You didn't build that, someone else did. Saddle stool edition by samUwell - TribalWar Forums
Click Here to find great hosting deals from Branzone.com


Go Back   TribalWar Forums > TribalWar Community > General Discussion
Reload this Page You didn't build that, someone else did. Saddle stool edition
Page 1 of 3
Thread Tools
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
1 - 07-04-2022, 15:34
Reply With Quote
In my new hut, in my kitchen I have an island, something I did not have in my condo and something Ive always wanted. Makes cooking so much easier and you can seat people at it in a less formal setting than at the table. Only problem was, I didn’t have any seats to seat the people that come over.


Here is the island in my kitchen. Nice and big and it needed some seats, so I started looking at buying some stools. I scoured the internet for something that would fit my style and settled on a saddle bar-stool style of stool. The only issue was, I didn’t like any of them I saw. Granted, I didn’t go to a brick and mortar and look and keep it to the internet, so I decided to make my own.

Now, it needs to be said that while I have worked in the construction industry for most of my life, I have never made a piece of furniture before, so this was going to be something new for me, so I got to work on sketching some plans, something I have also not done in a long time. I used to draw a lot when I was younger but yeah… lol.

So I went to my local Rockler woodworking shop and bought some lumber to make the stools. They didn’t have any 2”x_____ so I had to buy all 1” thick boards.

(left – right) Zebra, African Padauk, Maple (I think beech), Mahogany (which I didn’t use because the board twisted into useless lumber), Walnut, and Cherry.


Here you can see the basic design of the stool I wanted to make. I changed it up quite a bit though as the upper decorative piece was too advanced for my first build so I removed that and, I also lowered the cross support members as I like to rest my feet on the cross support while sitting. It was just too high.


Here you can see a side view of the stool. I wanted to add some dowels into the legs to give them some contrast.

I got to work ripping down the boards into the dimensions I needed to make the components of the stools and glued them up. For some weird reason, I didn’t take any pictures of the ripping the boards down or the glue up, but I ended up with a lot of pieces.
 
samUwell is online now
 
Sponsored Links
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
2 - 07-04-2022, 15:35
Reply With Quote

Here we see a rough idea of what I wanted for the seats. Basically, 3 chopping blocks so I watched some videos on how to make some chopping blocks and got to work. I messed around a bit with the various pieces until I found a design I wanted. I wasn’t too sure about the Padauk running down the center like it was and because the Mahogany was so twisted, I bought a stick of Rosa Paula which was hard as a rock and ripped it down and put it in the center.


Here you can see the Rosa Paula running down the center. This **** was insanely hard, and it would come back later to bite me in the ass…


The seats are now glued up. Time to run them through the planer.



Looking good so far but there is a lot left to do.

Time to get working on the legs and cross support members.
 
samUwell is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
3 - 07-04-2022, 15:35
Reply With Quote
Because I have never done a glue-up before, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from tightening the clamps down. What is too tight? This, I am sure, comes with experience, something I have zero doing and I say this because while I was gluing the individual pieces together, none of them stayed ‘flat’.


Here you can see how the piece of walnut on the left side is slightly higher than the padauk. WTF? Turns out, this apparently happens a lot, something I did not know about or account for, so this changed up the measurements of ALL the components to the smallest width, so the pieces stayed dimensional. I wanted the pieces to be 1 ¾” x 1 7/8” and now… ugh.


Back to Rockler to buy a jig to make **** straight. Turns out, I could have made the jig above and I will as this is too small for my Dewalt table saw but it got the job done. I had to line up the piece on the jig and cut it flat to all the pieces.


One of the legs was so bad that I had to toss it and quickly made/glued up another one.



All the pieces had to be put onto the jig, ran through the table saw, and brought to the proper dimensions.


All the pieces are now glued, cut to the proper size and something I can work with.


Now that that set back is done, on to “How in the **** am I going to cut the curve into the seat?”
 
samUwell is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
4 - 07-04-2022, 15:36
Reply With Quote
No one wants to sit on a flat board, and I needed to cut in the curvature into the cutting board seats. I do not own a band saw and honestly, I am not sure one would’ve worked anyway with how hard some of this wood was, so I needed to get creative, and I decided to make a jig for the router that I can chip away at the seats and get a rough shape to them.


Here is the basic sled that I came up with. The L metal would hold the router and allow me to push it from one side the next, go over 1”, and drop the depth 1/8” inch at a time.




This is something I can work with. I initially thought about using a belt sander to shape the ass into the seat but then I saw on Amazon this thing called a shaping disk that attaches to your grinder. Huh… lemme try that.




I had to rig up a bunch of support pieces to keep the seats in place and the shaping disk worked great.



Seats look like a seat now. Time to get to work on the legs.
 
samUwell is online now
 
Brasstax
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
5 - 07-04-2022, 15:36
Reply With Quote
If you turn the barstools over - you can fit 4 people on them instead of 1.
 
Brasstax is offline
 
Mitchdubai
Pooptruck++
Old
6 - 07-04-2022, 15:36
Reply With Quote
Now you can say to all your friends "can I push your stool in". Every cloud.
 
Mitchdubai is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
7 - 07-04-2022, 15:36
Reply With Quote
Getting the design of the legs drawn onto the wood pieces was quite a bit of fun to be honest. Because I had the legs set at a 5 degree compound miter angle, and because I have never done something like this before, I found it to be technical and, time consuming.



The black circle you see on some of the legs are the spines. Essentially, the part of the legs that will come into contact with the seat. Because this was so technical, I made some legs previously with some pine boards I bought at a box store. You can see those on the right of the picture. I needed something to practice with because I was not going to cut into $500 in wood on my first try. And let me just say that I am glad I did because I made a ton of mistakes with the pine boards. Good lord…


Anyhoot – I got the legs cut out and the cross-support pieces in a rough-cut state. Because I wanted the cross-support members lower on the legs than I had with the pine boards, I left them long so I can cut them down to size and then dry fit everything to take the measurements.





With the legs sitting at a 5-degree angle, all the cross-support pieces at the tops of the stool needed to sit flat so the weight of the seat was evenly distributed.

Here you can see the spines of the legs protruding past the top support pieces and the 5-degree angle on the pieces. This all needed to be cut flat so the design of the stool works properly.


Here is one of the upper pieces getting ready for a trimming.



Just a little off the top, eh hoser…


Dry-fitted everything to make sure it was all good and sure as ****, it was. Awesome or, so I thought…
 
samUwell is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
8 - 07-04-2022, 15:36
Reply With Quote

I disassembled the stools and got to work on putting in the dowels. Initially, I wanted the dowels every few inches apart but after seeing how awesome the wood looked together, I decided to spread them out a bit.


Because I don’t have a drill press, I went back to Rockler and bought a portable drill press that worked great.


Here is a rigged stop block for the dowels. I wanted the dowels to stand out so I bought walnut and because I couldn’t find any maple dowels, I had to buy oak, something I wasn’t happy about, but I wanted that contrast in the legs.



Once the dowels were glued in, I cut them down to size.

When I was cutting in the notches or mortises (sort-of) into the legs, the saw blade did a great job but didn’t get them completely flat/smooth for the glue up.



In the notch above, on the right side, you can see a small protruding piece of the wood where the saw blade did not get it so, I had to use a file and file that **** down.



Much better. Had to do this pretty much on all the legs, in all the notches.
 
samUwell is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
9 - 07-04-2022, 15:37
Reply With Quote
The stools are getting somewhere. Progress is being made. YAY!



I had to pre-sand everything before I built it because there was no way I was getting my orbital sander in these tight spaces. I didn’t take any pictures of sanding because wtf is there to show but, I went 120 grit, 180 grit, 240 grit and finished it with 320 grit, all with apparently the single best sanding disks on the market made by 3M called, 3M Extract Cubitron II Net Disk. The 320g from 3M is similar to a 600g from some other company.

Finishing is one of the more important aspects of this and I did a lot of research on finishes. I found some that is basically the best on the market called Odies. A lot of oil-based finishes is wipe on, let soak, and mechanically buff off and I thought this was the same. Everyone was saying to sand the wood to the highest you want, apply the oil, and buff it off so I got to work on sanding.





While difficult to see in the above images, this wood really woke up and it was time to glue everything together.

When I did the dry fit and found that all the components fit together properly and level, for some reason, when I did the glue up, I glued the pieces individually. Long cross-support, long seat support members were first glued to the legs and once dry, I glued the short cross members. However, something went wrong, and I am not quite sure where or what happened.

I have a feeling that once I put the oil on the wood, it was hot outside and the oil caused some of the pieces to twist a little bit and when I glued the pieces individually, I didn’t notice the twist until I glued the legs together. It caused the legs to be out of square and a bit wonky and this pissed me off extremely bad. I almost burnt the things; just have an impromptu bonfire in the backyard kind of reactions but I decided to wait a few weeks, cool off and deal with it.

Man was I ever pissed though.
 
samUwell is online now
 
Brasstax
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
10 - 07-04-2022, 15:37
Reply With Quote
Needs more sawhorse
 
Brasstax is offline
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
11 - 07-04-2022, 15:38
Reply With Quote
Well, since the stools were out of square, the legs rocked, and the seats no longer sat flatly on the upper support pieces...



While the picture above might not show it, that seat was being pressed down and there was still a gap. It was worse on the other side and the way I built the stools was that all the pieces would distribute the weight evenly down the legs so, if the seat wasn’t sitting flat on the upper-support members of the stool legs, one side of the stool would be taking the brunt of the weight of a human. This could spell disaster. Even the feet of the legs no longer sat flat, and the stool would rock. Sigh…

I needed a way to fix this… The only thing I could think of was to glue some sandpaper down onto a piece of good plywood and slide the stools across it. But, how would I know what still needed to be sanded and what didn’t…




And push/pull the stools back and forth until they were level I did. This took a long time, and a lot of labor was required. I did both the tops where the seat sit and for the legs. Did 120 grit, 220 grit, and 320 to finish it. I just did this on Saturday, July 3rd and I am still extremely sore. Forgot about those muscles in my legs. Damn…

Anyways, it worked, and it worked very well. The seats sit flatly on the stool and the legs no longer rock but man… what a pain in the ass.

When I was designing the thing, I kept getting stuck on how I was going to mount the seat to the stool legs. Initially I thought about just using some long screws but decided against that, mostly due to expansion and contraction so I got some figure 8 clips and had to route them into the top cross-support pieces that came with wood screws. Sweet.



Ok, not too bad.
 
samUwell is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
12 - 07-04-2022, 15:38
Reply With Quote
This is going to work so, I put the Odies Oil on and buffed it off.



Pre-drilled all the holes for the fasteners and started screw the clips to the support pieces. Well, remember how I said that Rosa Paula wood was extremely hard?

Every screw busted off. “ZOMG!!!” So, I had to break out the router again, rout in new areas, pre-drill it again with a wider drill and… it did it again. Worst part is the Rosa Paula piece that runs down the center of the seat, right where I have the center clips on the short cross pieces.

This was all yesterday mind you and I once again thought about burning them…

But I kept pushing on and carefully mounted the seats to the stool legs. There is an L shaped bracket that I can use should these fail at some point but I think these will work.
 
samUwell is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
13 - 07-04-2022, 15:38
Reply With Quote
Before:


After:








 
samUwell is online now
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
14 - 07-04-2022, 15:39
Reply With Quote









All in all, I had a LOT of fun doing this. There are a lot of mistakes with the stools and for a while there, I didn’t think I was going to be able to live with those mistakes, but it is a learning thing for me. I needed to remind myself that I have never built a piece of furniture before, so mistakes are bound to happen, and they turned out very nice. They are sturdy, sable, and don’t rock. Lol.

I am very happy with the way they look and maybe down the road, as I get better at making some of these insane cuts, I will remake them… mistake free.

Like, subscribe, and don’t forget to ring the bell. It really helps the channel a lot.
 
samUwell is online now
 
SINep
VeteranXX
Old
15 - 07-04-2022, 15:41
Reply With Quote
Get rid of those god-awful, "traditional", Home Depot, island ledge supports, it doesn't match your kitchen.
 
SINep is offline
 
Rustie
VeteranXV
Old
16 - 07-04-2022, 15:43
Reply With Quote
Cool thread, they look great!
 
Rustie is offline
 
HumDumpin
ReeeingRainbowXV
Old
17 - 07-04-2022, 15:44
Reply With Quote
Nice project sam, now make a popout shelf for that plug on the island so you dont trip on the laptop power cord!

Also nice fkn doggie
 
HumDumpin is offline
 
samUwell
VeteranXX
Contributor
Old
18 - 07-04-2022, 15:57
Reply With Quote
Quote:
Originally Posted by SINep View Post
Get rid of those god-awful, "traditional", Home Depot, island ledge supports, it doesn't match your kitchen.
Funny, I've been thinking of making replacement ones. I cannot stand those things.
 
samUwell is online now
 
Gouge
VeteranXX
Old
19 - 07-04-2022, 16:19
Reply With Quote
How much for you to make me two of those stools and ship them to me?
 
Gouge is offline
 
Zanthious
Tribalwar Admin
Old
20 - 07-04-2022, 16:20
Reply With Quote
bro this screams bay area are you in cali son
 
Zanthious is online now
 
Page 1 of 3
Reply


Go Back   TribalWar Forums > TribalWar Community > General Discussion
Reload this Page You didn't build that, someone else did. Saddle stool edition

Social Website Bullshit


Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)
 
Thread Tools

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off


AGENT: claudebot / Y
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 17:03.