sawnhorse

I set out to build me some sawn horses the other day, two to the couple. I went to the big box and bought me a brand new board just for luck, the old swamp water salvage would have to do for the rest. Took an hour and another half to get home with that board. It looked beautimus in the store but now it look like if it weren’t cracked up so much I could screw it in the ground no problem. I glued the board and two fingers together and used some lacquer I had laying around to try to make it hold still long enough to get a few screws and some glue in it, on it, around it, whatever worked.

You ever had one of those days? After the thing with the board I knew it wasn’t gonna be my day when my Stanley taping measurer broke on me. Not broke in two, the danged numbers went crazy. I measured up four legs, two were way longer. I recut the short legs until my saw got hot, still too short! There are only so many ways four legs can go on another board. I made a teeter-totter, then I made a sliding down board, then I made something look kinda like what I had in mind if you back up a ways and squint, a long ways and squint a lot. I hammered and glued and sawed and screwed and this picture is what my first sawn horse looked like. Gotta admit it didn’t look much like a horse, didn’t look much like a saw either but after looking at it awhile I kinda liked it. Problem was with my Stanley box of numbers on the fritz I hadn’t measured on anything and I didn’t see no way I was gonna make another one this beautimus and look kinda sorta mostly maybe the same.

Hu
 

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Gotta be a plan “B” here somewhere. Gonna fry me up a pot of coffee and chicory and contemplate on this awhile. Hmm, another board or three, most near a quarter ton worth of 35’s, I could maybe put my lathe on it. I done gone and built me a lathe stand and didn’t even know it!

Hu

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I'm still using a couple wooden saw horses my Father made before I was born! I'm 69! He used them when building several houses. Somehow they have stayed together and I have used them a lot. Starting to show some signs of dry rot, darn things just done last!
 
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That one is a beauty, it would be a shame to make a twin and then they would always be in competition. Best to do is get out your Stanley box of metric numbers and make a miniature of it and let the first one think it's a Daddy. After all it is fathers day...
 
:rofl: Great story Hu, and I like your lathe stand. (I'm thinking these other guys missed the jokes.) My Craftsman lathe was on a similar stand. ;)

Hmm...I might just need to try that whole fried coffee thing. :rolleyes:
 
:rofl::rofl::rofl: Looks like a hobby horse I once tried to build, only without the saddle. Never could get it to eat, but holy moly did it dump..
 
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a little New Orleans Blend cures most things!

The coffee goes great any kind of way except straight out the bag! I have known people to chew the roasted coffee on turnaround projects(long hour seven day a week construction jobs) to stay awake though.

That lathe stand is butt ugly and would have cost more than the lathe was worth built from new materials but I raised the lathe up about ten inches from the sit down reloading table it was originally on that was moved here just because it was light. That made tool angles a ton easier. With no rewind on the machine being able to hollow from the backside seems like it is going to be a big plus too. Also, turning on this is like turning on some of the six or eight thousand pound metal lathes I turn on sometimes, nothing moves! I haven't spun any badly out of balance stuff on it yet but I suspect this stand won't go skating across the floor like the table did sometimes. Those fine rubber feet cut from a floor mat square should help with that too. I like that it stays in place when I lean my petite 230 pounds on it.

All in all for an investment of $12 I'm pretty happy with my lathe stand. Pretty happy I don't have to build another to match too! Maybe I'll go with that "son of" idea for my brother's little Jet lathe.

Talking seriously about wood for a minute, looking at the end grain on the two by twelves at the big box it was obvious that the trees they came from weren't much bigger than that twelve inches. Getting some wood from naturally grown big timber would no doubt make us all much happier. I had some of those old saw horses older than me and left them when I sold a business and had no place to store them. Sure missed them!

Hu
 
Be sure to keep it in-sight of the other machines for stability, and the jet 'pet' sounds like a winner :thumb:

"many domesticated horses will become anxious, flighty and hard to manage if they are isolated. Horses kept in near-complete isolation,
particularly in a closed stable where they cannot see other animals may require a stable companion such as a cat, goat or even a small
pony or donkey to provide company and reduce stress." ......Borrowed from the wiki here :D
 
Be sure to keep it in-sight of the other machines for stability, and the jet 'pet' sounds like a winner :thumb:

"many domesticated horses will become anxious, flighty and hard to manage if they are isolated. Horses kept in near-complete isolation,
particularly in a closed stable where they cannot see other animals may require a stable companion such as a cat, goat or even a small
pony or donkey to provide company and reduce stress." ......Borrowed from the wiki here :D

The expression 'to get your goat' has its origins in horse racing. Goats have been used as companion animals for high-strung race horses, to keep them calm. Someone wanting to fix a race would slip into the barn the night before the race, steal the goat, then an upset, distracted horse would run a bad race. Hence, if you are upset and not at your best, it is said that someone has 'gotten your goat.'
 
The expression 'to get your goat' has its origins in horse racing. Goats have been used as companion animals for high-strung race horses, to keep them calm. Someone wanting to fix a race would slip into the barn the night before the race, steal the goat, then an upset, distracted horse would run a bad race. Hence, if you are upset and not at your best, it is said that someone has 'gotten your goat.'

Oh well, nuthin like hijacking my own thread, it was all in fun anyway! A friend paid a couple three thousand for a thoroughbred filly. As luck would have it when she was a weanling her full brother ran out a quarter million dollars or so and she was a hot commodity all of a sudden!

She was at the track with a trainer as a two year old and the horses do indeed get a lot of bad habits standing in a stall twenty-three hours a day. She started weaving. The horse swings it's head side to side in a rhythm and gets their whole body going. Burns up a lot of energy in a day's time plus like most bad habits it was highly contagious. Soon you will have a whole barn full of horses doing it. The trainer called my friend Roland and told him to bring the horse a goat.

No clue what good the goat would do but Roland went to the stock yard and bought a huge billy goat, about three-quarter the size of the horse. The trainer put the goat in the stall with the thoroughbred and she started weaving. The goat reared up on it's hind legs and butted her in the ribs as hard as he could! Sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a ripe watermelon. A few minutes later she started to weave again. The goat came all the ways across the stall on his hind legs, BOOM again! I went to the track with Roland a few days later and every time the filly even turned her head she kept a close eye on the goat. Her ribs had taken all they could stand!

Another goat and thoroughbred story, a trainer had a goat that would patrol his whole forty stall barn, ducking under the door nets to butt weavers. Just a common brush goat, going rate about thirty-five dollars or less at the time. Another trainer with a barn full of weavers gave him six hundred and fifty dollars for that goat.

Hu
 
I'd say this makes it official!

No mo sawnhorse. I roughed out a chunk of oak over 14" diameter and four and a half inches thick, 25 pounds, and put it on the lathe. I have to hand crank to get the Craftsman lathe going, a bit of an overload. It blew the surge protector if I tried to start it from a standing start. This is the first and last time I try to spin over 15-17 pounds maximum on this light duty lathe. However, did the ten cent test, two nickels on the lathe ways while I first started roughing at 650 claimed RPM, they didn't twitch! I'd say that makes this thing officially a lathe stand, now I just need a lathe!

Only 89 degrees, feels like 99 according to the weather and I can't turn on my fan without blowing the breaker the lathe is on. What kinda idiot is turning outdoors in this? It came down to a choice between playing with the lathe or mowing the lawn that I should have been doing, an acre or so. I decided the lawn would wait till tomorrow, maybe the next day. 50% chance of rain tomorrow, I can hope!

Hu
 
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