The World's Best $6 Sawhorse?

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Here's a horse of a different color that will look like pure gold to the hassled handyperson!

Though the traditional sawhorse is a staple of every construction site, there's always room for improvement . . . and if a wobbly workstand and an unwieldy 2 X 4 ever combined to give you an unkind cut, you might be interested in knocking together our "foolproof" framing horse.

Take a look at the design. The longitudinal trough at the top is sized to accommodate a 2 X 4 of any length, and prevents it from skewing under pressure from the saw. The crosswise channel near the center of the horse lets the blade pass through the work freely, and the flush, 1' X 3' surface serves as a compact bench for hammering or measuring.

Perhaps best of all is the fact that the whole project can be put together from three 8-foot 2 X 4s and a scrap of 1 X 4, at a cost roughly equivalent to that of just one pair of conventional sawhorse brackets. Nearly as tempting, it'll require only a handsaw, a hammer, and a tape measure to build.

The first step is to cut the 2 X 4s, using the illustration as a guide. Pay particular attention to the 10-1/4" crosspieces at the top, as they must be trimmed at a slight angle to butt squarely against the splayed legs. Likewise, when cutting the 1/2" X 3-1/2" corner notches in the 14" and 19" platform boards, use that same angle to assure a good fit. The 36" brace rails should also be notched slightly at their upper corners for the same reason; a 1/4" indentation measured at the surface will suffice.

Next, using 8-penny common nails, fasten the legs to the sides of the brace rails at the notches. There should be 3" of 2 X 4 protruding beyond the upper surface of the rails, and the legs ought to join those bars perpendicularly. Once that's done, you can connect the two halves of the horse by nailing the two 10-1/4" cross braces between the ends, and the 10-3/4" struts near the center . . . one 14" from one end, and the other 19" from the other, leaving a 3" space between.