Here's my weekend project of a big bench for all of my bonsais for any one who's interested:
My bonsai's at home are a sorry sight sitting on mish mash wooden planks and palettes to keep them off the ground. And it's just not as fun to do the 'hands behind your back walk' (the kind you do in an art gallery) to enjoy looking at them when they're sitting near your kneecaps. So for a while i've been wanting to of course build a bench for my trees. I try and do projects properly the first time around (after doing hundreds of projects NOT properly the first time around and paying for it), but doing a proper well planned bench I knew would be a planning trap for me. I'd want it to be perfect, it would become too large of a project and i'd never actually do it.
Then a little while back I saw a little article online of a guy who lived in an apartment block, with no backyard. He was sad to not have a nice place to just chill at his home, so the crafty fella grabbed a bunch of wooden palettes (you know the ones that forklifts pick up), a bag of zipties and he started standing and ziptie-ing the paletters all together. He ended up making a great little peaceful area for himself that he said was surprisingly strong.
Here's a photo of his finished palette garden:
You can read the story and see more photos here: http://www.dinosaursandrobots.com/2009/ ... t-and.html
Here's my hideous front yard area with my trees. (my trees get more attention than my yard).
So! I um....'found' some palettes from bin locations in an industrial area near my home, made two car loads, bought some hefty gauge zipties and set to work.
A close up of the ziptie binding method. I had to use two zipties in each join to get around the thicker palettes.
The finished palette bonsai garden! The overall stability is REALLY strong. I gave all the areas good hefty shake tests and you'd be surprised how little the whole thing budges.
The palette with the blue milk crate underneath doubles as a nice sunny spot bench to sit on.
The backside so it looks a little more presentable and my neighbours don't feel the need to call the council about an 'eyesore'. ha!
I shaped it to have two sort of 'walk in' areas. it's really quite cosy once you're in there.
And this is my favourite part, where the little black training pot is, is where I place my spinning wheel, my tools to the little pale crate piece on the right and it's such an ergonomically easy setup to work on a tree for hours outside. (plenty of places all around to also set a cold one).
So there we go, all up it took me around an hour or palette finding, then 3 hours of setup and ziptie-ing. If anyone is looking for a quick and dirty bench that will 'hopefully' last a year or two, try it out. There's limitless possibilities for how you can set it up and arrange the palettes, and all it takes is a snip of zipties to take it all down again.
jozaeh
certainly the most economical setup I've seen! 
... they didn't make the trip. I now use the tried and true sleeper and cement block method for ultimate portability, it now gets de/reconstructed and repositioned every 6 months to account for sun tracking.
) might have a term for this already? Retro wharfy sheek??? 
