I have a work bench I do all my gun work on, and it's fine for most things, but not so good for torquing barrel nuts. The bench will rock as I tighten things down.

I am thinking that adding mass to the bottom shelf will make the bench more stable. I big slab of steel would work, but hard to find cheap. I also thought about creating a shallow box on the bottom shelf and filling it with 3-4 bags of quikrete.

Anyone have a better idea?

Ammo shelf.

Bolt it to the wall

And the floor

^this. You have it, might as well make use of the weight


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Show us a picture of it and we can re-engineer that bad boy to sustain tons of torque. LOL
Seriously.

Sandbags

I wrote a long reply to this and apparently never sent it.

On my lathe, I use a combination of 25# lead shot bags (I think there are 4) (expensive), plus lifting weights (I got a whole set for free somewhere, and relatively easy to find cheap on CL or OfferUp. I've also got a couple cast iron pan sized lead weights I cast a long time ago. They're about 30lbs each. Plus I keep a rack of tools and chucks situated at the "light" end under the tail stock. I considered sandbags stacked because sand gives and so you get a nice dampening effect when the piece is out of balance (not really a consideration for you). However, sandbags are relatively big compared to lead shot. The lathe bed itself is cast iron, so heavy by default, plus the extra couple-three hundred pounds of stuff mentioned before. If I could find a good deal on lead mined from a range that'd be great, because I don't care so much about purity as I do weight, and a little dirt & copper doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'd also use the mined stuff as ballast in the bow of my boat. I've currently got a bunch of universal-machine style plates up there and I don't like how they're distributed. If I could bag up a bunch of mined lead and tape them down in place up there or otherwise fasten them, I'd be pretty happy.