U.S. Art SupplyHeavy Duty Extra Large Adjustable Wood H-Frame Easel - Sturdy Wooden Stand, Locking Caster Wheels - Studio Artist Easel for Painting, Canvas Holder Display, Sturdy Beechwood

I needed a new medium-sized easel for my studio, and gave this a try. It is perfect for my needs. It is sturdy, versatile, and great looking. It is adjustable for different plane angles, and has a fairly sturdy top clamp that extends very high for large canvases.It's a bit of a project to assemble it. I did it by myself and it took about an hour. You need to assemble it in a large room where you can spread out the parts. The assembly instructions are not too difficult to decipher, but there are a couple of assembly steps that are a bit tricky. I had to go back and redo a couple steps once I figured out that I had messed them up the first time. But it was fairly easy to do this.Overall, a great easel for anyone who does a lot of artwork in many mediums. It is particularly good for drawing and oil painting. If you are planning to use an easel for watercolor painting, I would not recommend this model. It is relatively easy to adjust this easel in spite of how large it is, but when I am working in watercolors, I tend to make position and angle adjustments a lot, and this easel is almost too sturdy for such rapid adjustments.

Amazon got this to me 2 days ahead of schedule. It was well packed and all pieces were in good condition. Every item was labeled and packaged in envelopes of one kind or another. There was a two page printed instruction diagram with labels for each envelope and piece of wood. The wood pieces had number stickers on them.If you keep the parts in their envelopes and study the diagram and the labels, assembling this easel is quite easy. We had no trouble. They even included two screwdrivers and a hex wrench.If you pour everything out and mix it all up, good luck getting it all together. Take your time, study the diagram and go one envelope at a time. It will come together perfectly. The drilled holes are precise and everything fit. The only problem I had was a barrel bolt connector which somehow got a drop of solder in the screw head. I took a Dremel cut off wheel and cut the solder out so the screwdriver blade could turn the bolt into the barrel connector and it worked fine. Assembly is not rocket science if you follow the diagrams carefully.The assembled easel is a steal for $190 delivered. Heck Jerry's had an almost identical easel on sale for a similar price but it cost $175 to ship it! Amazon Prime shipped FREE. Best deal in town. And the horizontal feature is great. Very stable and sturdy with the "table" on 4 points instead of the much more unstable Lobo easels with horizontal tables. Good wood, good hardware and great design. Instructions could be improved but they are adequate to the job so long as you use some common sense. Two girls did it in a couple of hours.Update 6/16/2018 - After painting some oil paintings in vertical mode and some acrylic and tempera paintings in horizontal mode, I can say that I would buy this again without reservation. It is sturdy and versatile. I might have done the clamping system a little differently if I were designing this but there is nothing wrong with the standard design. i just did some tweaking in the woodworking shop in the basement to get it exactly how I want it. Anyone can do the tweaks. So go ahead and buy this without fear. It is a great product and a terrific value at the price.

I purchased this for my wife's birthday, she loves it and is excited to start using it. This unit is better in real life than in the Amazon photos. It is unusually well made, from solid wood - oak I believe (not mentioned on the Amazon page). It has been well-finished in a light clear coat, soft wood edges, tongue and groove solid wood construction, brass hardware, easy adjust knobs for all height adjustments.Features:It has a wide range of adjustment for height, including the adjustable tray height. That is, a ratcheting latch under the tray allows raising the tray height way up, like head-height. As you can see in the photos, it grabs the canvas at the top with a bracket which has a depth of 2" hold (canvas depth) and the bottom base tray has a depth of 1-5/8". I measured one of my wife's canvases, it was 1-1/2" thick, making it a nice fit. This unit extends to accommodate an unusually large size frame. I inserted a 48"x60" canvas, which had no problem fitting the height (portrait orientation). The Amazon page says an upper size limit of 139" which sounds about right. The locking wheels make it easy lock into a position and easy to move even with a large canvas. I noticed the canvas had wood supports on the back with the exact same width as the vertical supports on the easel. I doubt that's a coincidence. It's sturdy, with long screws, thick solid wood, even solid wood reinforcement blocks at the base (see left and right side of base) to keep it from racking right and left.Assembly:Ignore the 1-star reviews claiming no instructions, those reviews are outdated, apparently. The instructions were included. The instructions were easy to follow, with an illustration of each step showing detailed hardware (see the instructions sheet in the background of the screwdriver photo). They were a bit on the small side, I had to magnify it to see some of the assembly detail. Each step's illustration has letters for every piece of wood and every piece of associated hardware. A nice set of screwdrivers (see third photo) were included, much nicer than anything I've ever seen included before in ready-to-assemble furniture item. It also comes with an Allen wrench (hex key) which is only needed for 4 bolts.Assembly Time:The only negative was the time it took to assemble, about an hour for me, and I used a power screwdriver for about 1/2 the screws. Note: don't use a power screwdriver on the brass screws, it will strip the heads. But, considering the number of parts, that assembly time wasn't bad. It beats making one from scratch. As a former woodworker, I can attest to the time and cost for building this from scratch, about 3 days and materials alone would have cost over $100.

This easel is top notch quality. It is beautiful all by itself, never mind being functional. Always wanted a nice one but was always afraid I would end up with crap for a big price tag. This is not that. Fully adjustable. NOT GOOD if you have low ceilings, it is big and extends very tall, over 8 feet.