DIY: Cheap/easy bench/vise/brake holder

[Sinfield]

Been meaning to take pics of these for a bit and put up some info on them, but school and skiing have been taking way too much of my time.

My buddies and I spend every friday night drinking beers and waxing/tuning our shit in prep for the weekend, but up till now we'd been doing it on some old cardboard boxes. Obviously not ideal.

I wanted to make a bench that would be relatively compact and portable should I move, or possibly to take up to the mountains w/ me when we stay in condo's or camp. I found a thread on here (can't remember the link) showing how to make inexpensive ski vices, and then I headed to home depot to see what kind of shit I could come up with.

Wound up with two sawhorses. One is made of wood and super stable as a bench, the other is metal and folds down to nearly nothing which makes it super portable. Bonus is that it's also height adjustable.

Armed w/ plenty of Schlitz, a hand saw, and a drill whose battery died every other screw we set about assembling these monsters. Basically we made a T out of two 8" pieces of 2x4 (in the future I'd probably use 10" long pieces, esp if you want to tune boards too.

Assembly is relatively straightforward. Glue and screw.





Also in retrospect, I don't know if I would bother w/ the angle cut for edging. I've since discovered that w/ the ski flat on the bench/vice, you can still edge tune the skis w/out catching the file on the stands.

I bought some silicon to put on the tops of the vices, but since I had a week trip to Vail looming the next day, and because I'm a hack on a bike, I had plenty of extra holey road tubes lying around so just did a temporary tack job to keep the skis from moving around

This is the portable unit. The legs fold into the bottom of the flat surface. Money.


Another dirtbag trick I came up w/ one night while trying to wax all six pairs of my skis w/ only two rubber bands and no wire/twine/rope.

Take old road bike tubes and tie them off. They make about the best/ cheapest brake holders you'll find. Plus you can use them to tie up the vietnamese hookers you keep in your tuning cave. Bonus.



Here's one of the ski attached to the bench. I found that the best way to get it to stay was to cut a longer brake holder out of road tube, and just loop it under the flat part of the bench. That fucker isn't going anywhere. I tossed a couple of screws into the wooden legs to hold my scrapers. A place for everything and everything in it's place right?



Anyway, these things work great, and total cost to build them was about 30 bucks each. In theory they only take ten min to put together, but add too many Schlitzeszez, a hand saw, green, and ski movies into the mix and it may take a bit longer.

A few things that I would change would be longer crosspieces for boards, silicon instead of bike tubes on top, skip the angle cuts, and maybe add a shelf underneath the permanent one for all my other ski tuning shit. Otherwise, these things are bomber and also super easy to move around the shop which is great if your space is limited.

[jm2e]

Looks nice. I've got a similar set up, but I've started thinking I need more support under the tips as they get floppy when I'm scraping cold wax. I think extending the sawhorse top to about 5 feet long would probably work better. Maybe with 3 "clamps" as well?
How's your stability when scraping hard with each of those horses?

[Sinfield]

Hasn't really been an issue, esp on the wooden one. The metal one is a bit more floppy by nature, but we generally do the waxing on that one, then move them over to the wood one for scraping. I also found that it helps to brace the tip of the ski w/ my hip as I scrape.

For a more permanent setup, the longer board would work well I think. I was originally going to do that, but I like having them compact and portable.

[Roxtar]

Love the idea of the road tube, brake holders.
Far stronger than the rubber bands sold for this purpose.

I've been saving my bad road tubes, just knowing an idea like this was coming.
Thanks

[DaSkier]

Hasn't really been an issue, esp on the wooden one. The metal one is a bit more floppy by nature, but we generally do the waxing on that one, then move them over to the wood one for scraping. I also found that it helps to brace the tip of the ski w/ my hip as I scrape..

add one more tube (as on attached picture, in red, either direction..), and it will hold the whole thing in place even better!