My oldest kid got a police bear motorcycle toy that makes a quite loud sound when you push down on the bear. I could just remove the batteries, but that would be way to easy and spoil part of the fun with the toy. So I took it apart to see how I could lower the volume instead - I found it to have a small but regular loudspeaker and thought, no problem, Ill just make a volume control with a variable resistor..... And then I realized that my soldering iron is packed away in a bag somewhere in the room below the stairs, my tools were in the workshop in the shed and the parts needed would be somewhere in the sheed or in another bag somewhere else. 

The end result - I never got around to lowering the volume and realized that I don't tinker  with electronics very much because it takes to long to get the gear out to do it. 

In a perfect world I would of course have a permanent electronics workbench where everything would be ready for small and big projects at all times. But I don't have room for that and having all those small parts around is not optimal with small kids in the house anyway. So another solution was needed.

Then i got the idea to try and pack the briefcase like bag, that my soldering iron and powersupply all ready was in - It wasn't big enough, but the idea of a mobile electronics workbench  was born. 

I then spent some time contemplating what I would  want to put in the my Mobile Electronics Workbench. Fortunately there are lot of pictures of electronics workbenches  on the net. Most of them are from people who actually have room for a prober workbench - But quite a few  are on the kitchen counter or in the living room. So I'm not the only one with the problem.

With the idea solidified now it is time to start planning. First thing is to decide what stuff have in the Mobile electronics workstation and what features, if any, it is to have.

My soldering iron goes without saying along with my variable power supply, a signal generator, a couple of meters and the tools needed to tinker with electronics should all be within reach. I also wanted good work light, power and a work surface. Lastly room for some parts and basic prototyping stuff, like a breadboard would be very nice to have.

With a good idea of how much room I needed I started sketching out a layout and started looking for either a suitable box or materials to build it.
However I couldn't find a suitable box, at least not a good price so I decided to build it myself. A couple of pieces of plywood was located and in order to play around with size and measurements I used Google sketchup to model it. (download the model)
I ended up with a design that is approx  42 cm(16.5") high , 20 cm(7.9") deep, and 56 cm(22") wide, measured externally. 

I cut the plywood with a circular saw, that someone was kind enough to lend me. (note to self, buy circular saw) and after that assembling it was fairly straight forward.

The pieces are both glued and screwed together and the screws are countersunk. To make sure the plywood would not split I predrilled the holes.  

All parts of the box, except the front are 12 mm(0.47") plywood the front is 6mm(0.24"). The Shelves inside are 6mm(0.24") and to make sure they do not bend to much the there is a L bracket in the middle adding some extra support.

Because the front board is so thin mounting the piano hinge and the closing/locking mechanism is a bit tricky. I predrilled the hole all the way through the board, then cut screws down in length and any excess screw was grinded down with a file. This way I get as much screw as possible without having anything stick out of the board. As there would have been had I been using bolts and nuts. 

Finding a good locking mechanism as also a bit of a challenge. I was initially looking for a more classical box closing mechanism(see picture) but my local hardware store does not carry anything small enough to fit my purpose so ended up going with some mountings which are for padlocks and locking them with small snap hooks. Its a little more work to open it but it has the added benefit of letting you add a small padlock if you need to keep children or the like out of the electronics workbench.  

And here it finally is - the finished mobile electrical workbench. I can now setup my electronics workshop just about anywhere, including the dining table. 

It could still use a few finishing touches but I think of it as functional object rather than a pretty one or maybe it's just a working prototype. - either way its finished for now.

On the left you can see it setup on the dining table, which is no longer out of bounds for electronic projects and on the other picture I annotated the contents(also on flickr) to give you an idea of what I pack into my mobile hackspace.
The colorfull boxes that holds parts are from IKEA, the tonegenerator and powersupply I made myself some years ago.

As you can see on the action shot below the project has now come full circle as the first thing I did with my portable electronics workbench was to install a volume control on the noisy toy that started the whole thing.