Making the Benches

I was stumped for a solution about how to best attach legs to these benches for a good year or two, before I came up with this solution and could proceed. The legs have dedicated steel female 1/4-20 machine threads that I make using three off the shelf hardware components and a touch of welding. This makes for easy, solid assembly with no degradation from repeated assembly/disassembly. The only tool needed is a #3 phillips screwdriver, which is included.

Router table, not typically made of steel but for my small shop anything large has to serve multiple purposes, router table, welding table, table saw extension table and more. Here we are cutting a new template that will in turn be used to cut a new bench shape.

Template construction for a new 7 foot bench. The finished template will guide a wood router to cut the desired shape from each bench panel.

This is the new panel press, I am very pleased with the result and can now use it to make bench panels up to 8 feet in length. The press itself is built as two stressed skin panels much like the panels that it can now make. In this photo it is being used to press a 7-foot panel for one of the new bench prototypes. note the counter height spiral cone legs supporting the device