Designing a Homemade Workout Bench with SOLIDWORKS Weldments

Given the global COVID-19 pandemic it has become taboo to be out in public. Now that my local gym and thousands of other gyms are closed to help prevent the spread of the virus that leaves us thinking, ‘what do we do if we want to work out?’.

SOLIDWORKS to the rescue!

With my hobbyist background in woodworking I created an easy at home workout bench inspired by some social media posts. Great advantage to this bench is its cheap and easy to make. Everything can be made from wood coming from a local hardware store or from scrap lumber lying around. With a quick search there is a lot of people getting rid of left-over lumber or companies getting rid of skids.

Homemade Workout Bench

Workout Bench Design

Here’s a design with the drawing. Going through this, the core bench is made from a very study 4″x4″ and 2″x4″ with either I dowel or hardware for the rotational components. If you want to take this to the next level, you can put the legs on hinges with lock outs and add two wheels to allow the bench to be folded and wheeled into a closet.

Workout Bench Drawing (click to enlarge)

Going a little further into the how I created the bench. There are some notches cut out of the main 4″x4″ beam. This was a simple cut extrude. The notches are for the bench angle. I have 4 positions in total: roughly 5°, 45°, 60° and flat. I controlled this using configurations suppressing and unsuppressing mates.

When building this I found using these deck brackets was the easiest with some nails or screws.

This can be created using basic hand saws and drill. Of course if you have power tools then that’s even better.

This is a section view half way through. With this view you can see the notches a little better. This controls the tilt on the back rest.

I used a custom SOLIDWORKS weldment lumber profile along with some basic and advanced mates all learned in the SOLIDWORKS Essentials class that we deliver live online. The drawing utilizes a full BOM for the completed assembly and a cut list for the structural frame. I have added the cut sizes of all the materials used in case you would like to make it.