today we're looking at this Marco aluminium bench trunking by Atkore
reminds me of being back in a science laboratory what we've been experimenting on I was just doing
a time at school gary it was at school i don't think i really appreciated how close those
socket outlets were to the soldering iron that i never mastered and we've seen that in a previous
video aren't we we have yeah so probably best it was made out of aluminium with your wandering
hands around yeah right that's probably where most people have seen bench type sockets like
this mounted in trunking systems when you're at school but great for lots of applications
obviously laboratories schools healthcare in factories as well yeah and you know myself
yeah mounting sockets onto benches especially when you're going to move them around
can actually simplify your electrical installation makes it very versatile doesn't it the bench moves
with the power outlets on it you've obviously only got to find the feed for that making the
process easier to flick around yeah so should we have a closer look at this system yeah please
not uh had a look at the internals of one before so it's pretty similar to
obviously dead or trunking but is on an angle so obviously your sockets are more usable on a bench
so this is an aluminium profile and in the middle here there is the facility to put a dividing
separator uh so you may have your mains cable in there or your data cables in another compartment
i've also seen in factories this used to run say compressed air lines down if they're using air
tools on assembly benches as well that's a good idea any other colours other than the aluminium
um so yeah it's satin aluminium or it can have a white finish to match the upvc inserts on the
front where you clip in your accessory boxes okay so that's nicely got it covered i like
the inside a lot of the compressed air i think is that a trick that you used used a few holes
always a few tricks that yes again it's a on a bench production environment yes try to keep
minimized pipes and wires it's a great solution it comes in two meter lengths okay and you can
also buy a back-to-back version that we've got here as well so say you have two benches there's
obviously opposing sides facing each other um that's useful for there for smaller installations
you can cut these pedestal units ah right so that's a standalone unit that can be bought is it
yeah so this is an off the shelf uh unit obviously it's cut down to the required length you can have
one with two double sockets or single sockets or single double socket and again they come in
sort of single units or back to back variants as well so that's a full gang all the way down
to one gang and back to back as variants yeah so that's three gang that's one game right okay yeah
i think you're probably going to be screwing this one to the side of this bench if you found it very
andy's into about it haven't you yeah it is i just yeah i can see there's finding a home on the eef
expansion is again because we often use power we often have to use data on the bench as well that's
great the boxes that clip in there you can get 35 millimeter deep and 25 millimeter deep boxes and
that's 35 mil deep yeah yeah and obviously your lid clips in there so it's hidden by the accessory
when it's mounted so when we're talking about lids obviously there's always that sometimes you have
to join the lid together don't make joining pieces yes so you can get joining pieces to join two
lengths of extrusion together look pretty similar to the end caps guys good thing about the joining
strip is obviously if you don't quite get that straight we'll cut to that a little bit later on
i think we'll cut to it now let's have a little look yeah yeah i had an attempt so we did get
you know cutting this extrusion i've used our milwaukee bandsaw that we've used before uh
which will cope up 125 mil this is 100 millimeter profile so i thought yeah i'll have a go on that
and as a first attempt i don't think that's that bad you can drop a comment below on what you think
um when it comes to cutting pieces obviously when you get the corners
things get a little bit tricky i wouldn't like to use the bandsaw on a corner okay so bring it in so
luckily you can get internal and external angles pre-cut obviously with a with a tidier
miter than you might be able to do yourself and they're sort of solidly welded together as well
the other good thing is there is an earth an earth point on each piece of aluminium extrusion as well
and i'm thinking maybe i'm going to put i'd know 50 mil between socket outlets or data points and
all that would they give you a pre-cut 50 ml you can even if you if you can't cut the lid yourself
there is an exact 55 millimeter spacer to space the accessory outlets if you further want to
reduce time we haven't got as much trunking as we had delivered because the minute arrived we
had a purpose for it so should we cut to the future when we actually installed it
fit this marco bench trunk into our drill bench because we move it around all the time so just
need to shorten it a little bit try to get a straight line using our milwaukee band saw
i must give you a little bit of fair dibs you did quite a good effort cutting that strike
first first attempt uh on this um so just bringing in the cable entry at the back so
just drill a 20 millimeter hole through the trunk and then a slightly larger hole in the
bench itself to accommodate the cable gland so once the cable glands in position we can look at
fastening it down onto the bench drill a couple mounting holes position the trunking in place
i'll just cut the first one of our lid sections just to get the spacing fabric wiring excess we're
just going to fit two double sockets on here again it's just like regular dado trunking not being
aluminium obviously we've got to connect the cpc to the unit itself they do provide a point in each
one gary and there is a top tip isn't it there is a top tip it's only on one of the sides so when
you made your cut you never checked you were in a very good position because you cut off the bit
that didn't have the earth tag on yeah and notice the pre-made corners also have the earth point on
as well to warn our singles into our sockets we said earlier that you can put data and we didn't
put data into we didn't use the divider for these ones so ever it's a simple system okay it's just
the case for us really now for the trunking is actually just to finish those lids off
when you do put the sockets on there is a top tip isn't it not to screw them down tightly because
the lid does go under the sockets themselves yes that's it and here we're using uh some
conduit singles but we're also bringing in an h07-rnf heavy duty rubber flexible cable and
we've used this as an opportunity to test out the new mk rapid fix sockets here uh because you can
combine different cable types in in one accessory yeah that's class one class two class five what
we've got yeah so we're in there so this is the tip so when we're putting these back at this stage
without the lid don't screw them all the way back because of the little slide just under there so
finish off the last socket outlet exactly the same process we've only got class two conductors now
so strip those off i'm gonna use the same socket outlets i think pairing the two together makes
an immensely quick system degree yeah it does yeah so just cut those final bits of
lid and then in this case i'm putting the end caps on so the good thing about this
extrusion system the screw ports in the end so it's just the case putting self-tapping screws
into the end cap and then we're job done yeah and as we pan back now you'll see look at that
and that can be moved anywhere that we want it to go straight forward process well what a great
system you can see there we put it on that bench that bench is going to move in the future so we'll
take our power with us however i've noticed back here one that i hadn't seen before is this part
of the same system uh it's a it's a relatively bench trunking so think of that problem we have
sometimes in an open plan office particularly you've got a solid floor you need to drop some
power and data down in the middle of an open plan space this is the power pole that i think we need
to look at in a future video okay so that'll be a separate standalone video for that one
but as always at efixx we're interested in your feedback and your comments have you been using
this trunking on a bench and you've got some great applications you want to share with the community
please leave them in the comments below and we'll try and get back to as many as we can