The force on the bench will be:

The weight of the arbor press + weight of workpiece + the force of you pushing down on the press handle.

The "one ton" force will be generated between the jaws of the press.

I think that your bench will be OK.

JimB

SO ! The experiment was a success ? Noel.

I'm easily confused. What's the difference between weight, force and pressure?

And what exactly does the 1 ton claim refer to? I assume, perhaps wrongly, it means the pressure exerted at the end of the ram is equivalent to loading it with a 1 ton weight, so a 1" square ram would put 2240psi on whatever fitted exactly between the jaws. Is that right?

Dave

The bench will be subjected to, as already said, weight of press m+ weight of workpiece, and whatever force is produced by the mechanical advantage to deliver a 1 ton force between the jaws of the press and the workpiece.

The latter is likely to be on a par with the first two, or maybe even less.

As long as the bench can safely withstand the total force, you should be O K.

For definitions

Pressure is force per unit area (Lbs per square inch for example )

Force will be (same units as weight) mass times gravity. (If you take a mass to the moon, where gravity is less the weight will appear to be less )

Howard.

A force is simply a push or a pull. We call the force pulling an object to the centre of the earth its weight – but this changes as gravity varies from place to place.

Mass is the amount of matter (stuff) in an object and doesn't change wherever it is.

Pressure is force per unit area so your assumption is quite correct.

As has been mentioned things can get tricky in imperial or pre SI Metric units. The force pulling a 1kg mass down is 9.81 Newtons on the earth as the Newton is the SI unit of force but in imperial the unit of force could be the Ton or the pound and the unit of mass is also called the Ton or the pound, even though mass is not a force and so not the same as weight. So if you took a 1 Ton mass weighing 1 Ton on the earth to the moon it would no longer weigh 1 Ton – even though there was exactly the same amount of matter there. My brain hurts!!

To be fair there are explanatory terms such as pound force and ton weight that clarify what is being talked about but these are not used as commonly as perhaps they ought to be.

Most important thing might be to bolt it to the bench so all that yanking on the handle does not tip it over, whence it falls upon your toes. They almost certainly wont stand up to it.