Ultimate sawhorse

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horizontal component as well as vertical owing to the angles. That's resisted only by friction on ground w/o the strap. It may be reasonably stable if the angles aren't too severe and the surface is rough, but the force is there and has to be resisted...

Makes no difference as far as the spreading force goes...I presume he did it for symmetry and to make the footprint the same for both sets of legs--if both were inside on the one side, that side would have a 3" narrower spacing than the other two owing to the thickness of the tubax'es.

On 1/5/2012 7:33 AM, Limp Arbor wrote: ...

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Well, let me make a guess... :)

From a crude guesstimate of the angles from the end-on view of his video, it looks like roughly a 70 degree angle of the legs to ground.

So, cos(70) = 0.34 or let's say 1/3 for "close enough"

If it's loaded w/ 100 lb uniformly, that would be only 25 lb/leg and only a third of that would be horizontal or roughly 8 lbf.

Not a lot; granted, the problem is that w/o the strap it would want to spread if anything upset the balance at all to raise a leg from firm ground contact so friction force went away.

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narrower (folded and unfolded), and stronger.

Does not require much tension to make them stable.

Looks to me like the reason the legs are laid out the way they are is so you only need one set of templates to drill the holes (plans come with cutout templates for the top end of the legs). If you wanted to you could make the two inside legs open left and the outside legs swing right. The pivot point is critical otherwise the notches won't line when the legs are open. I suppose you could cut the legs and clamp them in the 'open' position then drill the bolt holes to avoid alignment trouble.

Once open and strapped these things are strong and stable. The legs are splayed out in two directions to aid in stabilizing them. I used

They obviously don't fold up as small as my yellow steel horeses but they are lighter and just as stable. My yellow folding ones don't get much use because they are too low for me to use w/o extending the legs. If you have ever used these you know that they don't fold up completely once you extend the legs. (not mine)

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I estimated about 8-lb/100-lb of loading on each end (or ~15 total). The strap tension will be at least partly compensated for by ground frictional force.

Close enough? :)

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On 1/9/2012 8:03 AM, Limp Arbor wrote: ...

That would be the obvious way... :)

I haven't tried to draw out one to check on dimensions but seems to me at the cost of using a wider board or gluing up stock that one could offset the pin location from the slot and reverse it so they would close on the crosspiece instead, eliminating the strap entirely.

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