Workshop Bench Leveling

A couple of years ago I picked up 6 benches off of craigslist for basically the cost of moving them. They are 1 3/4 maple top 30x60 benches. I have had these benches in my downstairs workshop and when I started setting up the plane workspace I brought two benches up.

When I originally setup my downstairs workshop I broke one of the feet off of the table. The tables had cast feet on them and they were really brittle. Thankfully, my basement floor was dead flat so I just took off the feet and rested the bench legs straight onto the concrete. Additionally, I previously used the benches as independent work benches so I didn't really care about them lining up perfectly to each other.

Now that I have building things that fly I really wanted to make sure I could put two 60" tables next to each other and have a full 120" of solid straight and level table. Surprisingly I could not find any

"pipe feet" on McMaster. I learned that "threaded tube insert" was the search term of choice for this part. I finally found the tube inserts (search for tube not pipe) on Amazon for a decent price coming from JW Winco.

In the excitement of finding the part I was looking for I hurried through measuring things. I measured the OD of the pipe and it was 1.660".  (Looking back on this, yes, why wouldn't I measure the ID of that pipe...) I quickly hit the order button on Amazon and then went back to McMaster to order some swivel leveling feet (in retro-spect I probably didn't need the swiveling function, but they looked nice).

Two days later everything arrived. I threaded the feet into the plugs. I cleaned off the benches. It was pretty amazing how excited I was to have this level of adjustment on my tables. I tilted the benches up to put the feet in and there it was. Defeat. As in, the tables beat me yet again. The legs are thin-wall galvanized. The ID is large enough to accept the entire OD of the tube insert.

To be continued...