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There sure are a lot of shop presses on sale online and in stores. Some of them are actually worth a damn too. Our boss just bought us one. Yes by god he bought one from Harbor Fright. How it ever got past any sort of QC is beyond my imagining. The inspector had to be Ray Charles, or perhaps a pound of butter? In any case it was a mess when we got it. It was so bad that we actually gave it back to the boss and built our own using mostly scraps that we had in stock and a few I purchased at the recycle center. We built a very very strong press. If you have any questions please let me know. Oh and yes this is a bench-top unit because we are rapidly running out of space in our shop. Fortunately the boss is out looking for more space lol hurrah!!!!
We did use a harbor freight 20 ton air over hydraulic bottle jack, (yes I bought the warranty) I could have bought one online but I have a local harbor freight in town so if it screws up I don't have far to go to get a new one right away. The side rails are 1.5x3x.250 C channel, The very top is three layers. First, a .250 X3X angle iron with a 2x2x.250 square tube welded to it we thought that would be enough but under a full load we saw it was bending slightly so then we added the bar across the top that you can see in the picture. That piece is 3x1.5 solid flat bar. It looks a bit like old fork truck fork material. There is no longer any bending going on at the top of our press lol. The whole thing is 16" inside dimension and the "table "/ apron is 9 inches wide so you can put a bit of work on it. The table consists of one of those 1.5x3 pieces of flat bar welded between two pieces of 3x3x.250 angle iron. The very bottom of the press is an I Beam and yet another of those 3x1.5 pieces of flat stock all welded together. I turned a piece of solid stock down for the cup at the top and welded in in to "capture " the top of the bottle jack and turned the 1 inch piece for the actual press cylinder that does the work and welded it to the part in the middle, which is yet another piece of that 1.5xx3 steel. By the way when you make the pieces that go up and down remember to forty five them so that when you lift one end to move it it does not stick in between the columns.
No doubt you will notice that there are no holes going up the sides of our press. We use spacers at the bottom of the table to adjust our heights. Crude perhaps, but effective. Some day we will get a nice drill press and do the "hole" thing, for now this works perfectly. If you decide to build your own shop press I hope this helps. It is easy to scale up the height and or the width. The scavenged metal cost us about 40 bucks . There is not a lot of material but what there is is heavy duty so we don't have any failures under pressure. Thanks for looking
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Is that some kind of swage fixture in the last 2 pictures? Can't quite figure it out from here. Thanks for another great post! ~PJ
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