Homemade Meditation Benches
My friend,
Lahiru, suggested to make few meditation benches as a donation to
Indiana Buddhist Temple few weeks back. I had no idea what a meditation bench was, but luckily he had a basic one with him. After few modifications to the design, here’s what we ended up with.
If you like to make one at home too, here are the details.
- Materials
- Steps
- Cutting wood – a hand saw is enough actually, but I used a jig saw to make it bit faster and to cut the semi circles on legs. Dimensions are given below
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| For legs, cut from the dashed lines, which are 1/2” from each edge. The 5.25 and 6.75 are lengths along the outside edges though. Alternatively, you could determine the angle from these two values and then calculate the the lengths for the actual cut piece. | The jig I made to draw semi circles and flush legs to the size.
About the semi circle, I just used one of my wife’s planting pots to draw it. So I didn’t measure its diameter. You can use whatever shape or size you like. |
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- Fixing hinges – I used a router to make the mortises so that legs would close flush with the main board.You could omit this if this is not a concern.
- NOTE. I have flipped one side of the hinge (by removing its pin) to get them fixed as shown above. The reason was that the hinges I used won’t close flushed. See diagrams below.
- I didn’t like the protruding wedge shape (right most image above), hence the flipping (see here to know how to remove hinge pin) and mortising.
- Now, with some custom mortise routing I could get the legs to close flushed (above right). I made few jigs to make it easy to batch these as below.
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| Mortise on the main board (ignore the writing), it’s the same for legs except the groove for hinge pin is on the edge rather in the middle and only half of the groove is necessary. | Simple jig made from 1/2” MDF. The dimensions for the hole depends on the flush trim router bit you are going to use. I used a 1/2” bit that came with this mortise kit. Roughly mine had about 1/16” added to actual hinge dimensions |
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| I had to use this 1/8” hardboard mask over the jig to get the depth difference in the mortise for groove and the hinge plate. So the process was to route entire shape WITH mask and then route the groove only WITHOUT mask. A plunge-based router would have eliminated this need. | Cross section of the mortise |
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- Finishing – 120 grit sanding followed by de-waxed shellac with 220 sanding between coats.
I think this covers most of the stuff you need to complete this project and any questions are welcome in comments. Happy bench making !!
Nice work Saliya :-)!!
ReplyDeleteSaliya,
ReplyDeleteI have couple of questions, having build my fair share of benches, how do you stop the bench from wobbling and thus collapsing on the person using it.I have build quite a few portable sets much larger than this even using a bridge support I still get a wobble. also it seem a little small anybody to sit on with any security, or do not get the right use by thinking that someone could sit on those?
Overall is a nice finishing job, I hope my wondering question are not understood as a criticism but merely collaboration of one woodworker to another to understand and improve each other's work, share ones experiences to the benefit of both.
Peter,
ReplyDeleteI value your comment and you are correct that the moment you introduce hinges to the legs the bench tends to wobble. However, in this it didn't happen because of the way how a person would sit on them. Here's a link (http://www.dharma-rain.org/zazen/legs.html) to a website, which shows the usage of these benches where the person's legs go underneath the bench. The bench then acts as a support to maintain a straight posture. Also, if the person tilt to one side, the bench leg on that side will try close, but it's unable to do so because the leg on the other side will push to the bench seat and lock. I had an idea to add a collapsible bridge support to secure this further, but after testing out it seemed unnecessary. About the size, 1.5" x 7.25" board seems enough for a single person to sit comfortably.