Yesterday morning I turned leg after leg, experimenting with different diameters and shapes to produce a folding stool that would easily hold a 225-pound person but not look like it was made with Tuscan-order columns.
About 2 p.m. I had my answer. Here are the specs on this stool:
Legs: 1-3/16”-diameter x 24” long. The ankle is 7/8” diameter with the taper starting 6” from the floor.
Hardware: 5/16” x 3” hex bolt, 5/16” x 2-1/2” eye bolt. Three washers. Two acorn nuts.
The stool is stout. Sitting in it inspires confidence. And it looks only marginally heavier. The one shown is in teak (yes, more teak offcuts. Will I ever be rid of them?). The design also worked fine in mahogany.
One other note: This stool starts out with a seat about 18” from the floor. After the leather stretches, it ends up about 16” from the floor. Now I can write the chapter for “Campaign Furniture” on these stools.
As a woodworker who loves to make chairs, I always try to use components that are as light and strong as possible. Thin spindles look better and can help a chair conform to the body of the sitter.
But wood has its limits.
Today I started assembling some folding campaign stools that were based off an original that had 1”-diameter legs. The original had a thin 5/8”-diameter ankle and 7/8”-diameter foot. They looked fantastic, so I decided to build the project as-is.
Unfortunately, we moderns are lard-butts.
In comparing the new stools to my old ones (which had a 1-1/8”-diameter legs and chunkier ankles), I definitely preferred the feel of the chunkier stools.
I weigh 185 pounds, and the stool with the thin legs was just too flexible to be comfortable. Every time I shifted my weight, the stool would give a little bounce. That’s not good feedback in the buttocks region.
So if you are building this stool before the book comes out, I recommend you beef up the legs. Use 1-1/8”- or 1-1/4”-diameter legs. Tomorrow I’m going to turn some more legs and try to get the look of the skinny leg on a thicker component.
Today I was riveting the heck out of the seats for these folding campaign stools I’m building. And after the 25th rivet, I realized something bad was going to happen. I was going to run out of “burrs.”
Burrs are the copper washers that get compressed against the leather and hold the rivet tight. You need one burr for every rivet. And I was five burrs short of finishing the seat.
This is generally not my way. I always buy too much hardware – I have boxes full of knobs, screws and doovlackys galore. But today I was five burrs short.
So I abandoned the project until I could buy some more copper rivets and burrs. I made dinner. My mind wandered.
Growing up in Arkansas, our garage was home to three things: my dad’s workshop, kids’ toys and my father’s private collection of canned tuna fish, Tostitos and toilet paper.
We belonged to one of those early warehouse-style food store where you buy food stacked on pallets and box it yourself. My dad, keen on the idea, bought boxes and boxes of tuna, Tostitos and TP. I often wondered if he tried to keep the tuna in balance with the TP. As in: Do I have enough TP to accommodate this amount of tuna?
But our family’s humor has always leaned toward the scatalogical.
When my friends saw the stack of tuna, TP and Tositios, they’d mock me and ask to see the fallout shelter and so forth. I just shrugged my shoulders. I’ve always liked Tostitos and a clean bum.
Somehow today this image (of the Tostitos, not the clean bum) wandered through my head, and I scolded myself for not buying more burrs the last time I was buying buckles.
But wait, I thought. I did buy some more burrs. They were with the buckles. In the bag with the buckles.
I rushed to the shop. Sure enough, the bag was full of buckles and burrs.
2. If you want a French workbench but don’t have the machines or time to build it yourself, I’d like you to meet Mark Hicks of the Plate 11 Bench Co.
Mark took my campaign chest class at Marc Adams School of Woodworking this year. Not that he needed it – he runs his family’s furniture business in Ozark, Mo. This year, Mark has expanded his business to start making workbench kits.
If I were to buy a workbench, this is exactly how I would want it.
The parts come unfinished. All the joinery is cut. No vises. All you need to do is do the final fine-fitting, assemble the bench and then add the vises of your choosing. The bench comes in two heights (which can be trimmed to a wide variety of custom heights) and with two joinery choices when it comes to the joint that fits the top to the legs: a tenon, or the sliding dovetail/tenon in French benches.
Here are the specs:
Material: Kiln-dried 16/4 silver maple
Weight: 200lbs
Top Dimensions: 23” wide x 84” long x 3-3/4” thick
Leg Dimensions: 5-1/2” wide x 3-3/4” thick
Two standard leg heights: 38” (adjustable to 34”) or 33” (adjustable to 29”)
Leg Joinery: Bare Faced Tenon
Mark is still working out the pricing, but he thinks the base bench will be about $2,000.
He will have a booth at Woodworking in America and prototypes of his benches to show and sell. Do stop by, meet him and check out his benches.
If you can’t attend Woodworking in America, you can read more about the benches at his web site: Plate11.com.
Saw Setter or Harmonic Scarecrow Music hath charms to sett the teeth on edge.
SAW, an instrument which serves to cut into pieces several solid matters, as wood, stone, ivory, &c. The best saws are of tempered steel ground bright and smooth: those of iron are only hammer-hardened: hence, the first, besides their being stiffer, are likewise found smoother than the last.
They are known to be well hammered by the stiff bending of the blade; and to be well and evenly ground, by their bending equally in a bow. The edge in which are the teeth is always thicker than the back, because the back is to follow the edge.
The teeth are cut and sharpened with a triangular file, the blade of the saw being first fixed in a whetting block. After they have been filed the teeth are set, that is, turned out of the right line, that they may make the fissure the wider, that the back may follow the better. The teeth are always set ranker for coarse cheap stuff than for hard and fine, because the ranker the teeth are set the more stuff is lost in the kerf. (more…)
