by Brian Birk

Created on: June 21, 2008   Last Updated: June 22, 2008

Early one morning a few years ago the garbage truck backed into the side of our church. It bumped the wall hard enough to break more than a dozen bricks and break the Sheetrock on the inside of the wall. Our church building was only a couple of years old at the time. Our parking lot comes right up to the wall of the church, and I figured something like this would happen again unless we put up a barrier. I settled on heavy planters and concrete benches. After pricing some of these things I decided to make them instead of buy them.

One of the guys in our congregation made four planters using some of the left over bricks from the construction of the church. I ordered a mold and made six concrete benches. Having the planters and the benches in front of the church improved the looks of the building. Someone could still run into the church, but now they will have to run over some rather heavy objects that they might notice before they got to the wall of the church.

The first bench that I made was far from perfect. It's in the back yard of the church strategically positioned over a plastic pipe that sticks out of the ground and is part of the septic system. So far no one has run into that plastic pipe with the riding lawn mower. That bench has holes all over the top from air bubbles that weren't released from the mold, and the legs have a few voids because the concrete in the leg mold was not tamped well enough.

I've made about thirty benches now, and I've learned a few things about the process. I built a stand for the bench top mold. The bench top mold looks like a large cake pan. It is plastic and about four inches deep. It takes two sixty pound bags of pre mixed concrete to fill the mold. The stand that I built for the mold allows me access to the bottom of the mold. After I've filled the mold with concrete, I tap on the bottom of the mold with a rubber mallet for quite a while. The tapping consolidates the concrete and releases air bubbles which leave little holes in the upper surface of the bench if they aren't released before the concrete hardens.

I keep the concrete relatively dry. It is more difficult to mix when you use less water, but the concrete will be stronger and it will be less likely to contain air bubbles.

I coat the mold with vegetable oil before I fill it with concrete. Failure to do this would make it very difficult to remove the bench top from the mold. It could even make it impossible to get the bench top out of the mold without destroying the

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