Jenny and Ian Make a Shave Horse

My wife Jenny has been getting into green woodworking and bushcraft type skills.

This started with some training to become a forest schools teacher (an initiative in the UK to gets kids outside and learning so basic bushcraft skills, like shelter building and fire making, along with craft work). Anyway, she did a week long course on green woodworking skills and was bitten by the bug. She had asked me after the course, could we make a shave horse, I’d said yes, but never gave it any further thought. Anyway whilst we were both off work over Christmas Jenny suggested that we make a shave horse. So we started watching some videos on YouTube, and were surprised at the relatively low number, so decided to make our own (video).

So we started off by designing a shave horse on Sketchup, which like all could designs was a mash up of other designs we’d found.

I used a ‘stretched’ chassis from the saw horses and added the pivoting components that make it a shave horse. For me to really enjoy what I’m doing I like to work hard and push myself. The project itself wasn’t particularly difficult, but instead I put a lot more effort into the filming and videography. No more lazy timelapse videos with a GoPro! We didn’t get it perfect, but we did have a lot of fun making the videos and I’m really pleased with the outcome.

So to try and describe the process see the first video.

Part 1 covers:

• Cutting the stock to length
• Cutting the leg joinery
• Building the shave horse chassis

Part 2 covers the following detail:

• Cutting the legs to length
• Attaching the pivot mechanism
• Short demonstration of shave horse in use.

We had a really good time building this project, which we did in a weekend

We hope you've enjoyed watching it.

If you'd like more detail, or want the SketchUp model, please let me know.

Here is a link to the Shave Horse SketchUp model that I've uploaded to the 3D warehouse in SketchUp. If you want dimensions open up the model and measure the bits you need.

SketchUp Download link