Laboratory Casework Fit-Out for a Precision Instrument Manufacturer | Rainin, Oakland, California

The Solution

Labs USA supplied the room as a single coordinated casework package rather than a list of cabinets. The base run is painted steel laboratory casework: four drawer base units, two drawer and two door combination units, full width drawer units, a sink base, knee space units where technicians sit, a hinged door corner base unit for the corner condition, and ADA compatible drawer and file drawer units without a toe base where clearance mattered.

Painted steel casework was the right structural choice for a room that mixes liquids with instrument service. Steel carries the load of heavy benchtop equipment without deflection, takes a chemically cured paint finish that tolerates routine wipe down with solvents and disinfectants, and can be reconfigured later because the units are discrete boxes rather than built-in millwork. Framed glass door wall units above the bench keep standards, reference glassware, and small tooling visible, which matters in a room where the same technician may be looking for a consumable and a calibration weight in the same minute.

Work surfaces are one inch thick phenolic resin with a four inch high applied curb in a black crystal matte finish, with service hole cutouts, a drop-in sink cutout, and a forty five degree angle cut where the corner units meet. Phenolic resin was specified instead of epoxy resin because the room is predominantly instrument and light chemical work: phenolic is lighter, easier to work around service penetrations, and has the impact resistance that suits equipment being set down on it repeatedly. The applied curb keeps a spill on the bench rather than behind it.

The wet station received a twenty four by sixteen by eight inch deep epoxy resin drop-in sink with a center drain, a resin sink outlet with a removable strainer, a deck mounted mixing faucet with a gooseneck and vacuum breaker, and a stainless steel drip trough with a hose drain for glassware. Safety equipment was supplied with the same order: a deck mounted dual head drench hose at the sink and a vertically mounted emergency drench shower with a stay-open ball valve and pull rod.

The instrument side of the room is mobile. Three adjustable height utility tables, two at sixty inches wide and one at seventy two inches, ride on roll and stay casters, carry two twelve inch deep upper shelves and an electrical power strip with three duplex receptacles, and are fitted with LED task lights with occupancy sensors. A thirty four by twenty eight inch welded table with adjustable height legs and casters was supplied for a dedicated station. The result is a room where the fixed laboratory casework handles storage, liquids, and services, and the mobile lab tables handle work that has to move or change height.

Advantage

The decision that shaped this room was how much of it to build in. Fixed casework is the right answer for storage, plumbing, and a bench that will still be doing the same job in ten years. It is the wrong answer for instrument work, where the useful bench height depends on the technician and on whether the job that day is assembly, probing, or teardown.

Splitting the room solved both. Roughly two thirds of the perimeter is fixed painted steel casework with continuous phenolic tops, which gives the room its storage capacity, its sink, and its services. The open floor is served by mobile adjustable height tables, which can be wheeled to a power drop, raised for standing work, and locked with roll and stay casters so they behave like a fixed bench once they are in position.

Accessory detail is what keeps that from becoming a compromise. Tank restraint hardware secures a cylinder to the wall rather than to a bench leg. A two tier lazy susan makes the dead volume of a corner cabinet reachable. A phenolic resin pegboard over the sink dries glassware without occupying counter space. Filler panels close the gaps that otherwise collect debris between units and the wall.

Labs USA specifies the whole range, from lab casework and lab cabinets through lab furniture, laboratory fume hoods, and bench level exhaust snorkels, so the split between fixed and mobile follows the work in the room rather than a single product line.

Return on Investment

The first return on a package like this is installation time. When cutouts, filler panels, corner strut assemblies, angle cuts, and adhesives are quoted with the cabinets, the installation crew is assembling a kit. When they are not, the crew is measuring and cutting phenolic on site in an occupied building, which costs labor, creates dust in a clean room, and risks a surface that has to be replaced.

The second is flexibility that does not require a project. Instrument work changes. Mobile adjustable height tables absorb a lot of that change at zero cost, and discrete steel casework units can be relocated or reused if a wall run changes later, which fully built-in millwork cannot.

The third is durability. Chemically cured painted steel casework, one inch phenolic resin tops, and epoxy resin sinks are specified for laboratory service life measured in decades rather than years. Solvent wipe down, hot glassware, and dropped tools are ordinary events for these materials rather than damage events.

The fourth is compliance and readiness. The drench hose and emergency shower were part of the same scope as the sink, so the safety provision was not a follow-on purchase discovered at inspection. Lead time on the manufactured casework was eight to ten weeks, which is the number that has to be planned around; everything else was sequenced to it.

Serving Laboratories Across Oakland and the East Bay

Oakland and the wider East Bay hold one of the densest concentrations of instrument, diagnostics, and life science manufacturing in the country, and those facilities share a specific problem: they occupy buildings that were not purpose built for laboratories. Converted industrial floors near the Oakland waterfront, tenant improvement space in Emeryville and Berkeley, and mixed manufacturing and laboratory buildings in San Leandro and Alameda all mean casework has to fit an existing shell.

That is where a specified package matters more than a catalog order. Filler panels, corner supports, and knee space panels are what let a standard cabinet run sit cleanly in a room with out of square walls. California seismic practice also makes wall mounted components, tall storage, and cylinder restraint a design question rather than an afterthought, and the tank restraint and wall unit mounting in this project were specified with that in mind.

Labs USA supplies laboratories throughout the Bay Area, including Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Alameda, San Leandro, Hayward, Richmond, and south into Fremont and the peninsula. Whether a project needs a full lab casework fit-out, replacement lab tables, or bench level fume extraction, the specification starts with the room and the work, not with a product code.