of creature comforts, but that is the way I have lived my whole life, so no biggie .

This was my working area and my present bench is still very much the same.
After a while we (Anne and I) moved from Zwavelpoort outside of Pretoria to Kasane, in the north western Botswana.
First I installed the bench in the hotel, right inside the shop.
It was crucial for us, because we were penniless and we had no money to afford a separate workshop, so we made and sold jewellery right there in the hotel in the back of out tiny seventeen square meter shop.
At the time we lived in a caravan in the bush at the bottom of the hotel grounds and we shared a plate of staff food per day and showered in the staff showers.

It took about 6 months, but eventually we started making some money, and after about 8 months, we were able to buy the park home from the contractors that had built the hotel.
They had parked it on the banks of the Chobe river.
So I moved my bench into the park home, thus freeing up some space in our shop.
This is the only picture I have of the bench in the one end of the park home.

Kasane is brutally hot in summer and the interior of the park home would go over 40C, so it was quite tough to make jewellery in there.

We lived for eight months in the bush in that caravan amongst elephant and buffalo.
Once our shop was starting to do well, and we had some sales staff working for us, we turned our attention to Zimbabwe, and the Victoria Falls that were only 80 kilometers away. There were plenty of tourists and no manufacturing jeweller.
Zimbabwe was at the time going through some structural reform and at that time Mugabe, the president, was behaving normally, not like the racist pig he would become later.
We targeted Elephant Hills Hotel, and along with a miniature shop model that I built in the park home and a very cool hotel manager called Stewart Chase, convinced the hotel management to allow us to build a satellite shop right in the hotel.
And then, a few months later, we designated another dead area in the hotel and we were allowed to build a workshop near the maintenance section at the back of the hotel.
Once that was finished, I moved my workbench to the workshop in Zimbabwe.

This was the Zimbabwe work shop and the final resting place of this bench.

Some four years after this picture was taken, a maintenance staff member set the hotel alight by welding on the thatched roof and the hotel burnt down and the bench was completely destroyed.

Somewhere in that smoke was my bench.

Just for some context on how well this bench actually worked.
We did a agricultural show in Pongola in Natal before Botswana.
It was as small farming community, and they used to have a yearly agricultural show.
We drove 600 kilometers there in our beat up old VW, set up in minutes and made an embarrassingly amount of money in two days.
In a tent on a earth floor with my parrot Cujo.

My life partner and best friend Anne.

The locals were completely fascinated that some one could melt, roll, make and set jewellery there and then, while they wait.

This show was our first one and proved the concept was very viable.
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Zimbabwe was imploding because of Mugabe's farm seizures, the tourist industry was fucked and we decided to cut our losses.
We sold our house and we decided to move to to St. Maarten in the Caribbean because it is a Dutch island and I had Dutch citizenship.
For the next eight years or so, I worked from a normal fixed bench in a shop we opened there.
After living for eight years in St. Maarten, it became apparent that we had simply jumped out of one third world country into another third world island and we wanted to leave the island and go and live in a first world country.

Trust me, living on a Caribbean island with power failures every second day, sewerage in the streets and hostile racist locals becomes stale after 8 years.
Anne had during that time obtained Dutch citizenship and so we decided to move to the Netherlands.
I needed a new mobile bench. So I built my current one.
I had a long time ago discarded the leather pouch that is commonly used in traditional benches in favor of a rigid flat platform.
Also, the curve of a traditional bench was discarded for a square shape because it is much more space efficient and also makes adding drawers and the like much easier to attach.

 The New Bench


I built the new bench in my shop in 2010.
First I made two identical frames like this 1250 mm x 710 wide out of 30 mm square hollow tubing.

I welded four square cups on each corner so that the upright posts could be removed in case the bench had to be taken apart.
The reasoning was because we had no experience living in the Netherlands and I had heard that all the doorways were narrow and also that there were stairs every where.
So that allowed me to take the bench apart if it had to me installed in a smaller place.

The top and bottom frames.

The cups tacked on and the upright fitted.

This was the basic frame complete.
It was mostly made out of 30 mm square tubing with a wall thickness of 1.5 mm.

Further work and now it was ready to build the wheel mechanism.

The wheel system when the bench is on the ground.

The wheels when the bench is raised.
My friend Tommy designed this system and it is amazing how much weight can be lifted in this way.
The actual wheels took some strain, however, and they would have been better if they were made out of Nylon.

I opted for angle iron as drawer guides.
I wanted to keep things as simple as possible.
If I ever build another bench, I would make the drawer a little more refined, but at the time the island has gone to shit and we needed to get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

Adding more sectioning for the tops and my working area.

Fitting my roller after the frame had been painted.

This extraction system was completely different from my first bench.
This is a barrel fan the sucks the air very hard.

The exhaust is under the bench.

The air is drawn down behind the polishing side of the polishing motor, down to the bottom of the bench

Behind the polishing buff is a removable filter box to filter all the dust out.

I split the polishing motor so that the grinding part was outside the bench.
This avoids any contamination of the polishing section.
My first bench did not have that and it proved to be very annoying.

I like white melamine for my entire bench, because it is easy to clean.
After the frame was finished, it was a matter of cladding the bench.

Space is at a premium so I did not waste any nook and cranny that could be converted into a drawer of cupboard. Here the front was made into various compartments.

Much like my second bench, this side was designated as an oxygen/ gas side.I didn't have any idea what type of bottles were easily available I Europe, so I just made everything as big a possible and figured that I'll cross that bridge when I get there.As it turned out, Germany has a nice sized refillable propane bottle and so now I use the bench with the gas inside the bench and the oxygen bottle standing outside the bench.
Not as nice as the Afrox system, but still mobile enough to use in a shop.

Here all the drawers are finished with my old shape Graver max fitted inside as well.
All the drawers have hole so handles so that handles don't stick out.
And all the doors are held closed with magnets.

When everything is closed, the front is quite flat.
So when the bench is wheeled about, there is nothing that can really hook.

The front to the bench without my working tray.

My working tray.The opening thingi is not necessary to sweep filings off the tray. I simply pull the whole tray out and clean it.
Also, my current color is sprayed satin black, which is a much better color for seeing gold, silver and gemstones.

My setting microscope installed.

The door for the gas section installed.
The chain it for holding the lifting lever back.
Every thing kept simple as possible.

My acid box, containing sulfuric acid,
Sodium triphosphate (STP)
and sodium bicarbonate of soda.
These days, I don't use sulfuric acid, because it is too volatile and ruins clothes.
Sodium triphosphate (STP) is the pickle one buys at the jewelry suppliers, but I use PH down from the pool supply shops because it is dirt cheap and it is the same stuff.

My melting pad has evolved into this configuration.
The side covers can be removed, in case I have to roll long pieces of wire.
The bottom consists of a 3 mm steel plate and some soldering pads underneath for heat protection.
Also, I make and sell a very cool ingot mold that can be purchased here.

This is my current configuration for melting with a small external oxygen bottle not visible in the picture.
The blue little door is where the
crucibles and borax and other melting stuff is kept.
My soldering torch also runs off this system.
I use a 'Little Torch' for soldering.

My pliers, hammer and file rack that slides in and out as when needed.
My little torch hangs on there as well.

I made a removable side panel that all my immediate hand tools can be hung from.
The two rods fit into the two tubes.

These are the tools that hang there now.

I made a pull out soldering pad, and if anything, that and my burr box are the most handy configurations of this bench.

This is the current state. I have two third arms and a soldering box where all the different solders are kept.

This is my sliding burr box being built.

This is my current burr configuration.

The bench leaves St Maarten.
So after we left St. Maarten we arrived in the Netherlands without a clue as to what we were going to do.
So we bought a second hand Jumpy Citroen which I converted into a camper.
Then we put all our stuff in storage and went traveling.
We first figured we would do Germany, because the Dutch wear no jewellery and the Germans do.
Eventually we settled on Dusseldorf in Germany along the Rhine river.
It was a great place to stay, and we got an old shop, busted our asses to fit it out while living in a camp site and then we moved the bench in and made a section where we could live in the back of the shop.
The bench proved to be very handy as a tool station while we were fitting out our shop.

The bench in the back of our shop.

After some four years, we could not break into the retail market because our shop was not 'normal' enough to the average german. ( They are VERY rigid and xenophobic in Germany)

I was doing trade work for other jewelers which is no way to make a living and we decided that the shop was a complete drain and we needed to get out of Germany.

So we decided to move to the Netherlands, where the bench is today.
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There is no jewellery industry in the Netherlands to speak of and in Germany we had already started to shift our emphasis from making and selling our own stuff to selling tutorials and designing and making tools for the jewellery industry.
https://www.jewelry-tutorials.com/
https://www.drill-straight-tools.com/index.html
https://www.drill-straight-tools.com/titanium-jewelers-saw-frame.html

And here we are still.
Not quite the wandering life style I had envisaged thirty years ago, but nevertheless an eventful and interesting life

No regrets whatsoever.

Below is my contact email and other websites.