Hi! We're Erik, Seb and Greg
We had been looking for an bench and table set for the guys to sit in the sun on their breaks. We wanted something that seats 6-8 people on a small footprint, can easily be stowed away or repositioned if need be, and is built to last. We remembered the solid wooden trestle table and bench sets most households and hospitality businesses back in Germany use for that purpose and tried finding some here in NZ, but to no avail. We decided to take the matter in our own hands and bring in the first shipment of Oktoberfest Originals - traditional beer garden furniture.
About Our Products
Each set comes with 1 table (220L x 50W) and 2 benches (220L x 25W). Benches are made of 30mm thick solid spruce, Tables from 25mm solid spruce. They come in orange or natural wood with two coats of UV-resistant varnish on top. The underframe is 3mm powder coated or painted steel. All parts are easy to replace and readily available. Built to last for generations.
A day in the life of an Oktoberfest Originals Beer Garden Bench and Table
In the morning, 5 people sit on the bench not moving much. This is what engineers call static load. Assuming a weight of 80 kilograms per person, with five people on a bench, this results in a total weight of 400 kilograms, or a force of 0.8 kn per person. The manufacturers also add the safety factor 1.5. The bank would have to endure 600 kilograms. In tests, they must be able to carry this weight for 15 minutes without damage.
In the afternoon, the Oktoberfest is usually a little more hearty, the music is a bit calmer, the visitors are usually still sitting on their benches, but are already hooked and sway to the beat. In this case, the force not only acts from above, but also sideways. With a weight of around 50 kilograms for the part of the human being on the bench and an uneven path of 15 cm in each direction, this results in a horizontal force of around 0.3 kn per person. No problem for the bench.
One question remains: What is the maximum load on the beer garden bench? Does the music in the evening put the sustainability of the Oktoberfest benches in danger, if the visitors all jump at the same time?
The engineers can answer this question with the so-called bending tensile strength. For each type of wood, this value determines the load from which it breaks under a bending load, for example due to a jump on the wood. For spruce wood, from which beer benches are made, the mean, short-term bending tensile strength is 80 Newtons per square mm. Extrapolated to the length of the beer bench, which is 2.2m, this results in a maximum possible load of around 1.8 tons. When the Oktoberfest visitors jump about 15cm high, the bench has about two to three times the static force of 0.8 kn. But even if that can be around 1.2 tons - the beer bench can take it.
