Industrial Furniture Blog By RDM

If you’re starting up a small workshop or other new manufacturing venture you may be tempted to use lower-priced, off-the-shelf furniture that has been mass manufactured – the kind intended for garages and hobby workshops. It may look like a bargain, but, unfortunately, the savings can be short-lived. Without a proper design, money can be lost to inefficiency or in some cases, larger losses due to furniture failure causing workplace accidents.

You owe it to yourself to outfit your shop with heavy duty industrial workbenches and other furniture specifically suited to commercial use. Here are three ways you can save money by investing a little more money on industrial-duty furniture up-front:

A Less Accident-Prone Workplace: Not every industrial accident causes horrible injuries – but they all waste time and money. Workers spend time getting first aid and taking time off instead of manufacturing your products. You may spend time cleaning spills, disposing of hazardous material, and temporary closing of space – and it may all be the result of an inexpensive work station that had been value-engineered for an activity that it could never satisfy fully. For instance, placing a couple of fans around a standard table is not an acceptable substitute for a real laminar flow clean air HEPA workstation.

Improved Workflow: Time is money, especially for startups that need to prove they can meet high volume demand in order to be taken seriously. That means you need proper workflow procedures to ensure that every station works at full capacity without slowing down any of the others. Standard furniture rarely satisfies the needs to produce an efficient work flow. Instead of planning your shop around inexpensive furniture, plan for it based on the way you’d actually like it to operate. Purchase the industrial furniture with features to match your specific needs, with room to expand and the ability to adapt. This makes workplace flow much easier to achieve. You will be able to produce more, sell more, and prove that you are ready for high volume challenges.

Reduced Maintenance: It’s simple: Industrial Quality furniture is tough. Standard office furniture or lower-grade substitutes are not. Your operations will place all of your furniture under repeated stress. If your furniture fails, you will need to either stop work or find a replacement for that station. Both options waste time and money. But if you buy RDM Industrial-Quality furniture with the proper material and load-bearing requirements, you will save money over the total cost of ownership. A Quality bench, table or other furniture piece will pay for itself.

Contact RDM and we’ll help you develop specific solutions based on your industry, size and other specific requirements. We will help you to design your workplace to become a safer, more efficient and more profitable operation.

Everybody knows that stainless steel and aluminum are extraordinarily resistant (though not totally immune) to corrosion. This property makes these metals extraordinarily useful for laboratory furniture of all kinds, as well as heavy duty industrial workbenches. Wood tends to particulate, splinter and burn. Plastic can melt at low temperatures and produce unpleasant chemical reactions.

The secret of aluminum and stainless steel’s resistance to corrosion is called passivation: a chemical process that builds a microscopic layer of nonreactive material between the aluminum or stainless steel work surface and the air. Stainless steel’s passivation process occurs due to its chromium content. When exposed to air, stainless steel produces a layer of chromium oxide a few atoms thick. The passivation layer is just a few atoms thick and is oxygen and water resistant. Generally, the higher the stainless steel’s chromium content the more resistance it offers to the elements, thanks to a more robust passivation layer.

Passivation is a natural characteristic of pure aluminum. Aluminum oxide accumulates on the surface of the metal, halting further corrosion. Be careful - Aluminum alloys do not necessarily have this characteristic, so they can actually be less corrosion resistant, depending on the exact alloy used. In many instances, aluminum is often applied as a thin layer to impart corrosion resistance to other materials.

Various processes can improve passivation but it is never 100% effective. For example, regular abrasion can remove both materials’ passivation layers, making them vulnerable to corrosion, though this normally requires a significant amount of wear and tear. In addition, submersion, galvanic reactions and other circumstances and eliminate the layer. For the most part, these situations fall outside the scope of typical use.

If you have any questions about the aluminum, stainless steel and other materials we use in custom industrial workbenches, lab tables or anything else, don’t hesitate to Contact RDM. We’re happy to answer your questions.