Originally Posted by
Stanley Covington
You are welcome.
These four smaller horses are intended to be used primarily for layout and saw work while resting on the floor/slab/ground with me sitting in front of two of them.
The other two are set off to the side to keep completed pieces or the next pieces close at hand, or to support material to both sides of the mitersaw.
Resting a beam of some sort on two horses provides a place for chisel work and cutting mortises, etc, using a butt clamp or adjustable C-clamps. The planing beam can do double duty.
The horses nest together, and can be strapped into a compact bundle, and thrown over my back to carry one-handed from truck to jobsite. Very convenient.
The other four are the same height, but the beam is twice (?) the thickness and length, and the feet have a wider stance. Those are in the US right now. These are more stable and better able to handle heavier loads. Four of them can support several tons with no problems whatsoever.
The little horses also work very well when placed on a workbench for gang-layout and gang-sawing.
Another useful application is glue-ups and assembly. The horses make it easy to apply clamps. I recommend placing a sheet of newspaper over each sawhorse to keep glue drippings from accumulating. It can get messy otherwise.
You can see horses supporting the boards the guy is working on in the fourth picture in my first post.
If you decide to make some, avoid the temptation to use a heavy hardwood. They need to be lightweight and the wood equal in hardness or softer than whatever they will support. Making them pretty will make you look amateurish in the eyes of professionals, at least in Japan where these are seen everywhere. Mine are fancier than most.
Four of these horses can support everything from doors to entire timber frame bents during assembly. Just put one at each corner.
I think I broke the toe of one of the feet off once, but just glued it back on and pinned it with a finish nail from the bottom. They are very durable.
I have a Makita mitersaw (also in the US) to which I attached similar feet making the table the same height as my 8 horses. This is a very useful arrangement in the field, as you can imagine.
The plywood table is a great tool. Cheap, strong, versatile, easy to transport, and extremely useful. As I said before, I don't think this is a Japanese invention, since I can recall seeing similar tables on construction sites in the US when I was a young man, usually for drawings. If you work in the field, a table like this is very useful. I had one that I used for many years, but gave it to a subcontractor friend in California before transferring to Japan. 5/8" CDX, painted with white exterior latex, with my company name stenciled on each leg. The paint helped to keep them from walking away, and protects them from sunlight and rain-damage if they get caught in a shower before I could get them indoors.
I don't recommend it, but I have seen carpenters make an ersatz tablesaw by bolting a circular saw to the underside of the table. Very dangerous, but useful.
PS: If you drill a hole in the plywood top, you can lock the all the parts, either while assembled or disassembled, with a chain or cable lock. Not a problem in Japan, but I had one go walkabout over a weekend in the US.