Members' Gallery - Share Your Builds

Danish stool: I made it!

Thanks Richard and Helen, I learned SOOO much from this series! I'm still a beginner and many of the techniques in this video were outside my comfort zone: the angled mortices, the angled tenons, the through tenons, the compound angles, the curves, the weave, etc. Thanks to your amazing instruction and demonstration, I managed without struggling too much. It was hard (in a good way), but certainly not frustrating. I'm really happy with the outcome. The joints fit snugly and are virtually gap-less, the stool feels nice and is plenty strong enough to hold my weight as I sit on it. Here it is, on the workbench, 2 minutes after completing the weave (oops, we can still see the cord scraps in the photo). I'm honestly still surprised/amazed at how well it turned out and I can barely believe I made this. I would never have attempted a build of this complexity without this series. I think the hardest part for me was the angled tenons in chapter four. I had to restart these pieces several times to get all 4 tenons fit snugly with consistent angles. I was simply incapable of sawing them correctly and trying to correct them with a chisel only made things worse. I resorted to planing the ends with a variable angle shooting board and then using a magnetic 90 degree sawing guide and then the result was near perfect. I put off the weave for some time as was rather intimidating. In the end, it wasn't that hard. In fact, I enjoyed it quite a bit and now I kind of feel silly for having put this off for so long. I did struggle a bit with the paper cord, especially at the start. The cord snaps off surprisingly easily when bent around the nails or pulled too tight. I even cut one of the loops on the underside while driving the nails in at the very end, but I managed to tie it off with a an extra nail. It takes a bit of getting used to, but by the time I reached the final middle section, I was progressing with decent speed and no longer snapped the cord. I've said this before in my previous posts, but I truly feel more and more confident/empowered after each of these series. Building this stool suddenly makes me want to try building more chairs. Maybe I'll try your chair building series next :-)