Stabilising our wobbly bench

Check out this wobbly bench:

Now check out what it looks like now:

I spent this afternoon adding two diagonal support struts to minimise the wobble. It worked better than I thought it would!

It was mostly a patch job – the bench isn't exactly high-quality – so they're not amazingly sized up (there is a big air gap):

…but, it's stable enough for me!

Putting it together involved:

• a lot of turning the bench upside-down
• finding a few completely rounded screws that I couldn't remove — instead I worked around them
• using a very blunt saw to cut the diagonal struts
• holding some things at some quite inconvenient angles (I could have well-used an assistant)
• breaking a couple of drill-bits (one because of its low-quality [it was from the middle-of-Aldi] and the other because of weird drilling angles due to the aforementioned completely rounded screw)

If I did it again, I'd like to have:

• a better (sharper) saw
• measured up the struts better
• an assistant

Here are some more pictures of the – to be honest, almost rotting – bench.

The support struts are cut from another bench that I found discarded on the street and disassembled for wood. One man's trash.

Finally, here's a nice SVG rendition of the bench (pre-struts). I traced it using Inkscape.

I hope it can continue to keep me and my housemates comfortable eating our alfresco teas.