Not as my friends joke about.. shaving a horse, or a place to sit and shave myself.
The shaving horse, schnitzelbank, zugstuhl, or whatever you want to call it is a very versatile work bench. I made mine way way back in ’84. It is modeled after several Bavarian style horses that I had seen.
I made it from old barn beams, right under me there you can see a little notch from an old mortise.
It has spent most of it’s existence outside in all sorts of weather. Think Central New York State.
Last year the pin that holds the head in place broke (it was a very hard mahogany piece), and I was thinking that my horse might be on it’s last legs, it was starting to rot. So i made a new peg of oak,and it snapped, I made another one, it snapped. I made one of beech it snapped a couple of days ago. So I replaced it with:
yeah! break that!.. but the day before…
the rot was starting to get serious. then I stumbled when getting off from it… and it split in half.. it really irritated the carpenter bee that was nesting in it. sorry I didn’t get a good picture.
I did This quick and ugly patch up to keep going:
from some scraps of 2 x 6, but now I have to decide if I want to “improve” this, or do I want a complete re-build? I could secure those legs better, and put a wider seat on the area where I actually sit. Or I could take this opportunity to make an English bodger’s style horse. Just to see if I might like that type more or less than this.
I have made idea sketches of at least a half dozen different sorts of shaving horses so I have a notion of how to make all of them.
Decisions, decisions
be well, count your fingers
K
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