My company, Red Gate software, has given me a 6 week sabbatical. I’m documenting the time with all the posts under a tag if you want to follow along.

I need a few sawhorses for my flagpole. It’s 22ft in length, and I’m thinking I need at least 4, perhaps 5 sawhorses in order to work on it properly. With that in mind, I went looking for plans last week. I didn’t want to buy more, especially since many of them I’ve seen at the store don’t last, don’t work well, or aren’t that strong.

I found a guy selling folding ones, and selling plans. I thought, hmm, I could do that, and embarked on a prototype last week. My thought was that I’d see if this worked, and then build more.

It didn’t. Apart from being too low (though it was a test), I couldn’t get the angles right and it wasn’t as stable as I wanted. The folding thing is nice, but I think I can do better.

I searched again this week and found this guy’s video and article. I wasn’t impressed at first, but when I saw him show the strength and simplicity, I thought this was a good plan. I started off measuring things, marking up my wood.

Next I jointed the braces so they’d glue together cleanly. I also jointed the tops, even though that was a bit of overkill.

Once that was done, I glued the pieces together. No metal in here, just glue. I won’t want to accidently get into trouble with cutting at some point.

While that was going on, I trimmed the ends of the legs. I had to shave off an angle, and I used the circular saw first, but that was a problem. I actually messed up a couple of them. I fixed things later, but a lesson learned.

I also had to dado out a place for the legs to attach. Once the glue dried, I used the circular saw to cut out a slow. Slow going, but I got it done.

Now time to put things together. Here’s the first leg going on. I glued and screwed it to the cross brace.

From there, it was pretty easy to add the other four legs. I wasn’t worried about glue drying here, so I turned it upside down right away and went to work on the angle braces made of plywood.

Here’s the first finished one. It was fairly solid and level.

And strong!

I took a break, hit the store, and came back to finish the second one. I have parts for 2 more, but I needed to tackle a few other things today.