orepass: Woodworking to Pass the Time

Stools are fairly simple structures. Legs, aprons, cross braces, and seats. The challenge comes when making them strong and stable, adding angles to joints. The design that Becksvoort developed uses mortise and tenon joints for the aprons and tapered rungs fitted into tenons to provide cross braces. His choice of tapered rungs makes great sense. They are simple to make and using an angled hole is quicker and simpler than using a square mortise. Additionally, the rungs will not show the wear of square braces. Since I don’t have a lathe, I will be making angled mortises and tenons.

After dimensioning the legs the apron mortises were cut using my powered mortiser (love this machine) The great thing about Becksvoort’s Apron design is that the apron tenons are angled allowing the mortises to be straight.

Now for the aprons and tenons to fit into these mortises. Angled legs create great challenges and the use of straight mortises means that the Aprons must have angled tenons.

Length was made on the Tablesaw using my mitre sled followed by cutting the tenon by hand. There’s many ways to cut the tenon and as an afterthought probably some more accurate methods, but getting out the hand saw was quick and I need the saw to adjust the width anyway.

Lastly I cut them at a 45 degree angle. It’s a simple pleasure to make the cut.

As a larger challenge the plans called for the angles to be different for each side. Don’t tell anyone but I ignored the two degree difference. I’ll see at the end if this was a mistake.

Self proposed challenges. The little things that didn’t go quite as planned. The precise cutting of the tenons was enhanced by miscutting the length not once but twice. this left the mortises slightly long. Not a big problem just required a small piece to infill the mortise. There was also the problem with the runaway drill. We all do multiple projects and I accidentally used the leg as a backstop for drilling a hole. Since this is a piece for my own use I just plugged the hole and moved on.

Slow start today. Running this morning in almost 80 percent humidity took the ‘get up and go’ out of me so it was mid afternoon before I wandered into the shop. Continuing to contemplate wood choice I finally just dove in with the cherry left over from prior projects. It’s a bit of a mixture of sizes and it took a bit of sorting before I had the major components identified.

Then it was table saw, bandsaw and planer until the legs were the same dimensions and square and the upper rails all the correct width and size.

I did take the time to ensure that all surfaces were flat before cutting the larger board to make the upper rails, used my planer as a jointer per the usual process.

Sometimes you’ve just got to make a decision and move forward. One little bit of risk I had to consider was that the width of one of the legs was just under size. I could make them all slightly smaller …or I could make sure that the edge is tapered and hope that I don’t taper the wrong side. You can clearly see the leg that needs to be watched in the picture below.

Thinking ahead, the seat of the stool in the article is made of leather and since She who works Leather and Wood is not nearby (Please visit Marilyn’s blog). I’ll have to find an alternate place to get some help. There’s a little shop that I pass occasionally maybe I’ll stop in and see if they can do the seat.

It’s been four years since moving into my latest shop and many projects are complete and onto their new owners. It’s also been four years since I’ve looked through cut offs and scrap stacked on my storage shelves.

While in the middle of a project I keep all of the cutoffs since you never know when you may need to repair a mistake and match color and grain. Over time some pieces get thrown away, but others sit happily on a shelf waiting for a new opportunity.

After finishing up the recent Bar Stools it became clear that some of the lumber needed a new home. So I began picking through the remnants of Oak and Cherry thinking about a future project.

White Oak on the left and Cherry on the Right. There are many great pieces of lumber but not enough for big projects so I need to come up with something small or several small projects.

Then it struck me….I’ve been using one of the Marley Bar Stools for playing guitar, but that will eventually head to a new home. A stool or two designed for a little music would make good use of these pieces and occupy my spare time as the Hot summer moves into fall. I go many places for inspiration, I thumbed through ‘Shaker Inspiration’ by Christian Becksvoort and noticed a simple stool. Not sure about the seat I did a little more search and actually found an article on this piece in Fine Woodworking Magazine, January/February 2015.

This looks like a likely candidate! Cushy seat, smaller parts from the scrap pile, and something I could use.

Being comfortable with hand tools and using machines for basic dimensioning of materials has not translated to a quick and easy bar stool project. Mistakes have been made, lessons learned and in some cases re-learned and the project is far from complete. One area of woodworking that I have avoided is the use of routers for mortise and tenons and pattern routing. That’s partly what this project is about pushing new skills.

Reviewing the project videos it became clear that I would need some jigs for the mortises. Fine Woodworking had an article in Feb 2023 edition showing the Morley Jig and it was clear that this had probably been used when Morley made the original stools. The videos used alternate methods but the jig worked well and I can see its use in the future.

No need for me to show any more build details since fine woodworking did an excellent job in their article.

Chairs have angles and in the case of this stool the angle of the front legs is 6.5 degrees from the back legs. The design of the stool actually means that as long as you are consistent the angle could vary slightly.

I spent the morning dimensioning and cutting to size for the rails two for each chair (8 total). Generally things went smooth with a small problem.

As I finished up some of the lumber dimensioning a couple of fun things happened. The first was the movement in some of the off cuts I had set aside. Walked out of the shop for a few hours and these slits had opened up considerably. The second item is less enjoyable. Saw Stop blade struck what remained of a staple in the end of board, another blade damaged. If I had trimmed the end a few mm further up the board would have saved a lot of money.

It was necessary at this point to take a walk!