Japanese Sawhorses
Sturdy designs in two sizes excel on the floor and on the benchtop.
I can’t remember where I first saw a Japanese planing beam on trestle horses, but I do remember my first thought: “I gotta make a pair of those!” Having grown up around wobbly A-frame sawhorses made from 2x4s and festooned with paint spatters, bent nails, and errant sawkerfs, I thought those trestle horses seemed so sturdy, so clean, so intentional. I make them with drawbored mortise-and-tenons, which add another step to the build but provide extra solidity in joints that will see a lot of stress over the years. Because these heavy-duty horses have myriad uses, referring to them as sawhorses sells them short. I prefer to be more accurate: They are workhorses.
The design of the low horses stems from the fact that most Japanese woodwork is done while sitting. I rarely work on the floor, but I use low horses all the time on the benchtop.…
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Comments
I had been thinking about building a pair of saw horses but all models I saw were clunky or cumbersome to build. These japanese horses are very nice set of horses. I will build these when summer rolls in. Thanks for the article.
I just finished building a pair of these and they turned out beautiful. I used douglas fir 4x4s for most everything and then simple 2x4s for the cross bars. I don't have a hollow chisel mortiser so instead of square pegs I used oak dowels. I highly recommend building a pair of these.
My first sawhorse builds were copies of James Krenov’s sparse design in one of his early books. They are light, sturdy and store out of the way.
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