Aldo Leopold Bench

The story

I stumbled across some plans for a bench named after the naturalist, Aldo Leopold. It was simple in design and construction, but allowed for several different uses. I sketched out plans for a full size bench, but decided it would be fun to build a single-person bench first.

The plan

A few weeks went by since I copied down the plans, but it just so happened that I grabbed my notebook that was open to the page on a weekend. I had no other urgent plans, so let's get started. These dimensions are for a full size, probably two-person, bench which I still want to build, but for this I stayed small to use up some left over lumber.

Again, all the dimensions stay the same, except for the width of the bench. I figured if this single-person size goes well, then a larger bench is going to be straight-forward enough.

The build

I had a bunch of pressure treated pine left over from building some garden boxes and other things around the house, so I had plenty of off cuts to work with. The most important was the bench seat, so I laid out what I had to work with.

I liked the way that slightly dirty piece looked, and it even had some bits of live edge, so I used that as my seat.

The cutting and setup for this bench is delightfully simple. The angles are easy and repeatable, and the "joinery" is just screws. Everything was cut by hand and built easily. The only power tool I used was my drill.

Once everything was cut to size, I did a dry assembly. In this case, there was no glue, and the screws were only driven in far enough to prevent sliding. After this bench sits outside for a year I might need to check the screws, but I did by exterior quality #10s, so they should hold fairly well.

Finishing

I thought it would look best with a dark brown oil stain. After a quick round of sanding, I was ready to finish it.

And it looks pretty nice! I ended up putting it just under the shady part of my yard by the woods, it seems to fit the best there.

Changes

While the bench is fairly comfortable, I think for next time I will slant the back support to be less vertical and allow for more of an angled resting position. Nothing as severe as an Adirondack chair, but definitely less than true vertical.

For this size, I also only used screws, but for the full size I will either user carriage bolts, or lag bolts, for screwing the legs together. Let's see how this thing handles the winter!