TITLE: Fixing a stool
DATE: 2021-03-15
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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About a year and a half ago I made a stool from a piece of oak,
with alder legs. I had just been given a new drawknife for
Christmas and wanted to test it out by shaping some pole lengths.
The seat of the stool was shaped from a tangential section of a
large log. First the log was split down the middle using a
splitting maul, then the backside of the log was taken off with a
chainsaw, ripping down the grain of the wood, which is slow-going
compared to cutting across the grain. Using a tangential section
meant that there was some lovely colour difference between the dark
heartwood and the pale sapwood.
I drilled four holes with a brace-and-bit drill and an auger
through the seat, to fit the legs. I shaped the alder legs with the
drawknife into octagonal shapes, purposely leaving some bits of
bark on the corners, which I think adds a nice effect.
To fit the legs into the seat I shaped the top of the legs down to
pegs which could then be tapped into the holes in the seat, and
finally wedged with thin slivers of hard yew. I made sure the seat
was wet and the legs were dry, so the seat would tighten around the
legs.
To make the pegs I sawed into the legs then used a flat chisel to
split off the wood up to the saw cut, bit by bit. To fine tune I
used the chisel to shave down the pegs.
Clearly I cut too deep on one of the saw cuts for the pegs, because
recently the leg snapped off.
Instead of shaping new legs I decided to shape a new peg for the
broken leg, and just have a shorter stool. I actually think the
shorter legs look better, as one of the legs was previously quite
bowed and looked a bit silly.
