Hey all,

The straight to the facts questions are at the bottom if you don't feel like wading through my ramblings.

Just found this sub, I'm in that magical state where you stumble onto a previously unknown subreddit centered around something you love and you know you have soooooooooo much sorted by best of all time browsing to come.

Anyways, I have 3 main hobbies requiring workspaces: DIY electronics, gunsmithing, and 3D printing. So I used to have a computer desk, a small soldering desk next to it so I could still use the computer while soldering, then on the other side of my room a custom built L bench with the main section being a gunsmithing / general workbench with the smaller section housing a 3D printer and a laser engraver. Well two years of constant worrying (ie bitching) about my health and then over 30 days in the hospital with 2 weeks on life support maybe have kind of slightly made me start to consider thinking about losing the workbench and having a bed instead.

So the garage is being turned into a workshop shared between my roommate and I and I'm trying to figure out how to separate stuff. Most of the printing and engraving stuff is moving to the garage but I still want some basic soldering / electronics capability in my room. I have a 48" Autonomous electric sit/stand desk that is to be my sole work surface in here. I've acquired a dual monitor arm for my 34" ultrawide main monitor and 17"(?) complimentary monitor that I orient in portrait for reading vertically formatted things on, and that was a bit stressful finding on that could place the ultrawide centered and also hold the other one that far off to the side. Anyways, I've also acquired a keyboard/mouse tray (also a chore because I use a 10-key keyboard and a Logitech fancy "the mousepad wirelessly charges the mouse" mouse/pad that is pretty large) and an under-desk PC mount (which I ALSO had problems with in the past finding one wide enough for what I thought was a pretty standard tower case, and I can't recommend the strap style vs a rigid metal frame if anyone else is looking) so I actually have some usable work surface on my desk. I'm now looking for a clever way to mount my Yamaha HS5 studio monitors as currently they're on ~4" stands and are forced to sit behind the displays which is less than optimal. I've never liked horizontally mounting studio monitors but I'm not going to even try to act like I could audibly discern the difference so unless I can find a cost effective and beneficial wall mount for them they'll be laid horizontally on slightly angled foam on the back edge of the desk. Am I pissed I forgot about my subwoofer when thinking I had finally figured out a way to defeat the obnoxious cable stretching effect of a sit/stand desk? No, mind your own business.

So my primary 4" vise moved into the garage to my main workbench but I'd like to mount my Panavise Jr. to my desk but am trying to figure out a cleaner way to do it than drilling 3 large holes into the desk. It has a helping hand base that's similar to their tray base but isn't any larger than the 3 mounting legs on the vise but adds a bunch of threaded holes around the edge for screwing loc-line helping hands into. i had an idea: flush mount powerful magnets into the desk and put corresponding magnets in the helping hand base. This should give me a strong enough hold to handle electronics work but should also be able to be cleanly removed and not have open holes in the work surface when not needed. It has 1/2" (I think) threaded holes all around the circumference of the base and only 3 of them are used for attaching the vise and 4 for helping hands leaving 11 available for this purpose.

My questions are:

• Is anyone aware of strong threaded magnets available for sale?
• I figured 3 ~1/2" magnets in the base and 3 in the desk to match would be enough to secure the vise but still be removable, anyone have any experience with this?
• If I'm unable to acquire threaded magnets what do you think would be the best method to secure the magnets to an aluminum hole?

I'd also like to build a small panel mount cabinet under my monitors so I can add some panel-mount tools like my audio interface, function generator, capacitance meter, either a kit or hand-held oscilloscope, and variable power supply into it and have one clean cabinet for all of them. The audio interface and lab power supply are both in their standard enclosures and while I'll probably just make a custom panel-mount power supply and put the lab supply in the workshop I don't think I'll bother with trying to de-case the interface (Focusrite Scarlett 4i4) so would like to come up with a way to have it fake-mounted along with the rest of the things mentioned. First I was just going to have it at the top of the cabinet (cabinet is going to be roughly the width of my ultrawide and 2 "units" high so all mounted gear sits in two horizontal rows) with a hinged lid so it can be removed if necessary, but I can't really think of a reason I'd ever need to remove it if I can have the back of the unit easily accessible with it in place and more importantly it would sit much more cleanly in the bottom row. I could just have the same hinge idea in place but have the left side of the cabinet hinged, what are the thoughts of the community?