4 Leg Stool – Fabrication 2

Continuing on with the 4-leg stool build…

With the joinery cut, I moved on to chamfering and finish planing. All the parts got 3 mm chamfers on each edge, with the legs recieiving and extra wide chamfer on the outside corner. I roughed in all the chamfers using a router table and chamfer bit, so all that was needed was a few passes with a mentor-ganna to finish plane the chamfers.

Here is one of the legs and wide chamfers being planed….

followed by the smaller 3 mm chamfers.

I plane the chamfers before finish planing the face of each part. The mentori-ganna can leave burnish marks on a finish planed surface, so it’s good practice to tackle the chamfers first followed by the main finish planing.

There’s nothing quite like planing to make the wood’s surface come to life. Even with chamfers. It’s a subtle thing but you can just make out the contrast between the dull machined surface of the wood and the richer finish planed chamfers in the images below.

With chamfers done, I moved on to finish planing the face of each piece. Since the parts are all relatively small in dimension (no wider than 30mm) I used a smaller 42 mm kanna for finish planing.

A few of the stretchers had some curly grain which ended up pretty rough and torn out back when I did the milling of these parts.

This kind of grain is a good way put your kanna and chipbreaker setup to the test.

Just a few passes with the kanna and the torn grain is gone, leaving a smooth and consistent surface.

It’s interesting to read the shavings when you’re planing difficult or torn out grain. Often the first few passes over a torn out surface tend to result in broken up shavings full of holes.

But little by little the shavings improve with each pass and when the tearout is fully removed you end up with nice full shavings.

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After finish planing one final detail I decided to add was a little accent to the legs. This detail really came about spur of the moment when I built the first prototype 4-leg stool. When the stool was complete and I stood back to look at the finished piece, something felt lacking. So I ended up adding a simple bead detail to the feet to make them feel more grounded and substantial.

After some quick layout using a couple ball pen marking gauges, I started cutting the bead by lightly scoring the outside edges with a hand saw. The cut flows around the leg and runs parallel with the angled cut of the feet.

This super fine, thin kerf (0.2 mm) kumiko saw worked out perfectly for making the scoring cuts.

To finish the bead I simply used a wide chisel to lightly chamfer each side of the bead.

The result is pretty simple, but I feel like the details of the bead match the rest of the stool (chamfers, chamfers and more chamfers), and overall this little bit of accent gives the feet more of a finished look.

And at last here are the completed stool parts, almost ready for assembly.

A final bit of work before assembling the stools was to stain and oil all the parts. One of my favorite ways add color to wood is using iron acetate (steel wool and vinegar), which in the case of cherry turns the wood a rich brown. Initially the color looks flat and gray, but with the addition of a coat of oil the gray mellows out a bit and becomes richer and warmer.

Here are the parts with iron acetate, but before oil. One leg had a face with some sap wood and looks extra gray, but even that piece mellowed out with an oil top coat and became much more uniform in color.

The curly grain on these stretchers really pops with addition of the iron acetate.

Well that’s all for now. Next week I’ll share photos from the assembly and weaving of the stools, and that should wrap up this project. Thanks for following along.