Hamilton/Roberts Designs Woodworking : Fine Wood Boxes : Wall Shelves

Quick and easy sawhorses. It doesn’t get much simpler than this, particularly considering they are pretty strong sawhorses that, when folded, take up about 3 inches of space. Just make sure you don’t accidentally saw through the hinges at the top! The photos tell you all you need to know. Some 1″ x 4″s and five hinges. I’ll leave the joining up to you. I used dowels at the time (about 15 years ago!) but might put some extra effort next time and use floating tenons. The last photos show a jig for holding a kayak I was building in our tiny shop with NO space to work on a 20′ kayak. Using a bicycle hoist rigged with longer rope, it’s a simple matter to drop it down from the rafters for working on the sawhorses.

UPDATE. Well, the old sawhorses actually did give up the ghost last month so I made two shiny new ones. This time I did use the floating tenon joinery (using my Multi Router) instead of dowels. On the old ones almost all the dowels eventually failed. Here are three photos of how they went together and the dimensions. Each sawhorse takes two 8ft 1″x4″s.