The fine gent over at woodshopdude.com (thanks to this YouTube video on how to build this particular folding sawhorse), provided me with the plans for his sawhorse — which I paid for.
The whole thing is a kind of marvel of 10°- and 22.5° angles, that interlock and intersect in such a way that the legs of this sawhorse splay and flare in two directions — out to the left and right, and also forward and back. It’s two interlocking frames (assembled legs-first, then stretchers) that can be easily tied together with a bowline knot and a trucker’s hitch, to produce a highly stable platform for sawing, or for a table top.
And that’s why I built the sawhorse.
I needed a tabletop for my outdoor workshop, because the next steps on my Dutch tool chest project requires that I lay it flat on its face, and do some work through the back into the front… and I didn’t have any working space in which to do that task. So I needed to make one. I have the table-top, in the form of an old door from one of our bathrooms. I just needed a way to support it outside, and that meant creating a pair of legs for the door. But the ground is uneven (outside, yes)… so that meant building legs that could be stabilized on the ground regardless of where I chose to set up.
The video referenced above (and here) suggests using knots — a bowline and a trucker’s hitch — instead of the ratchet straps of the original design. I chose to go that route because I’m a) cheap like that, and b) it’s useful to learn knots and keep that information in circulation in your brain, and c) both knots are general purpose that have other kinds of usefulness.
It’s hard to tell from the picture below, but this is me picking up the sawhorse one-handed by the top cross-beam… which isn’t attached to anything, and has no reason to come away in my hand at all, except that the two lower stretchers of the sawhorse are tied together.
You can see just a tiny bit of the clothesline that I cut off to use as the attachment rope to bind the two stretchers of the sawhorse together, to the left of my arm.
So…. yeah.
Part of me was initially unhappy that I had to cut all the parts by hand. If I’d had a circular saw station, I thought to myself, I could set the angle to 10° or 22.5° and just run off the parts, lickety split. In practice, though, the biggest trouble was aligning the pieces I’d cut, first to one another in the intended arrangements, and then into the whole. I might have drilled way more screws into way more pieces of wood, than I was supposed to…
But. The sawhorse works, I know some of the easy or common mistakes and how to avoid them next time; and I think I can produce the next one faster and more reliably now that I know what mistakes to watch out for.
It’s a nice bit of design!
Logistics
Logistics is the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies.
There’s not much in the way of supplies or logistics. WoodshopDude recommends two 2″x4″x12′ per sawhorse, and I got that from my own local lumber yard — with the caveat that I can’t transport 12′-boards on or in my car, so I got ten 6′ boards for a pair of sawhorses so I had room for mistakes, and room for the angles on the ends of many of the sawhorse parts. It seems to be working out ok… but I’ll have extra 2×4 scrap for some other project.
I had a lot of problems acquiring hardware, though. Each sawhorse needs two 3/8″ x 3 1/2″ carriage bolts, six washers, two nylon-thread nuts, plus twelve 3″ screws. I know I bought the hardware before, but I couldn’t find it. So I finally broke down and bought new hardware after hunting all over for the old hardware. Except that I found there were shortages of the right screws and bolts… and I wound up buying the wrong things several times, because I didn’t always have the right parts on hand. I think in the end I went to three different hardware stores, and bought a lot of small hex nuts, bolts, screws, and washers that wound up being not quite the right thing. Totally my fault, not the plans — but when I finally had all the parts in front of me, knolled on the countertop, I did gaze a while at them with wonder… I totally didn’t buy these parts before, why did I think I had??
Previous woodworking?
This part is copy pasted from a previous article on woodworking, and periodically revised to account for my ongoing efforts.
This is a guide to previous woodworking projects, and how I’ve been growing my hobbyist set-up, and learning the skills I want to have as a woodworker. I hope you’ll follow along with this journey as I work out the next step in the development of my woodworking set-up.
my current setup (2021-2025) consists of a low Roman-style workbench, a six-board chest for a tool chest that I’m gradually replacing with a Dutch-style slant-top toolchest on a wheeled base, a saw bench and a saw bent for cutting up lumber into parts, and a kit that mostly consists of European and American style hand-tools.
I’ve thought long about tool chests and woodworking efforts and spaces as part of my design work and magical practices, thanks to Christopher Schwarz’s incomparable book, The Anarchist’s Tool Chest. Far from being a guide to bomb-making or overthrowing capitalism, it’s a guide to the tools and techniques of hand-tool woodworkers in Europe from the 1600s through 1800s.
I reviewed the companion volume, The Anarchist’s Design Book, back in 2016 in the midst of some hoopla about a Gordon White book in the occult blogosphere of the time. A short while later, my life exploded to my profound regret, and I lost my woodworking space and opportunities for quite some time, until Schwarz came out with Ingenious Mechanicks, which Rex Kreuger simplified for me a bit, and I built my own Roman-style low or seated woodworking bench. Given how I live, though, and my tendency to pile stuff on any horizontal surface, I figured the Dutch Tool Chest design offered by Megan Fitzpatrick and recorded in her book Dutch Tool Chests from Lost Art Press would be a better fit for me and my woodworking hobbies and habits.
I think I started it the year before the pandemic in 2019, and then finished it in the summer of 2020. Then we moved again, in early 2021, and I was suddenly stuck.
And then I left off of woodworking for a while until I made this saw bench and saw-bent last year, and made a till for my first (badly made) six-board chest. From those projects, I learned a few things about cutting bridle joints and making mortises and tenons… and realized that I now had too many tools to fit in that six-board chest.
