The Sawhorse Discovery

I have a few sawhorses. They all suck. Also, I put stuff on sawhorses (usually hoping to keep them above the snow, with mixed success). Thus, all my crappy sawhorses are consumed as redneck storage. I guess I don’t really have sawhorses at all.*

I considered some options to address my sawhorse situation. Expensive ones cost too much. Cheap plastic fittings into which you slot hunks of 2″x4″ are annoying and always off kilter. Mid-tier ones are aluminum folding contraptions that piss me. My least favored sawhorses are made of plastic. They store nice and flat but they’re sketchy at a sawhorse’s core task; holding heavy things. I’ve sprung for some cheap stacking sawhorses at the box store. They’re made of low-rent plywood and the shittiest possible wood. They’re narrow and degrade over time. Mine are shot.

In keeping with my whole “autodidact vibe”, I decided to see what YouTube had to say about building your own sawhorse.

I was pleased to see dozens (maybe hundreds!) of sawhorse designs. I rejected many out of hand. Most are too complex. They annoy me. A sawhorse is a working man’s tool. It should be simple, tough, and cheap. The last thing I want is a sawhorse that’s a marvel of woodworking prowess. That defeats the purpose.

I found a video. It’s linked below. Watch it and you’ll know where I’m going with this.

It’s like they made the video just for me!

At about 3:00 they say: “Sherman used to say when… he interviewed carpenters he would say ‘build me a set of saw horses I’ll come back in a few minutes and if I like them and you did a good job you’ll get hired. If they’re terrible it’s a no-go’.” Holy job interview Batman! I want to live in that world!

Imagine a world before HR! You may laugh but any job seeker will tell you that getting hired and doing the job are almost completely unrelated. Thanks HR!

I ponder the logical consistency of hiring a carpenter based on his ability to make a simple sawhorse! It sounds nice. I pine for glorious simplicities that were rashly disposed in the creation of our current topsy-turvy world.

The evil eye of HR is hell on the productive. It basically eliminated “ability” as a selective factor in any jobsite with more than a few employees. It did it long before I was in the workforce. (Add to that I’m thinking about old-timey “carpenters” when most of the modern economy is thinking “illegal alien who can slap up drywall fast”. A portion of the world is long gone and I’m getting all misty eyed about it. But I digress…)

The video’s silly little story motivated me. Suddenly I really wanted to make sawhorses. I wanted them to come out good enough that in a long gone time I’d have been hired as an apprentice n00b carpenter. (Except I’m just starting out. Any old time, sepia toned, past world carpenter would sense my inexperience and kick me to the curb.)

At about 7:30 they say: “we finally reached irreducible complexity”. Holy shit! That’s a rhetorical kill shot for me. It’s exactly want I wanted! By now I had a man crush for these dudes!

I was searching for something and couldn’t define it. Irreducible complexity is what I’d wanted without even knowing it!

The design requires 3 studs and nothing more. There’s nothing superfluous in the design. If it doesn’t have to be there, it’s not! Adding details to make it “adjustable” or “foldable” or “fancy” would create something that’s more than a sawhorse and not what I wanted. (I may make something like that in the future… but it’ll be just me having fun and not a utilitarian first step.)

So I set out to make a sawhorse. How’d it go?

FABULOUS!

Stay tuned for photos of sawhorses and all sorts of happy thoughts!

A.C.

* Sadly, my homemade boat (upside down and suspended on sawhorses, but exposed to the elements) hasn’t moved in 2 years. It may be rotten or it may be in good shape. I just don’t know. It is what it is. I’ll deal with it in due time.