EPA Heavy Duty Table

The problem

An EPA environmental testing program needed benches that could carry water tanks weighing thousands of pounds, and the tables holding them could not be ordinary shop furniture. They had to be certified by an engineer for the load, they had to survive around water, and they had to be something the agency could build again and again across its own operations rather than ordering as a one-off from a fabricator.

What we built

A table engineered around the structural fiberglass U-channel the agency had already specified. Fiberglass channel is the right material for this setting: it does not corrode around water the way steel does, and it comes as a standard stock section, which means every dimension of the design can be called out against the channel's published profile.

That is what the drawing on this page is: the channel cross-section with the dimensions that drive the design — flange width, depth, web and flange thickness, and the fillet radii where the section carries its load. The full CAD package worked from those sections up: 3D models of the assembled table and dimensioned 2D drawings a shop can build from without asking questions.

The design brief was deliberately conservative. No clever joints, no custom parts — stock channel, simple cuts, bolted assembly. When a table has to be certified for thousands of pounds and assembled by whoever is on site, simplicity is the engineering.

What changed

The agency got one certified design instead of many uncertified benches: a drawing package it owns, can hand to any shop, and can assemble across its operations, with the engineering stamp attached to the design rather than to a single build. That is the quiet advantage of designing to stock sections — the certification travels with the drawings.

Stack

3D and 2D CAD, structural fiberglass U-channel, dimensioned manufacturing drawings.