Prayer Kneeler

A piece of furniture to kneel on and pray

About a year ago, I met a new friend, and that friend needed a prayer kneeler as a gift to another friend of theirs. So, as a friend does, I said, "Of course!"

I didn't even know what a prayer kneeler was, so we looked up some pictures and sorted out a general idea of what was needed. Here's what I planned up.

Probably the most interesting aspect of "engineering" is the hinge mechanism. I didn't want to use bolts that would protrude and be unsightly, but it also needed to be pretty strong. The hinge does get support by the leg sitting on the floor, but I still wanted it to be plenty hefty in the case that it did have to bear a person's weight.

I decided to use a large diameter and very short dowel between each leg and the side panel. The image below shows where the dowel protrudes from the side panel (left), and the inset of the leg where that dowel will fit (right). The dowel is 1-1/2" in diameter, and is glued into the side panel. The inset in each leg is just slightly larger than the dowels, which allow them to freely rotate.

I made this out of Black Cherry wood, and started with rough-cut lumber, which you can see below.

After thickness-planing and jointing, I had a nice set of boards for the project.

Then, after lots of cutting, routing, drilling, turning, and who knows what else, I had all my pieces ready for assembly.

Since I needed to glue up boards to get the width for the top piece anyway, I figured I would spice it up a bit and put a couple Black Walnut accents in.

But now I needed a padded bench, and I don't know the first thing about upholstery. The picture below might look a bit confusing, so let me try to explain what's happening. I wanted there to be dense padding in the bench, because someone would be leaning on their knees. But I also needed it to only be a couple inches thick. The picture shows the bench upside down while I'm clamping it down to compress the padding while I do all the upholstery tacking. To make matters worse, the assembly required the two support rails to be installed before this point, which ran right next to the upholstery tacks, meaning I couldn't really get in there with a hammer. I actually used a piece of wood as an extension (like a nail set) to put the tacks in. It was hard.

After some bent tacks and lots of cursing, I was pretty happy with the result though. For those with keen eyes, you may have noticed that I used Red Oak for the bench support rails, which I did because while Black Cherry is strong, it is more prone to splitting than Oak. Oak is an all-around good choice for strength. White Oak would have been an ideal choice, but I didn't have any on-hand.

After the rest of the assembly and finishing touches, it was done! I opted to not plug the screw holes in the bench near the cushion in case it needed to be removed and re-upholstered some day. The cross is Black Walnut to match the accents in the top panel.