I started building my first woodworking shop about a year ago now. During that time I've learned a lot and accumulated quite a few tools, but my limited shop time has been so focused on the shop itself that I've had precious little time to do any real woodworking.
The project is a prayer stool which I built on request of my mother for a family friend who is a Benedictine monk (with kinda bad knees). To use it one kneels, places it across one's calves, then lowers one's rear onto the little bench.
Help From the SMC Design Forum
The idea for how to attach the legs, i.e., in what amounts to a loose mortise & tenon joint angled slightly outward, came from Louis Bois. Mark Singer also offered a nifty idea, which was to hinge them and use a latch made of ebony. I chose the slip-in method partly because I thought it was more within my rather minimal skills and partly because, as someone else on the design forum pointed out, simpler might be better in a gift for a guy who has taken a vow of poverty.
The Wood
The wood comes from our own Donny Raines in Ohio. It's part of a small lot of birds-eye maple that he sold to me for practically nothing -- about $3.75 per BF delivered if memory serves. In various places the wood shows birds-eye figure, a bit of curl and/or quilting, and a little bit of spalting as well. Very interesting stuff.
Construction
The particular piece I chose for the top has the sap line running right down the middle of it which, I realize, is not the standard, accepted way of using any wood. But in this case it's part of the design -- part of my artistic, (perhaps "autistic" would be a better term?) "statement." Since the front of the piece is lower than the rear, (in order to allow for the sloping of the legs of the person using it), I wanted the front edge of the piece to have a more grounded feeling than the rear, thus I put the darker wood there. I'm not really sure it works, but that's what I was aiming for.
When I first cut the mortises & tenons my intent was to have them be a slip-fit -- just snug enough so that they would not fall out when the thing is picked up but loose enough to pull out for storage under the recipient's bed. Well, the Florida humidity nixed that idea pretty quickly when I left the thing assembled overnight and the humidity changed the next day. I practically had to use explosives to get them apart!
So I had to think of something else, and I finally settled on rare earth magnets. There are two on each tenon and two matching ones mounted in each mortise. (I plugged the drill holes for the magnets on the outer edges with cocobolo just for a cute little bit of contrast.) The system does not look very good when the stool is disassembled, but it works well and I was really under a lot of pressure to get it done at the end, so other, more wood-oriented, ideas had to go by the wayside.
Finish
The finish is several layers of Lee Valley Polymerized Tung Oil, followed by several of Tried and True Oil Varnish, and then a final coat of LV PTO. I sanded between layers with 2500 grit AO paper.
Tools
I got a pretty good hand tool workout making this little piece. Hand tools (mostly vintage) used include:
Planes:
Others:
- Stanley #4 smoother (WWII era);
- 100+ year-old British convex-bottomed planes;
- Unbranded (but most likely Sargent-made) standard angle block a la Stanley 9 1/2;
- Unbranded standard angle block which is undoubtedly a Stanley 9 1/2 without the markings;
- Chisels -- mostly W. Butcher
- Rasps -- Nicholson #49 & #50
- Scrapers -- Lee Valley "Super Hard" set
- Stanley hand brace & bit
- my "Marilyn" saw (home-built Japanese-bladed bow saw)
- coping saw
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Originally Posted by Louis Bois
