Hasta La Ideas

Having a bench-on-bench can be useful when you need to get the work up higher, or if you’ve got a bad back, as designer/builder Les Hastings does. He finds them useful in his shop in Wichita and is now on his third design, which folds up for travel or storage:

“Here’s my latest project, a small expandable bench.”

“It’s made out if beech, wenge, holly, Red River gum burl, steel and aluminum.”

“Closed it measures 3 1/2″ x 11 1/2″ x 22 3/4 long.”

“Fully open it measures 11 1/2″ wide x 12″ tall x 38 3/4″ long.”

“The finish is Waterlox.”

“There aren’t any plans. I built and designed this as I went along. Thanks for checking it out!”

He also machines the hardware himself (except from the pop-up bench dogs, which are the magnetic ones from Lee Valley). Here are a couple of them under construction with fittings he made from brass:

Here’s a look at the hinge mechanism coming together:

Incredibly, self-taught Hastings designed this without putting pen to paper. “I never draw, I just design as I go, do it in my head,” he says. “That’s just how I roll.”

During a brief chat, I asked him how the bench came about. “This is actually the third [design] I’m on,” he says. The first one came about when he “took a three-day class with Steven Latta on how to build one of these little benches. It was nothing fancy, just to get the work up higher. I was going to build the first one out of 2x4s, then switched to white oak. I still use that one every day.

“And while I was building it, I was already thinking about the next one: Wouldn’t it be cool if it could fold up, be portable? So I started working on that, figured out the hinge and hey, let’s dress it up a little. And while I’m working on that one I started thinking about the next one, let’s make it a little fancier.”

Next I asked him where he sells these. “No, I can’t take any more orders,” he says. “I’ve been trying to retire.” Hastings has had a long career with punishing hours, which I’ll touch on in a future entry.

I ask him if he at least has a website where people can see his work. He has no personal website, but “I’ve got a page on Lumberjocks, on Facebook, and I just started on Instagram,” he says. “I just do what I do, I don’t care to be famous, by any means, I just like to share my stuff, maybe inspire people.”

Hastings has produced some incredible work, and we’ll pick out some more of his projects to show you in the future.