Welcome, Fellow Shooters

Perhaps some of you have visited the Booger Bench page in the past, if so you know that I set out to build a portable shooting bench as cheaply as I could. My total cost for my first bench was less than fifty dollars. The most expensive part of the bench was the purchase of a set of folding table legs, which cost me about 20 bucks.

The original Booger Bench page was attached to my personal pages on my son's family website. The page was wildly successful. By that I mean that traffic to the page was (and continues to be) phenomonal. I've discontinued counting hits to the page because after a point, the data is meaningless to me. Let's just say it's up in the big numbers. I've decided to move the Booger Bench page to it's own website. My intention is to seperate the bench from my personal pages. I am also redoing all photographs, as well as drawings. As for now, I'll use the old photos and drawing until I can get the updates done and uploaded.

I first began thinking about building a portable shooting bench when Fergus Bailey was planning to visit the states and wanted to have a try at chuck hunting. He wanted to use his 1000 yard bench rifle, and wanted a stable platform to shoot from. Up to that point, I had been using a camera tripod that I adapted a front shooting rest onto. For shots up to about 150 yards the tripod worked okay. But beyond that distance, there just wasn't enough stability. Besides, I still had to anchor the rear of the stock somehow.

So, at Fergus' urging, I began to think about a portable shooting bench. I did a bunch of searches, and looked at the designs that were out there. I particularly liked the folding leg concept, because I wanted to be able to knock the bench down without a lot of hoopla. And I needed it to store easily, and not take up much room in my vehicle.

After making several patterns, using all my rifles, I decided that I could make the top out of one quarter of a 4 foot by 8 foot sheet of 3/4” plywood. That gave me a 24 inch by 48 inch top to start with. Since Fergus was left-handed, I decided that the bench should be ambidexterous, so to speak. So I patterned cut outs on both sides so that a shooter could lean into, rather than onto, the bench.

I also decided that I wanted to use a front rest, and rear bags to support the rifle. In keeping with my desire for a light weight bench that I might have to haul out into farmers fields, I chose a dimension that would give adequate room for supporting the rifle with the aforementioned rests and leave enough room for a box of loads, field glasses, range finder, and maybe a bottle of water.

I also wanted a way to carry the bench easily, so I added hand-hold cut-outs on each side of the bench. I had tried shoulder straps and rifle slings, but in the end, the cut-outs worked best for me.

Over the months that the Booger Bench page has been on the web, I received literally hundreds and hundreds of emails from shooters that built the bench. On the original website, I stated that I had copied what I thought were the best features of other benches that I had seen, and that folks were free to copy and modify the design as they saw fit. I've gotten many pictures of Booger Benches in many different configurations. Some were covered with out-door carpeting. Some were rectangular with no shooter cut outs. Some had leg extensions to raise the height of the shooting surface. It has been gratifying to hear from everyone and to see pictures of their benches. Hardly a week goes by without me getting an email from someone thanking me for putting the design on the web. I'd say that it has been my privilage to share it with you all.

Oh yeah. When I first made the bench, some guys I shoot with asked me what the heck is it? I told them that it was a portable shooting bench for shooting wood chucks, crows, turkeys... you know, all sorts of boogers way out there. Ah, they said, it's a Booger Bench. The name stuck!