lab tables

Cleanroom Basics for Lab Furniture and More

June 4, 2009

f you’re managing a formal cleanroom you’ll be conforming to ISO 14644-1 and any other applicable local, federal and international standards that regulate everything from air filtration to your choice of lab furniture. Increasingly, cleanroom standards are used by companies that do not require them, but still use them to ensure consistent manufacturing and research procedures are used in conjunction with these standards in order to provide the best possible quality and yields. A workspace free of excessive air particles makes virtually any manufacturing process more consistent. That is why, even if you don’t operate a full-blown cleanroom, you can make use of the following principles to improve air quality.

Laminar Airflow: There are several laboratory furniture products that can improve airflow and prevent dust, smoke and other particles from spreading through an area. Laminar Flow Lab Benches use the principle of laminar flow to direct airflow into isolated streams. Particles released in one stream are isolated from the others.

Positive Air Pressure: Positive air pressure is a simple, effective concept that prevents outside particulate matter from floating into your lab or other workspace. Whenever there’s a breach in the space due to a door or window opening, a break in floor or wall material, or any accident, positive air pressure pushes outside air away.

HEPA Filtering: A HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filter is essential in formal cleanrooms and useful in other contexts where manufacturing or research creates volatile or otherwise hazardous air particles. If you want clean air, your airflow control system should include a HEPA filter. The Laminar Flow Bench includes a HEPA filter. Remember, though that workspace filtering doesn’t affect direct contact, so remember to take normal safety precautions with hazardous materials.

Cleanroom Workbench Surfaces: A cleanroom laboratory table that meets moderate cleanroom standards can prevent problems in almost any manufacturing environment by keeping contamination to a minimum. For instance, if you can easily wipe a table clean, without worrying that particles will adhere, you can prevent contamination from the build-up of particles such as metal, plastic, and other materials. This may increase the duty cycle of your manufacturing machines by ensuring that it’s only processing raw materials, and none of the ambient grit in the workspace.

At RDM Industrial Products we can provide complete cleanroom furniture solutions for everything from workshops that you want to make just a little cleaner, to full standards-compliant cleanrooms. Contact RDM and a representative will match your needs with the exact solution you require.

Three Reasons Why Everyone Needs Quality Industrial Furniture

May 5, 2009

What do RDM’s industrial furniture and the space shuttle have in common? Both of them have landed at White Sands Missile Range. In 2007, RDM was awarded two defense contracts to build furniture and lockers for White Sands. All in all, RDM provided over $22,000 in products and services to upgrade the base’s storage and furnishings.

Why did White Sands go with RDM? We provide unmatched value for the cost: the kind of quality that they could rely on in an environment that cannot tolerate poor performance of any kind. They need industrial furniture that conforms to their best practices – and so do you. Here are three reasons why you should choose RDM:

Ergonomic Industrial Furniture Reduces Accidents

RDM can create custom shapes and sizes for most of its industrial furniture catalogue, along with ergonomic additions to make virtually any workstation more efficient. This is critical in an environment like White Sands, where staff track missiles, aircraft and other high performance technologies. They need industrial furniture that gets out of the way of their workflow – and so do you.

Custom Industrial Furniture Creates a Controlled Environment

RDM Industrial Products is uniquely diverse. Few laboratory and industrial furniture manufacturers have so many products and capabilities under one roof. That means RDM is capable of not only providing furniture that stands up to extreme stress from heavy loads, heat and chemical reactions, but they can also provide lab tables and other furniture to satisfy cleanroom quality controlled environments. With RDM, you never have to choose between the ideal and convenient solution – RDM Industrial Products provides both, so that you can order industrial furniture that creates the exact environment you need from one source.

RDM’s Industrial Furniture Saves Money

RDM secured the White Sands contract because they provided the best value. RDM’s manufacturing and sales are under one roof, so there’s no need to pay a middleman. RDM manufactures most of our products on site, minimizing reshipping costs that they would otherwise have to pass on to our customers. Please Contact RDM for your Industrial or Lab Furniture needs. See the difference that a complete solution provider makes.

Picking the Right Industrial Workbench Top

March 25, 2009

Your work surface is the most important part of your industrial workbench. If you pick the wrong surface it may stain or wear prematurely. The wrong work surface may even lead to an accident. At RDM Industrial Products, we offer top quality work surfaces for all of our industrial workbenches with a variety of surfacing options. If needed, our sales team can help guide you through the process of selecting the right surface. Below are four quick examples of the workbench surfaces that fit various workplace demands.

Cleanroom: Stainless steel is not always the go-to material for the surface of a cleanroom workbench. The exact requirements are based on particular cleanroom standards. Stainless steel surfaces don’t scratch easily or accumulate foreign matter. They can also be quickly and easily cleaned. Electropolished stainless steel can be very pricey, but is necessary for clean rooms of class 10 or above. For cleanrooms of class 100 or less, there are many other more cost-effective options available, such as our standard plastic laminated top with added phenolic backing sheet. The laminated surface does not particulate, and the underside of the wood substrate is sealed with the phenolic backing sheet.

ESD Static Control: If you are working with static sensitive materials or equipment the top choice is clear: You need a static control table with an ESD protective laminated work surface. These surfaces work in concert with our properly grounded steel table frames, providing a dissipative path that leads harmful static away from your products or equipment. They also help to reduce electrical charge buildup.

Heavy Duty Manufacturing: Stainless steel tables provide a durable work surface for manufacturing, though an additional layer of rough material may be warranted for traction. Keep in mind that in these cases, you will need a table frame that will support your specific load / activity. We also offer solid plate steel tops for heavy-duty applications.

Semi-Service: In this case, the workbench actually serves as front of house furnishing where it’s not only visible to the public, but may even be used by customers. There are a number of “Do it yourself” businesses that need a proper mix of beauty and utility. In this case, the right material is really based on a combination of use and image. Stainless steel is great for kitchens, for instance, while wood (see our wood industrial workbenches) is a great all around material. Also, our plastic laminated tops are available in hundreds of standard colors and patterns.

Whatever your choice for a work surface, we have the industrial table solution you need, or we can manufacture one with the dimensions and materials you specify. Contact RDM to find out how we can make tables / workbenches that are a precise fit for your needs.

Lab Furniture Surfacing: More Than Superficial

January 27, 2009

One of the most common mistakes people make when they’re outfitting a lab for private development and manufacturing is to ignore the type of lab surfaces they need in order to perform safe, productive work. Lab tables and other laboratory or industrial furnishings that look the same side by side can actually have vastly different uses, depending on the type of work surfaces they use. Here at RDM we can manufacture furnishing solutions to meet and exceed your needs; the dimensions and surface materials are separate concerns, but both are important. Your table or bench needs to fit its area — but it also needs to survive actual use, too. Below are some basic guiding principles when it’s time to place your order:

Know the Standard: Always be aware of your local city, state and federal laws, as well as professional advisories for the material you expect to be handling. For example, if you’re handling live specimens you probably should peruse the CDC’s Biosafety Level Criteria. Private companies will not typically work with infectious agents, so in all likelihood you’ll look to Biosafety Level-1 criteria, which specify a water-impervious surface with the ability to handle moderately high temperatures. Other fields will have specific requirements in for heat, chemical reaction and conductivity.

Don’t Skimp on Surface Integrity for the Sake of Price: It’s never worth it to save money by skirting regulations and advisories. Aside from the safety and liability issues the fact is that you won’t really save money. You’ll just make the demand for a replacement come that much sooner. If you purchase a bench that allows water to penetrate any cracks or crevices on the surface coating, you’ll end up with enough rot or corrosion to rapidly render it useless. Besides, lab surface technology has advanced to the point where it’s economical to make choices that exceed the requirements. Trespa’s TopLab Plus is one example of an excellent all-around solid surface material that suits many laboratory and industrial area applications.

When in Doubt, Ask: With over three decades in the industrial furniture business, RDM has plenty of experience outfitting research and manufacturing facilities with lab furniture of all kinds. If you’re not sure how to outfit a space within your budget, talk to us. We’ll draw on what we know to help you find the best possible solution. Contact RDM for your lab furniture solution. We’ll strive to exceed your expectations.

Ergonomic Products Make Your Industrial Workbench or Lab Table More Efficient

January 11, 2009

RDM Industrial Products features a wide range of ergonomic products. In many cases, ergonomics is used as a buzzword to describe any comfortable piece of furniture or equipment, but there’s much more to it than that. Ergonomic adjustments make work environments more efficient and easier to use productively. Here are five ways proper ergonomic products do that for a lab table, industrial workbench or other professional workstation.

Body Alignment

The reason “ergonomic” is used as a synonym for “comfortable” is because of this benefit. If your monitor is in the right position you can see it without straining your neck. You can type with less chance of suffering a repetitive strain injury. This is the most commonly known benefit of ergonomic products.

Cognitive Ease

Less well known is how ergonomic products help you think better. This is because proper equipment allows you to adjust your workspace into a more intuitive configuration. For example, if you need to enter data after inspecting a sample in a lab, the ergonomic solution is to put the monitor at or near the same sight line. This means the worker doesn’t have a gap where the sample is out of sight, where he might forget and have to check again, slowing his progress.

Injury Reduction

As everyone knows, less comfortable workspaces can cause injury due to repetitive strain, but the fact is that poor ergonomics cause injury by promoting inattention or leaving hazards in a worker’s path.

Time Motion Efficiency

Correct ergonomics lets people work faster, by positioning workstation elements in such a way as to reduce the number of motions required to complete a task. Many companies hire professionals to perform time motion studies in their workplace, but any perceptive manager can improve efficiency just by looking at how a workstation forces someone to take certain steps, and then modifying that space to eliminate those steps.

The manifold benefits of ergonomic equipment will multiply your workstation’s output. Contact RDM for product ideas that can do this for you.

RDM Industrial Products’ Custom Industrial and Lab Furnishings

January 6, 2009

One of the advantages of buying from RDM is that as a manufacturer, we are able to make custom orders to fit your industry, workspace and safety requirements. While we offer a tremendous selection of industrial workbenches and lab tables, these can be seen as starting points to help you order a custom product in addition to being standard products themselves. Our industrial furniture gallery is also an excellent way to help you define exactly what you need.

You can help make the ordering process as smooth as possible by following a few simple steps. First of all, make sure you’re familiar with all applicable, state, local and federal regulations that might apply to installing the new furnishings. For many businesses this is as simple as checking the local fire code, but if you work with hazardous materials or perform research your requirements can be much stricter.

Another thing that you can do to ensure an easy ordering process is to accurately measure the space your furniture is going to occupy. This is a simple task that can save time and pain. By avoiding inaccurate, out of date floor plans, you can avoid major estimating and install catastrophies. Please make sure you have reliable, current measurements.

Talk to us to see what we can build for you (the answer is: almost anything). We can recommend materials, offer initial quotes and answer questions about the item’s characteristics and life cycle.

Schedule work around the installation. If you’re moving a wheeled workbench in this may take no time at all, but if it’s time to install permanent counter space or complex lab furnishings you will need to figure out how installation will affect your work. Pay special attention to time sensitive activities such as industrial curing and similar manufacturing processes.

Contact RDM Industrial Products to start the process or ask for more detailed guidelines. We’re ready to provide the perfect custom industrial furniture solution for you.

Gallery Spotlight: Lab Tables and Furniture

December 5, 2008

This time around we’ll be looking at RDM’s lab tables and other lab furnishings. We provide both standardized and custom lab furniture solutions for our clients. Let’s see some of the products we build for this category.

This is the Model A-109P-WD Wood Frame Laboratory Table. It features a chemical resistant surface that makes it ideal for heavy duty, general purpose use. Similar models are available in heavy duty steel. Like all of our lab furniture, we can provide many different custom options for everything from surfacing to built-in storage.

This is one of our Flame Resistant Metal Cabinets. Its reinforced steel construction and coating make it the ideal safe solution for storing flammable materials. This cabinet comes in many different sizes and configurations beyond what’s shown here.

This is an adjustable-height lab table frame we had custom designed for a school. Note that at the time this photo was taken we had not yet installed the work surfaces. The customer had specific space, storage and color requirements that we were happy to satisfy. This photo shows the table area (at the back) in a lowered position, but it can actually hydraulically lift above the height of the sink. You can find other pictures in our custom desk gallery.

Contact us to order or inquire about your custom lab table or furniture solution. We’re eager to discuss and meet your needs.