Garden chairs from lovely old reclaimed bench-ends

 I love old-style park benches with ornate cast iron ends and slatted wood seats.

These beauties are two chairs I made by reclaiming some rather sorry bench ends and re-seating them with new hardwood slats.

I say new - all of the wood was reclaimed. Some from pallets and best of all, some was wood that used to be part of the Natural History Museum. Lovely old red mahogany-type hardwood baulks, which appear to be from the very early 20th century, although I can't be sure.

Here is one of them in the glorious sunshine. This one has face-on lion faces on the arms. These bench-ends are believed to be from a mid-20th century domestic bench. 

Lovely!

The other, in situ. These bench ends are either Victorian or Edwardian/early 20th century. They came from the Rock Park - a Victorian spa park in Llandrindod wells, wales.

Reclaiming the bench ends

The two chairs shown above came from two separate benches. One of these came out of a skip in the grounds of the lovely Victorian Rock Park in Llandrindod Wells. It was not possible to tell if these were original Victorian benches, but quite likely.

They were in a sorry state. You can see the left hand side has its lower end broken off. I had to go skip-diving to retrieve the missing end!

The wood was rotted and the cast iron frames were broken.

Here is one, after I'd wrenched off the rotten slats.

Leaving the bolts. The frame of this one has a support rail for the slats.

The bolts were seized, so I cut them all off with an angle grinder.

Leaving a lot of iron dust...

These cast iron ends had been damaged. 

Here the arm was detached from its decorative lion-shaped support.

And here, the lower end of one leg had been broken off. 

In this picture, you can see the leg end being clamped in position onto the remaining intact end.

This was in preparation for welding it back on

I used a basic arc welder for this. 

Here you can see the welding rod posed in position. The actual welding is too difficult to take a photo of.

Post-welding, the leg put back together.

The other set of bench ends came from someone who kindly donated it on Freecycle. These belong to their aunt. They just wanted them to live on.

Live on, they do!

They were a bit rusty in places, so I wire-brushed off the worst of it.

I think the steel was galvanised with zinc under the white paint. They were certainly not in very bad condition.

After wire-brushing I gave all the bench ends a base coat of black radiator paint. This is quite hardy. 

Gloves are advisable for this. Radiator paint is very hard to wash off.

I did all four ends.

Once the base coat was on, I then made the slats. These were ripped down from various pieces of hardwoods I had lying about.

The writing below is from the original builder. This wood is an old tropical hardwood. Maybe mahogany, but similar if not. hard, dense and even-grained.

I am not sure if the 01 12 is January 1912, 1 December, or even batch 1 of 12. Who knows. It came from one of the libraries of the Natural History Museum in London, which was probably early 20th century, so about 100 years old give or take a decade. 

The lighter slats are some unknown hardwood. They were from hardwood pallets, used for crating heavy fireplaces.

The sizes were cut evenly on a table saw (not shown) and then round using a rounding bit in the router (also not shown). The router was mounted in a bench and the wood presented onto to it. It is easier to control that way.

Here I have started bolting on the slats using coach bolts

Close-up of the bolts

Getting the two ends connected. These are the other ends. In this case, the slats are screwed on from the sides. There are no support rail as such, on these ones.

All slats on one chair

Once constructed, i sanded off any roughness on the slats, prior to painting.

And also on the chair arms.

A finished chair

Here are the chairs halfway through pointing them

The paint is green hammered-finish Hammerite paint. It is great for this. Very tough and dries pretty fast.

After the first coat, you always miss a bit!!

The two chairs drying after the second coat. I had rubbed back with steel wool in between coats, to smotth off and lumps from dust falling on the original coat, etc.

The two finished chairs in situ - they are every comfy. Wide enough for any single person to fit comfortably and also for two people to squeeze into if getting cosy (or one person and their bag, etc)