orepass

Stools are fairly simple structures. Legs, aprons, cross braces, and seats. The challenge comes when making them strong and stable, adding angles to joints. The design that Becksvoort developed uses mortise and tenon joints for the aprons and tapered rungs fitted into tenons to provide cross braces. His choice of tapered rungs makes great sense. They are simple to make and using an angled hole is quicker and simpler than using a square mortise. Additionally, the rungs will not show the wear of square braces. Since I don’t have a lathe, I will be making angled mortises and tenons.

After dimensioning the legs the apron mortises were cut using my powered mortiser (love this machine) The great thing about Becksvoort’s Apron design is that the apron tenons are angled allowing the mortises to be straight.

Now for the aprons and tenons to fit into these mortises. Angled legs create great challenges and the use of straight mortises means that the Aprons must have angled tenons.

Length was made on the Tablesaw using my mitre sled followed by cutting the tenon by hand. There’s many ways to cut the tenon and as an afterthought probably some more accurate methods, but getting out the hand saw was quick and I need the saw to adjust the width anyway.

Lastly I cut them at a 45 degree angle. It’s a simple pleasure to make the cut.

As a larger challenge the plans called for the angles to be different for each side. Don’t tell anyone but I ignored the two degree difference. I’ll see at the end if this was a mistake.

Self proposed challenges. The little things that didn’t go quite as planned. The precise cutting of the tenons was enhanced by miscutting the length not once but twice. this left the mortises slightly long. Not a big problem just required a small piece to infill the mortise. There was also the problem with the runaway drill. We all do multiple projects and I accidentally used the leg as a backstop for drilling a hole. Since this is a piece for my own use I just plugged the hole and moved on.