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.

  ![Seat of the 
stool](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/stool/seat.jpg)

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.

  ![Stool legs](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/stool/legs.jpg)

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.

  ![Shaping the leg 
pegs](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/stool/peg.jpg)

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.

  ![New shortened 
legs](https://johngodlee.xyz/img_full/stool/short.jpg)