Bowling alley bench top?

[Bob Glenn]

Anyone ever used a section of bowling alley for a bench top? Seems like it should be flat and heavy. There are a couple old bowling alleys out of business in town and I'm thinking of trying to get a section.

[Mike Olson]

i once bought a piece of bowling alley and it was anything but flat. Plus there were so many nails and screws in it that i ended up just cutting them up and throwing them to the curb. Oh, and the one i got had angle iron screwed to the bottom. Once i removed it and tried to move it around, it started to come apart.

[Brian Vaughn]

People have used those in several cases, here's one blog with the progress of someone starting from the beginning http://lumberjocks.com/PurpLev/blog/series/1609

Like Mike found, there are typically a ton of nails holding it together that you've got to remove or work around (Assuming you plan to delaminate it and glue everything back together, since the strips are not typically glued.) But the results can be spectacular.

Here's a couple of more examples:

http://lumberjocks.com/projects/1773

http://lumberjocks.com/projects/40790

[Tom McMahon]

I built my first real bench in 1972 out of a piece of old fir bowling alley and 2x4s. I have built several new bases for it since then. I did not take the nails out of it, I just drilled the dog holes with a sharpened carbide masonry bit after ruining a wood bit. It is no longer my main bench but it is still in the shop and in use.

[Peter Hawser]

Bob, not the same, but I did use maple butcher block - about 2" thick. It was a pain in the keister to plane flat (hand plane), but very hard. On another note, at this very moment the top three threads are all on bench top materials, but cover completely different types of wood. Interesting in demonstrating there are many many ways to build a bench!

[Ryan Mooney]

I have a side bench that I made out of a piece of bowling alley lane.. I didn't do a super job on it (one day project - need to get crap off of the floor now - kind of thing) - but basically pulled the angle iron off the bottom, split off as much width as I wanted and then "spread" it apart by arching up the middle. I then soaked glue into the cracks and forced it back together with pipe clamps. Came out surprisingly flat considering...

If I was making a main bench out of it I'd pull it all apart, pull the nails, re-plane it all and then glue it back together... worth it? maybe... they are usually pretty nice clean/hard wood but you are taking on a lot of work to save a couple of $$. Good experience though (like my dad always said "builds character" or some bs like that ). I have a couple of smaller pieces of maple lane and a few large lanes of vertical doug fir left so we'll see what happens when I get to those

[Jim Matthews]

The first two benches I built used reclaimed alley sections, as they were heavy and inexpensive.

The pieces are slip fit together, without glue - using wire connectors as mentioned in an earlier post.
Most of the pieces used have long grain showing on the "top" face and are stable.

The T&G joint presumably allows for some give with the seasons - to keep this top surface flat.

As a bowling alley, they had a flexible underlayment to allow for some give. On my bench, they were fixed solid.

With sufficient overhang to fit a vise, they took on a pronounced arch like a Halloween Cat.

For bowling alley sections to be used - they must be disassembled, reglued and heavily anchored.

[Zahid Naqvi]

Joe Meazle made one a while back, it's listed in the FAQs sticky. I've seen this bench solid as a rock, obviously.

[Tom Ruflin]

bench.jpgHere is my main bench from a section of bowling alley. It is southern yellow pine. I sanded off many coats of varnish/polyurathane, took it apart and removed the nails (they were easy to remove). I glued it all back together and surrounded it with maple. It is a great bench top.

[Ben Johnson WI]

My bench that I'm currently building is almost like a bowling alley - I used some imperfect T+G hard maple flooring from Lumber Liquidators, ripped off the T+G, and glued it up on the faces to make a 3" thick slab. I got a partial bundle of jatoba flooring too that's being used as an accent stripe for kicks and grins. I decided to err on the thicker side and glued a nice 2x12 I found that was pith-free and dried sufficiently to the bottom, so now I'm up to over 4" thick. I made it in two 12" x 84" slabs, so that machine planing remains an option, and makes each slab just light enough to move by a single strong guy (because I do plan on moving for work in the next 3 years or so).

[Bob Glenn]

Well, thanks guys. I guess it was a good idea, but not a great idea. I do have some oak T&G flooring left over from a house that I may consider using. Thanks