As with adding weight to my workbench, my lathe benefitted from adding some weight. At the same time, it made sense to make a new lathe stand to replace the rickety old one.

My old lathe stand was the one it came with. It would have been fine as, say, a heavy-duty saw horse, but it has poor lateral stability. I did manage to reuse most of the wood from the previous one, however.

To start, I glued two 4x4’s together to support the bed of the lathe. Then came the two A-frames for either side, which met at the top, and had the cross-beam mortise-and-tenoned in place. Then the two supports connecting the A-frames were given a similar treatment to connect the base. The top of each A-frame was cut to make a massive tenon to mate with a mortise in the top. Once glued in, it was already very sturdy, indeed.

I added about 90 pounds of playground sand enclosed in construction site trash bags to the bottom of the stand, sandwiched between two plywood boards attached to the bottom and top of the bottom supports.

I wanted to enclose the whole thing so as to be able to store tools without them collecting dust, so I furred out the frame to allow me to attach panels to the sides and back. The front would hinge open, the angle of the front working to keep it closed.

It ended up being very sturdy and surprisingly capacious.