The Literary Workshop Blog

In my last two posts, I showed how I made the oak framework for my new joint stool, which I’m making with expert guidance from the book Make a Joint Stool from a Tree by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee.

So far I’ve been working oak from logs. But for the seat, I used cherry wood that I also got from a tree.

This cherry tree came down in the back yard of a friend in Alabama during a 2020 hurricane. I hauled off as much of the wood as I could, sawed it up into very rough short boards, and made a bunch of wooden spoons out of it. The rest got stacked up to dry.

Because this joint stool will live in my kitchen, which has cherry wood cabinets and trim, I decided that a cherry seat would complement the space nicely.

Making the Seat

I had originally quarter-sawn a bunch of the cherry logs to about 2″ thick, knowing that they would have plenty of time to dry before I got around to using them. But the top should be much thinner.

The plan was to resaw this little plank on the bandsaw, glue the two pieces together, plane it all down, and end up with about a 3/4″ thick seat.

Resawing a thick plank and gluing the pieces together results in a nicely bookmatched seat.

But if you look closely at the above picture, you can see that the two pieces are not anywhere near the same thickness.

My plan for the seat had gone awry almost immediately. The bandsaw’s blade wandered, leaving one side just shy of 3/4″ thick and the other side well over 1″ thick on one edge. So I needed to remove a lot of material from the face of the thicker piece.

(Side-note: you can see in the background of the picture above that I already have a joint stool, which is a modern reproduction of the form. I have no idea who made it, but I bought it at an antique shop a few years ago. And while I’m not replicating the existing piece’s dimensions exactly, it’s very nice to have a full-scale model from which to work.)

The fastest way to remove stock is with the coarsest tool. In this case, the coarsest tool turned out to be this hewing hatchet. Its edge is beveled only on one side, and it’s designed for squaring up small timbers.

There’s a specific technique to using it effectively to hew to a line, but I won’t detail that method here since I didn’t pause to take pictures of the whole hewing process.

But as you can see, I was able to knock off enough thickness, and I can handplane the surface down from here.

For heavy stock removal, it’s best to use a handplane with a blade sharpened to a slight curve, or camber. I used my wooden jack plane, whose blade I keep shaped and sharpened for exactly these kinds of jobs.

You can take off a thicker shaving if you plane directly across the grain like this. Just be aware that the edge on the exit-side is going to break off some. If this were going to be the underside of the seat, that wouldn’t matter. But this will be the show-side, so I made sure to plan for a bit of loss in the overall width.

You finish by planing the surface down with the grain.

Thumbnail Profile

Once I had the whole piece glued up and planed down, it was time to add a thumbnail profile around the top edges. I had never done this by hand before, but the book shows how it’s done. It’s a surprisingly simple process, and I will definitely use it again on other projects.

Start with the ends. Decide how far in you want your thumbnail. Mark the depth with a cutting gauge or a sharp marking gauge. Clamp a batten across the workpiece in line with your scribed line. Use a saw to cut a very shallow kerf. Just a few light strokes will do.

Now use a rabbet plane to remove the stock. A skew-rabbet like the one pictured above works best. But I imagine that any rabbet plane or shoulder plane would do a decent job if you were to take a light cut. Fortunately I had picked up a wooden skew rabbet plane at an antique mall a year or two ago. They’re actually fairly common on the secondhand market right now, and unlike a lot of wooden molding planes, they are often in usable shape and can be tuned up pretty easily.

Once you have planed this rabbet onto each end, you can plane the rabbet along the long edges, too. Use the same method, though it’s not necessary to saw the kerf if the grain is fairly straight. Just use the rabbet plane held tight up against the batten. It doesn’t even matter if the rabbets at either end are cut to precisely the same depth. Just adjust your strokes with the rabbet plane to make sure the rabbets meet all the way around.

Now that the the rabbets are formed, you can round over the edges. Again, you start with the ends. Plane a chamfer first. When you’re working on the ends, be sure to skew the plane so as to cut the end-grain cleanly.

Then plane off the two corners of the chamfer. The result will start looking like a round-over.

You can plane the initial chamfer around the whole workpiece first, and then go around and take off the corners on each of the four sides. Or you can just work one side at a time, which is what I’ve done.

You can plane or scrape off any remaining corners if you like. And if you really want the round-over to look round up close, you can sand it down perfectly round. I didn’t, though. It’s enough for me that it looks like a round-over from a distance. I don’t mind feeling facets, and it won’t make any difference when you’re sitting on it.

Attaching the Seat

The book admits that the seat attachment is the most fragile part of the stool. The authors note that antique joint stools are often found with missing or replacement seats. The traditional method was to attach the seat with pegs driven through the seat and into holes in the tops of the legs. Because the holes go into angled legs, the angles create a sort of “dovetail” effect that holds the seat on.

I don’t doubt that the result is good if you do it right, but I also know how much this stool is going to get used, pulled around, and picked up by the top. I think there’s a reason that the seats of these stools don’t always survive. If the tops shrunk or cracked a bit, or if someone pulled up on the seat just a little too hard, the seat could pop right off. Then it would be very difficult to reattach it firmly using the same method.

So I decided to use a method that wasn’t really an option for a 17th-century joiner: wood screws.

I made four brackets out of some oak offcuts from the project.

Because these brackets are on the underside, they didn’t need to look pretty. In fact, there was only one part of these brackets that needed to be precise. Everything else could be shaped quite roughly.

Here’s how I did it:

First, I chose a wood screw, and I cut an offcut into this shape.

The stock is approximately 2″ wide and 1″ thick, and long enough to be cut into a right triangle, but the exact dimensions didn’t matter. As you can see, I cut one end at 45 degrees. If your upper stretchers are consistent in thickness, then you can just cut both ends at 45 degrees. But if the stretchers’ inside faces were left rough, as mine were, then you need to figure out what angle you should cut the other end at. Don’t just assume it will be a perfect 45 degrees.

Fortunately, the angle is easy to establish. You don’t measure it with numbers. You just gauge it with a sliding T-bevel.

Use the sliding T-bevel at approximately the same place you’ll put your bracket. I’m screwing them to the short stretchers on each end. Each bracket’s angle is cut to fit a specific corner. They won’t be interchangeable, so I made and installed them one at a time, so as not to get them mixed up.

Transfer the angle to the bracket, gauging from the 45-degree cut.

Cut to the line you just drew. As you can see, the angle between the seat and the stretcher is not precisely 45 degrees. But this bracket will fit the angle perfectly.

Now to make the inside of the bracket.

Figure out exactly how deep you want the screw to go into the underside of the seat and into the stretcher. Gauge the distance using the screw itself. Make sure the screw will penetrate the wood enough to hold it securely but not so far that it pokes through the side or the top. Be sure to account for the whole length of the screw, including the head, since you will want to countersink the head.

Mark that depth with a marking gauge.

Make a shallow saw cut on each line. You only need to cut as deeply as the screw head is wide, not all the way through to the corner.

Split out the center with a chisel. Working from both sides will get the best result. Why not just saw all the way until the kerfs meet? Because splitting out the stock leaves more of the wood in the corner, resulting in a stronger bracket.

Now drill a pilot hole in each face you just sawed. The pilot hole should be wide enough for the wood screw to pass through easily.

Countersink each hole so the screw head will seat nicely and pull the bracket in tightly.

Set the bracket in place, mark the location of each hole, and drill smaller pilot holes into the seat and side stretcher. Use a drill bit with a depth-stop or some other kind of depth indicator so you don’t drill too deeply or stop drilling too soon.

With the top screwed in place, flip the whole thing over and take a look at your work.

With the joint stool assembled, it’s time to do a final once-over before applying the finish. I used a card scraper to level out a few rough spots and take off stray pencil marks here and there. And of course I signed and dated the underside of the top.

The Big Finish

I applied a couple coats of Danish oil to the whole thing. The Danish oil I use is my own mixture: one part each raw linseed oil, polyurethane, and mineral spirits. I apply a first coat very thoroughly so it saturates the whole surface. I let that sit for 10-15 minutes. Before it becomes tacky, I apply a second coat, ensuring that any spots that look a bit dry get plenty more oil. I let it sit another 10 minutes and wipe off any excess oil.

I let the stool dry in direct sunlight, which both dried the finish and darkened the cherry top.

Should the finish become damaged or worn, I can just apply more, though I haven’t needed to do so with any other piece I’ve used this finish on.

After drying for about a day, the stool is ready to be used.

Immediately after I finished this, I thought to myself: “I want to make another one.”

In my last post, I showed how I did the layout and joinery for my new joint stool, which is a 17th-century design that I have wanted to try out for years. I built the piece from wood taken from several logs I got locally, one of which was an oak tree that once grew on my property. I’m so happy to be giving that tree a second life in this stool.

The stool itself is designed to sit on, or really to perch on. Your feet can rest comfortably on the lower stretchers if you like. Despite the flat top, it is a remarkably comfortable way to sit. It’s a wonder this design ever fell out of favor.

It also makes a great end-table, if that’s your preference.

In building this stool, I am following a book published over a decade ago now: Make a Joint Stool from a Tree by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee. This book is an invaluable guide to building this project, but the book is so much more than that. The principles and techniques they illustrate are widely applicable to all manner of furniture making.

Detailing without a Lathe

Traditionally the legs on these joint stools are turned, and they do look lovely when done well. I, unfortunately, am still lathe-less after 20+ years of woodworking, so I went with a different design plan.

The book very thoughtfully offers an alternative for those of us who don’t work in the round. It shows how to cut stopped chamfers with a lamb’s tongue detail on the legs. It was the first time I tried this kind of decoration, and I rather like it. And because you may wish to use this kind of detail on your own work, even if you never make a joint stool, I’ll walk you through the process here.

Between and below the mortises on each leg, pencil a line around the leg. Then pencil a second line about 3/4″ or 1″ further away from the mortises. The second line will be your stop, and the first line will be the beginning of the lamb’s tongue.

Use a pencil to mark the depth of the chamfer. I went about 3/8″, though I probably should have gone deeper for a bolder detail. Make a saw cut on the second line, and chisel into it to make a stop on each end of the chamfer.

I used a drawknife to carefully remove most of the waste. A chisel works too. Work right down to the layout line–and to the bottom of your saw cuts. A spokeshave is useful for leaving a nice, finished surface. That does it for the chamfer.

Now it’s time to shape the lamb’s tongue on each end of the chamfer. Using a mallet and chisel (bevel down), you start at your first line and scoop out the first part of the lamb’s tongue.

Next, with the chisel bevel-up, round over the lower part.

You can see the result here:

Use the chisel to make sure the chamfer and the bottom of the lamb’s tongue meet together nicely. Don’t get too fussy with how each one comes out. There will be little variations between them, and some will probably be cleaner than others, and that’s okay. From a distance, they’ll all look great.

It really helps to be working with stock whose grain is dead-straight.

I formed this detail on three of the four corners of each leg. The inside of each leg just got a rough chamfer all the way down.

When you need to remove layout lines, the card scraper will take off whatever the eraser leaves.

There are fuller instructions in the book, but that’s how I did it. The result is a softened, lighter look to the legs. Plus it removes the sharp edge that would otherwise start splintering as the stool gets used over the years. Always remove sharp corners on your furniture, or they will be removed for you.

In my final post, I will show how I made and attached the top of the stool.

Ever since I got this book, I have wanted to make a joint stool from a tree. The grainy picture alone should give you an idea of how long ago that was.

The book is Make a Joint Stool from a Tree by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee. Although I wrote a review here back when it first came out, I never got around to building the featured project until now. The reasons for my delay were manifold, but they mostly came down to (a) lack of trees, and (b) lack of a lathe.

Then about five years ago, the tree problem was solved for me when we took down a 100-year-old oak tree in my front yard in Alabama. It yielded a small pile of straight, clear, white oak boards, some of which I cut into 2X2s that I expected to make into legs for chairs or stools once they dried.

I brought all of the stock with me to Ohio when I moved here, and now the wood is at 12-15% moisture content–quite dry enough to build with. Along the way, it got mixed in with some red oak that I harvested that same year. Both woods are ideal for this project.

I still don’t have a lathe, though. Fortunately, Alexander & Follansbee provide guidance in their book for making shapely joint stool legs without a lathe, and this is the result:

For a first attempt at this form, I’m happy with it. The legs are white oak (well, at least three of them are) and the stretchers are red oak. The top is cherry. All the stock is from wood that I got right from logs. It was a fun project, and I will definitely make another one, even though I will do a few things differently next time around.

I’m not going to indulge a build-along instructable post here. If you want that, buy the book!

Rather, in this post and its sequels, I’ll walk you through several elements of the process that I found especially interesting, as well as some problems I needed to solve, some of which went beyond the scope of the book. So consider this post a small tribute and supplement to Make a Joint Stool from a Tree.

Layout

If you’ve only every built furniture with right-angles, the joint stool is a good introduction to angled mortises and tenons. But because the legs splay only in two directions (as opposed to chairs whose legs often splay in all four directions), the angles are simple to visualize. There is only one angle.

The challenge, however, is determining the exact length of the stretchers. The distance between the tenon shoulders on either end actually determines where you should cut the mortises. It’s hard to describe why, but as soon as you start building the stool, you’ll see what I mean. If that distance between the shoulders is a bit too short, then the stretcher would want to sit too high. If it’s a bit too long, it would want to sit too low. So you have to lay out the locations of the stretchers very precisely.

That doesn’t mean you have to do it with numerical measurements, though. After giving the problem some thought, I grabbed a big board out of my scrap pile. (It was a drawer bottom I had mistakenly cut to small.) On it, I drew out the angles and used the full-size diagram to lay out the angles and the locations of the joints, as well as the precise length of each piece. I planned for the legs to be 23″ long when finished, and everything else was gauged from that single dimension.

I departed somewhat from the dimensions of Alexander & Follansbee’s stool, which is shorter than mine and employs a 6:1 angle for the legs. Mine is more like 12:1. Because it’s a taller stool, the splay angle needs to be shallower. As long as the legs extend just a little bit beyond the top of the stool (when seen from above) it will be perfectly stable in use.

With the full-size template, I was able to cut the stretchers to the proper length and mark the tenon shoulders right from the legs–no measuring required. I’ll set the template aside for when I decide to make more of these.

Sixteen Mortise and Tenon Joints

Yes, there are 16 mortises to chop. That’s a lot. I cut them all by hand.

But I found that after my first few, I got a lot faster. The process was not nearly as laborious as I had imagined.

I considered removing the bulk of the waste with a Forstner bit on the drill press and squaring up the holes with bench chisels. It would perhaps have been a little faster to do it that way, but I don’t particularly enjoy squaring up round holes, and the air-dried oak cut really well under the mortise chisel. I’ll do it this way again.

Sixteen mortises are cut to accept sixteen tenons, which did not take nearly as long to make, thanks to some tricks recommended by the book.

Normally when cutting tenons by hand, you first saw the cheeks and afterward you saw the shoulders. But with this method of construction, you saw the shoulders first.

You also intentionally undercut the shoulder on the back of the stretcher, as you can see above. That way, the shoulder on the face is guaranteed to pull up tight against the leg with no gap. That does mean there’s a slight gap in the back of the joint, but no matter. The joint is quite strong enough.

With the shoulders cut, you then cut the tenon cheeks. But you don’t saw them. You just split them off.

I remember the first time I saw Peter Follansbee do this–on an episode of Roy Underhill’s show The Woodwright’s Shop. I was almost mad at him for making it look so easy. But it IS easy. First split off about half the thickness of the cheek. Then set your chisel in the layout line and split that part off. Check the fit in the mortise, and pare off any bit that remains too thick.

This method works because the wood’s grain is very straight. It’s been split out of a log, after all, not sawn out any which way. So the wood splits pretty straight. This also works because the joint won’t be glued together. The real strength of the joint will come from the drawbore peg that will lock the two pieces of wood together. But we’ll get to that below.

Because the mortises meet inside the leg, the ends of each tenon must be trimmed so as not to bump into each other when the frame is assembled.

I did the work roughly with a drawknife.

And yes, this leg has a stray saw cut in the top. It doesn’t affect he integrity of the joinery, so I just left it. The book guides readers away from perfectionism and reminds us that it is perfectly acceptable to leave tool marks, layout marks, and even small flaws in the work, long as those things don’t compromise the structure or ruin the overall form.

Drawbored Mortise and Tenon Joints

There are lots of good tutorials on drawboring, and the book covers everything you need to know. But it doesn’t hurt to show how it’s done, because it’s genius.

I first bored 5/16″ holes through the mortises about 1/4″-5/16″ from the edge. The lower stretchers each got one hole. The upper ones got two holes on one side and one on the other. The holes mustn’t intersect.

Insert the tenon in the mortise and use an awl to make a mark slightly off-center, toward the shoulder of the tenon. That last part is important. You are intentionally going to bore holes that don’t match up, but that are slightly offset from one another, and the direction of offset is critical to the success of the joint.

Pull the tenon back out and bore the holes where you marked them. I repeat: on the tenon, the hole must be offset toward the shoulder. How far should they be offset? The exact distance doesn’t matter. Make it about the thickness of a half-dollar coin.

Thus, when I assemble the joint and drive in a peg, the offset holes will pull the joint up very tight, and there will be enough friction in the offset holes that the peg will never work loose.

Drawbore Pegs

I bored 20 holes in 16 joints, so I need 20 pegs.

Because the whole joint will depend on the structural integrity of these pegs, the stock should be chosen with care. The grain should be dead-straight all the way through the peg, and the wood should be as dry as you can get it–ideally drier than the stock they’re being driven into.

I found some off-cuts about 5″ long. These were from the end of one of boards I cut to make the stretchers, so they are at least as dry as the surrounding wood. And because boards tend to dry out more on the ends than in the middle, I can expect these pegs not to shrink on me.

To insure the grain runs straight for the whole length of the peg, they must be split out, not sawn. For successful splitting, don’t try to split narrow pieces off thicker pieces. Instead, split your stock in half, then half again, until you are close to the size you need.

Using a chisel to split the wood will inevitably make the split want to run out because the chisel edge is flat on one side and beveled on the other. So once you start the split, set the workpiece loosely in the vise and pull the chisel back a bit toward the flat side, as you see above. That should straighten out the split.

On a sacrificial block, use a chisel to carefully shave down each peg to a slight taper. You may have to turn them end-for-end at first to remove the bulk of the waste safely.

This looks much more dangerous than it is. Oak works particularly well in this way, especially when your chisel is perfectly sharp. Other woods may not shave so well in this way. I’ve tried making pegs like this from hickory, for example, and that was noticeably more difficult.

On each peg, you’re aiming for a nice, long taper. The peg should drop easily into a sample hole but not go all the way through.

On a few of these pegs, I used a spokeshave to finish shaping them.

Notice the peg is nowhere near round in cross-section. That’s intentional. It is better to leave the pegs somewhat square, or hexagonal, or octagonal in cross-section, as the corners will grip better in the surrounding wood. It is also a good idea to shave the tip to a dull point so it can slip through the offset holes.

It takes a while to make enough pegs for the whole project. You may wish to make one or two extra, in case one turns out to be a bit too thin or breaks unexpectedly when you start tapping it in.

Assembling the Joints

Woodworking is a curious process. You start with a pile of wood, and you work steadily for hours or even days making cuts and planing surfaces and shaping joints, and for that whole time, you still have what looks for all the world like a pile of wood.

Then, suddenly, in just a few minutes, that pile of wood comes together into a recognizable form. What was a heap of seemingly random bits of material is now a stool or a cupboard or a table. It’s almost magical the way it happens.

The assembly is the fun part, especially since assembling drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints is a relaxed process. You’re not worrying about clamping things up before the glue sets or anything like that. Because there’s no glue, there’s no hurry.

I assembled one end, then the other, and finally connected them with the remaining stretchers. Tap in the pegs just a little bit at first, until you’re sure each piece is in the right place and everything is coming together as planned. Then go around and tap the pegs further in to snug up the joints.

I did have a bit of trouble making sure that the pegs cleared the opposite stretchers when they came through the backs of the joints.

I had left the insides of the top stretchers quite rough, since they will be hidden and out of reach of anybody’s fingers. They vary in thickness quite a bit, since there was no need for them to be a regular thickness. As long as they don’t obstruct the drawbore peg, they’re fine.

So back to the pegs. How far do you hammer in the pegs? Well, I just tapped each peg in with a hammer until it stopped. If you’ve done this before, you know what I mean. Once you stop feeling the peg advance, and the peg has come through the back, and the shoulder of the stretcher is snug up against the leg, you should stop. You’re done. Some pegs will go in father than others.

Then I trimmed off the pegs with a dovetail saw.

I sawed off each peg. The easiest way to do this without marring the surface of the leg is to rest the spine of the saw on the surface and saw carefully so the teeth don’t touch the surface. This leaves the pegs just a little bit proud of the surface. You can trim them flush with a chisel if you like. Or you can just whack each one with a hammer to set it flush. The hammer method is faster.

On the lower stretchers, I sawed off both ends of each peg. (It hurts a little bit to see your hard work on the peg come off as waste, but you get used to it.) On the upper ones, where they won’t be seen, I left the pegs long on the inside. Just a little something for the conservator to appreciate.

Once the stool was assembled, I leveled the feet. You can do this very precisely by hand. I also chamfered the feet with a spokeshave so they won’t split in use.

As you can see in the photo above, I’ve added chamfers and a lamb’s-tongue detail to the legs in order to break the sharp edges and lighten the structure visually. In my next post, I’ll show you how it’s done.

Last Christmas I was given a few pieces of exotic wood, which have been sitting in my shop since then, waiting for me to make a special little project with them. After doing a lot of work with pine this summer, I was in the mood to make a smaller project for myself, ideally using these special pieces of wood. (I’ve learned that the best time to use that special material I’ve been saving is now.) I had one 24″ piece of goncalo alves and a couple 18″ pieces of purpleheart, all about 4″ wide. After doing some sketching, I confirmed that I could use this wood to make a nice book stand, which I would model on a book stand that Peter Follansbee made.

You can see Follansbee’s version here. It’s a lovely piece, with his characteristic 17th century carving. His blog post gives you excellent directions if you want to make a similar one yourself–provided you have a lathe. I don’t intend to repeat Follansbee’s instructions, but I do want to supplement them–should you decide you want to make something similar but don’t own a lathe.

This is my own version:

The most obvious difference between my book stand and Follansbee’s is the choice of wood and my lack of carved decorations. I admire carved work very much, but it’s not the kind of thing I like to live with. The dimensions of my stand are also different (the reason for which you will see at the end). Mine is 18″ high, and the shelf is 18″ wide, whereas I think Follansbee’s is about an inch shorter. And the dimensions are different. His is more or less square, while mine is oblong. Working with short stock, I could make the rails only so long, which is fine. The lesson here is that this is a very adaptable design. The exact dimensions are not crucial to its function.

I especially like the ratchet in the back, which allows the stand to sit more upright or more laid back, depending on your preference (and perhaps the weight of the book on display). I had never built any mechanism like this, so I was eager to try.

When I showed the finished project to a friend, who is also a woodworker, he asked if I worked to any kind of plan. It occurred to me that others might also like to see the plans I use for my projects, too.

“Plans.”

The reason I seldom show my plans is that they are truly minimal. I write down only the most critical dimensions of the piece. I keep most of the design elements in my head during the building process–especially for one-day projects like this one. Decisions that can be made on the fly (like the exact radius of a curve) are not written down at all. As you can see, the finished product differs from the plans in several details, such as the number of teeth in the ratchet and the addition of a curve on the top rail.

I began, as always, by dimensioning my stock. I didn’t feel like running out to the garage and unburying the bandsaw and planer, so I just did it all by hand. All my stock was 3/4″ thick to begin with, but I reduced the thickness of the shelf down to about 5/8″, just to save on a bit of weight. Purpleheart is heavy, and I don’t want this book stand to be front-heavy! Planing across the grain with a jack plane brought down the thickness pretty quickly, though even with a sharp blade it gave me quite a workout.

Follansbee’s blog post does an excellent job explaining how the shelf is tenoned into the stiles, so I won’t go into detail about that here. But you can see from the picture below how the tenons are shaped. I also bored some peg holes (3/8″, I think), though I did that after everything was dry-fit and I could set a book on the stand to figure out where the holes needed to go in order to hold the book open. I decided to bore two sets of holes, one pair for a smaller book and the other pair for a bigger book.

Next I selected the nicest part of the goncalo alves board for the top rail. The grain had a natural curve to it, so I decided to shape the top into an arc following the grain direction. I penciled in the arc freehand, roughed it out with a coping saw, and fared the curve with a spokeshave. Next I cut the tenons on each end. they’re about 3/4″ deep with a haunch on the top.

I realized I should have cut the tenons first and shaped the curve afterward, as it’s difficult to hold the workpiece on a bench hook with the top all curved. I ended up picking one of the offcuts out of the trash and using that as a shim to help me hold the board in place. It worked surprisingly well. Lesson learned: don’t take out the trash until the project is finished.

With the tenons cut, I laid out the mortises and chopped them with a mortise chisel. I also bored the 1/2″ round holes for the pieces that will rotate for the ratchet.

My auger bits are optimized for soft woods, not for dense hardwoods like purpleheart. When I need to bore a hole in a very hard wood, I typically drill a pilot hole for the lead screw to follow. It really helps.

I cut curves on the top of each stile, which I think is a nice complement to the curved top rail.

I used my glue bottle as a template to trace out the curve on the top of each stile. (I told you I do a lot of the design work impromptu!) After cutting off most of the waste with my coping saw, I again refined the curves with a spokeshave. Clamping them together and shaving them down like this ensures that the curves are identical.

Making the rotating rails for the ratchet was probably the most fun part of the project. The rack and the blade are each tenoned into a rail 3/4″ square. I chopped a through mortise in each one and cut a tenon on the end of the rack and the blade (not pictured). Follansbee’s pieces are turned on a lathe, but I don’t have a lathe. I do, however, know how to make a round shape with flat tools.

Here’s how it’s done.

First, find the center of each end by using a ruler to draw lines corner to corner. The intersection is the center–or as close to the center as you need to get for this operation.

Next, use a drill bit of the same size as your mortise to drill an extremely shallow hole in the end of the workpiece. It’s best to use a bit with a center screw or spur, like an auger bit or a Forstner bit. I happened to use a Forstner bit in my electric drill, which is the only powered tool I used for this project. Now you have the finished width of the tenon marked clearly on the end.

Now determine the finished depth of the tenon, and measure that in from the end.

Mark the line all the way around the workpiece with a knife, and make a shallow saw cut on each of the four faces. You can measure the approximate depth of the tenon shoulder and saw to that line, or you can just eyeball it. Even if you go a smidge deep, you won’t compromise the strength of the tenon.

Now, with the workpiece held upright in the vise, split off some of the waste, going as close to the finished depth as you dare. (This is where it really helps to have chosen stock with dead-straight grain on each end.) You can deepen each saw cut as necessary in order to allow you to split off even more waste.

Because this tenon needs to rotate freely in the hole, it’s okay if you chisel over your line in a couple places. The more you take off with your chisel, the less time the next step is going to take.

Once you’ve gotten as close to your line with your chisel as you dare, use a file to remove each corner, and remove each corner again, until the tenon is roughly round. It helps to use a file with a “safe” edge (also called a pillar file) so you don’t cut into the shoulder by mistake. You could also use coarse sandpaper wrapped around a slim bit of scrap.

Test your fit in the mortise regularly. When it fits well but turns easily, you’re done–no matter what the tenon looks like. This method seems slow, but once you get the hang of it, it’s really quite quick.

I also decided to chamfer the corners of each piece with a spoekshave, which I think provides a nice transition from the square mortise to the rotating end of each piece.

With the whole assembly dry-fit together, I determined how the two pieces of the ratchet would meet. First I tapered the blade with a drawknife and spokeshave to just under 1/4″ at the end. I also narrowed the width of the blade at the business end just a little bit, so any misalignment between the two pieces wouldn’t be obvious to the eye.

With the book stand set at the steepest angle I could imaging wanting it, I marked the location of the first ratchet tooth. The rest are spaced 3/4″ apart.

I just cut them out freehand with a back saw, though I suppose I could have marked out each tooth first. My one suggestion is that you not make the top of each tooth sharp. There’s no need for that. The teeth will be more durable if each one has a bit of a flat left on top.

After removing as many of my layout marks as I could find and breaking the sharp edges with a spokeshave, I glued up the whole assembly. There are only six joints that need glue. Don’t glue the round ones!

While I waited for the glue to dry, I shaped the pegs from a couple scraps. They are about 3″ or 4″ long. I don’t know–I didn’t measure them. After planing them square with a slight taper, I took off the corners with a spokeshave and kept working at them until they fit just snugly into the holes.

I gave the whole thing a couple coats of my home-brew Danish oil, which is just equal parts raw linseed oil, mineral spirits, and polyurethane.

It’s very easy to use. Flood the surface with the oil. Wait 5-10 minutes, and apply a second coat. Wait another 10-15 minutes and rub it down with a clean cloth, removing any excess oil. Let it dry about 24 hours, though the finish won’t be fully cured for another week or so. Still, it’s about as foolproof as a finish can get. The finish gives just enough protection that the wood is easy to clean, but it also lets the grain come through, so the surface still feels like wood and not like plastic. It’s also very easy to renew if necessary.

As the finish dried, I kept rotating the ratchet mechanism, as I didn’t want the finish to freeze the round tenons in place.

The book stand will live in my office at work, where I’ll use it to display some of my more interesting books, like this English translation of Dante’s Inferno illustrated with woodcuts by Gustav Doré.

I like the fact that the book stand is tall enough that even a large book doesn’t completely obscure the tops of the rail and stiles. It would be a pity to use such nice wood only to have it always hidden behind a book.

I do, however, own one book that will hide nearly the whole stand, and I don’t mind that so much. In fact, I built the stand with this particular book in mind.

It’s my Compact Oxford English Dictionary, which my wife and I got at a secondhand shop for $15 quite a few years ago.

The full Oxford English Dictionary is by far the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of the English language. While it is now used mainly online, in print it runs a full 20 volumes. But the single-volume Compact edition is something of a technological marvel. Each folio-sized page contains nine regular pages in nearly microscopic print, and it must be read with a magnifying glass. (My copy, sadly, is missing the magnifying glass that is normally provided with the book.) Because I have full access to the online version through my university, I don’t often have occasion to consult my print edition.

But the volume is too interesting to just let it sit there in its box, so from time to time I’ll be displaying it on my new book stand.

I am, among many things, an opportunist. Two of my daughters, who share a big bedroom with no closet, have been after me to build them a proper wardrobe. I had been putting the project off because it was going to require a lot of both time and material. But when the material suddenly appeared free for the taking, I decided it was time to build the wardrobe.

My university had announced late last year that they would be tearing down an old academic building and building a new one. So before demolition began, I asked permission to salvage some of the hardwood trim and a few other items that were going to come down with the building. I soon realized, however, that many of the old offices had built-in bookshelves, so what began as a quick salvage project became a multi-day effort to remove as many of the old pine shelving boards as I could before time ran out.

I recruited a couple friends and a few family members to help, and between us we were able to carry away about 100 pine boards that were 10″ wide and between 4′ and 5′ long, as well as numerous trim boards and a few whole shelving units. My 2-car garage had (temporarily) become a no-car garage.

Free, salvaged material always comes with interesting challenges. There are the usual the nail-pulling challenges, as well as the working-around-massive-flaws challenges. But I’m used to that. The added challenge here was building a 6-foot-tall structure using only boards that were 4′-5′ long. Now where is that mythical board-stretcher when you really need it?

In truth, woodworkers make long boards out of short boards pretty regularly. There are all manner of scarf joints and other techniques that allow us to do that. In my case, though, I opted to butt shorter boards together and use trim boards to join them together in a big panel while also hiding the butt-joint in the middle. These panels will become the two sides of the wardrobe.

These boards are also edge-joined with tongue-and-groove joints, which will allow for seasonal expansion and contraction in the panel. My Veritas plow plane (with the optional tongue-and-groove kit) got a lot of use in this project.

I also spent a lot of time composing each panel. All these shelving boards are knotty pine, so I sorted through many to find ones with straight-ish grain on the edges and the knots in the middle. It’s no fun trying to plane a tongue or a groove straight through a pine knot.

I had also salvaged several long trim boards, and those became the key to joining up the whole panel. After joining together all the panel boards with tongues and grooves, I clamped and temporarily screwed the trim boards to the face-side of the big panel. The beauty of working with salvaged wood is that it’s already pre-distressed, so a few extra holes will hardly be noticed. They can be filled with putty, or just left open as part of the overall distressed look.

While this project came together mostly via the rough work of driving nails and screws, it also involved some fairly precise work, like cutting material right to a knife line–while cutting around flaws and notches left from the boards’ first life as office shelving.

After all the trim boards were ready, I flipped the whole panel over. (It covered my entire workbench, and then some.) I screwed the panel boards to the trim boards from the back. With careful placement of screws, I think I should be able to force the expansion and contraction toward the tongue-and-groove joints on the inside edges of each board.

I was also able to attach the trim boards so as to create big rabbets on the top, bottom, and back of each panel. These rabbets will allow me to assemble the whole case with just nails, nailing through each rabbet at the four corners of the case. More on that later.

After taking the above picture, I re-thought the placement of a few of the screws and moved them closer to each other. Old pine should be fairly stable dimensionally, so putting in screws 3″-4″ apart shouldn’t cause too much trouble. Putting them farther apart is more risky, as the wood is liable to split when it shrinks in the winter.

Even the screws were salvaged. We must have backed out a couple hundred old drywall screws while removing this wood from the building. And while they’re not as nice as genuine wood screws, they were free! And most of them were perfectly serviceable.

While I built the panels for the case in my basement shop, I decided I did not want to haul the whole thing up two flights of stairs to the second floor. Instead, I brought up the main pieces and put everything together right there in the room. The top and bottom got nailed on just as planned. There’s also a shelf near the bottom that got nailed onto battens.

The back boards also got nailed on. To allow for expansion and contraction, they are just shiplapped, just for variety. I was kind of tired of tongues and grooves at this point. The back boards add a lot of rigidity to the case and also help keep it more or less square. Most modern pieces would have just used plywood for the back, but I had over 100 shelving boards to pick from!

You can see in the above picture how the case is assembled, with the trim boards creating the rabbets at the corners. The shelf is set on top of battens that will also serve as drawer runners, and there are more drawer runners nailed to the bottom of the case.

Normally I would not use pine for drawer runners, as they will tend to wear out after years of regular use. Hardwood lasts much longer. But these runners are extra-wide, so once they do wear down somewhat, they can be pulled out, flipped around, and reinstalled so the drawers run on full-thickness boards again. And if they wear out yet again, they can always be replaced or reinforced with hardwood runners–but that should be another lifetime from now.

As I was putting the case together, my wife suggested that I put the whole thing on swivel casters, so as to make it easier to move for cleaning behind. That sounded like a good idea to me. So I screwed some spacers to the bottom and installed the casters. I made sure the grain of the spacers was running the same direction as the boards they are screwed to. That way, they will expand and contract at roughly the same rate, and the screws will pose no problems.

But for the cross-grain battens, which I installed to help reinforce the skirt boards, I used nails. The nails will allow for a little more expansion and contraction than will screws.

The doors are very plainly constructed. Each one is made of two boards joined on edge with a tongue and groove joint and reinforced by battens screwed on from the back.

I put cabinet latches at the top and bottom of each door, and now each door will close securely–without the risk of locking anybody inside.

The drawers are very simply constructed. They are joined at the corners with nailed rabbets, and the drawer fronts are screwed on from the inside. While the result is a very thick drawer front, that extra thickness isn’t noticeable in a case of this size. Plus, the drawer front serves as a stop. And I was able to make the drawers just a little bit under-sized because the drawer front takes care of the reveal around each drawer.

Normally, the bottom of a drawer like this would be a piece of 1/4″ or 3/8″ plywood set into a groove. But again, I was using only the wood I had salvaged from the building, and that meant making the bottoms out of 3/4″-thick pine boards. I glued up two boards to make a wide enough panel, then beveled three of the edges to fit into grooves I had plowed in the drawer sides and front.

As it happened, I had some spare cabinet handles on hand, so I didn’t even have to purchase the pulls. The only parts of this wardrobe that I bought were

• Nails
• Hinges
• Catches
• Casters

Everything else was salvaged material I got for free. While this is one if the biggest pieces of furniture I’ve ever made, it is probably also one of the cheapest.

To finish everything off, I added some simple molding to the top of the case. The front of the whole case is very plain and minimalist. Had I had a little more time and been inclined to do more work, I might have set the doors into a proper frame instead of building them as flat panels with nothing around the edges. But they are rigid as constructed, and I felt that the material lent itself to this aesthetic. Plus, these boards all have finish on them which, while distressed in places, is still in fairly good shape. I wanted to leave the original finish on these boards intact, and doing more framing and/or trimming would have meant making a lot of cuts that would have revealed fresh wood, and I would then have had to then match or at least complement the original finish In some way. And I was not about to try to replicate an old, distressed finish on the front of the piece. Sometimes you just have to work within the constraints of your material.

The whole project took me about 4 or 5 full work-days, which were spread out over a couple weeks. I now have significantly fewer than 100 shelving boards in my garage. I can park one of our family vehicles in there again, and the girls finally have a place to hang their dresses. So that’s progress all around.

I did warn them that I was not going to build in a portal to another world in the back of this particular wardrobe. It hasn’t stopped them from checking, however.

That other famous wardrobe, you may remember, had been built from wood grown from an apple seed brought here from that other, magical world. That’s why it opened the way for the four children to enter Narnia.

This wardrobe, however, has been built from wood that came from an even stranger world called Academia. So if on some rainy afternoon the children are playing hide-and-seek and stumble through their wardrobe into a world populated not by fauns and witches and lions but by undergraduates and adjuncts and post-docs, well… who knows what adventures they might have in such a strange land?