Wooden Bench Restoration

This Instructable is about restoring a bench, the wooden parts were rotted away.

My roommate had found this treasure together with a friend. Plans of restoration never fully went through and it stood on our balcony basically sitting duck.

To restore it's glory and more, I wanted to try to add a original design to the new wooden seating.

What's left of the bench are the steel supports on either side and the steel rod in between them.

There was some rust on the steel parts but the condition of the material looks pretty good. Also the paint wasn't severely chipping off.
The nuts were definitely stuck but came off with some violence and WD40.

To remove worst of the rust and bad spots of paint, I used a rotating steel wire brush on the bar.

The cast iron sides were cleaned off with the help of sandblasting.

Once the steel was cleaned off, I gave it a fresh coat of Hammerite, two coats of hammer blow black.

The spaces in the steel sides tell me that the back part was built with 3 slats and the bottom sitting part contained 5 slats of wood, each one being 60 to 70 mm in width. The total length of the bench could be altered a bit but I decided to keep the wooden parts around 120 mm in length.

Instead of going with just a couple of straight shelves of wood, I wanted to try something a little more interesting.
The way the steel is shaped I tried to create something in the style of art nouveau.

I wanted some kind of pattern shaped into the wood that would fit the steel and make it a little more interesting.

Cutting out the holes will decrease the strenght of the wood when seated, but I wanted to try anyways if it held.

Since I'm cutting a pattern and decreasing the strength of the wood I chose a dense hardwood plywood of 22mm.

I used a waterjet cutter available at my workplace to get the result. It's a great machine to cut mainly 2D shapes out of basially any material. Fortunately CNC milling machines will do the job fine or even better and these are a bit less rare to find in public workspaces.

The pieces turned out good, they needed some time to dry before moving on to the next step.

To finish the slats I used a dark colored wood stain. Two layers were applied which was a bit tricky to get it in all the small crevasses. Once everything is nice and dry I finished it up with two rough layers of clear wood lacquer.

To assemble everything back together I mainly used m8 bolts and nuts which would already fit in the existing frame. The cuts in the wood line up with the holes in the steel frame.

Once all the slats are in place, the metal bar is placed back that connected the iron parts before. The bar can be tightened with two nuts on each of the sides to ensure stability and to make sure the sides are more or less square to the ground.

And voila, the bench is fixed! It sure was nice to restore the cast iron sides to it's former glory and to try something different with the wooden seating. I don't think the pattern and the look of the seating fits the gracious shapes of the sides too well.

I might change it up in the future and try something more fitting or subtle. The cuts decrease the strength so I will have to see how much abuse it can handle throughout time.