How to build a killer (lathe) bench

Following the restoration of my Hercus 9″ lathe, I decided it would be high time to build a better lathe bench to house it.

You could use these techniques to build any workbench in your own shop.

This lathe bench was built with whatever steel was in my rack, so the design is a bit loose. The main features/requirements for the bench were:

1. Extremely accurate levelling of the lathe bed, which would generally require accurate levelling of the lathe stand itself
2. The ability to add extra mass if required (sand or concrete filling in the legs)
3. Accomodate my existing rolling tool cabinet to store lathe tooling
4. Accomodate a tank for a recirculating coolant system
5. Use space above the lathe on the wall for efficient storage
6. Use space under the lathe for efficient storage

The SketchUp file seen in the first couple of videos is available for free download here (stored in Google Docs for easy sharing).

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