We make many different projects some are big some small some are simple and some more complex this is going to be a simple project I wanted something that would bridge the gap between the raw beginner and actually making a decent project so we're making a three-legged stool it was once called the milking stool but of course most three-legged stools today would never be used for milking cows but we're going to make it because it's a great project for kids to learn on it's a great project for giving as a gift to kids so I've got a couple of pieces of wood here this is just some 3 by 2 or 2 by 3 depends on which continent you live on this is just to scrap I've got second hand and I've got a couple of, this is an old door where the door stiles have been thrown out and I saw it in a pile of wood ready for the burn,I thought, those would make really great legs for a milking stool so I'm going to show you how we take roughstock I also have some ash here some solid it's from the round it from a split log I want to show you a couple of things with this just to get you thinking through the different processes so we'll start out with those I'll show you how I prepare some of my stock and that will get us started.
Before I start discussing leg material and what the options are for the legs I want to prepare my top for a laminated top it's going to be quite unusual to find a 12-inch by one-and-a-half inch section of materials so the best thing to do is to get something like this it could be four inches or three and a half inches wide it could be three inches wide like this is this is just under 3 inches it's probably more two-and-a-half but what we do is we just clamp this in the vise, set the plane quite shallow you can hear it kissing the surface can you see that what we had its highs and lows from the machining process we get this all the time so if we glue up two surfaces like that obviously there's a big percentage of those that will not connect when we glue them together for a lamination so we take your shaving up with the hand plane like this until we get a continuous shaving all the way to the end like that so you can see what I got in just a few short strokes there same here now, so it's skimming across the high spots and bringing them low, so there we go now what I'm going to do is back my iron off here i want to take your shaving as much thinner shaving like this which gives me a perfect jointing edge, there you go so we've got this beautiful clear crisp edge that we wanted I'm going to do the same on this side so again I'm going to go with the heaviest set to start with a very simple good sharp plane here is rough rough, rough so there's a knot, just go for it when you get a knot just go for it, so I've set my plane shallower now, bit too shallow there we go that's got clear edges for the lamination, glue too setup what do now I want a 12-inch top and this piece is section is about two-and-a-half it is two and a half so I need five of those to make up a top so five, that will give me 12 inches and I'm gonna make these a little bit longer I'm gonna make these a 12 and a quarter a little bit of crack there but it won't hurt anything in this case so in a mark this is 12 and a half and I'm going to crosscut just with a handsaw like this that gets that and now I can use that piece to mark the distance here it doesn't have to be accurate at all and it can be just as you saw me do it's just rough end, you go near to your vise like this you get less flex very quick very effective if you've got a little bit of bind in there just take your oil, a rag-in-a-can here like I have just a tomato tin stuff with a rag and filled with three-in-one oil that will make you operate nice and smoothly very nice nearly there, one more, perfect, now I'm looking at these edges to see how they going together, looking good, that's nice, that's nice, but that got a little bit of a a hollow and that makes it good so there it is looking good this has a slight check in here it's not deep it's what we call a surface check it's not going to go any deeper it's not a structural check that affects it so I'm going to keep that it won't hurt my work so what we do now is we set the clamps, these are set one and two, lay these on here in the sequence, we're not taking them apart yet generally we might mark these across like this, going to open this up one notch and then I'll slide it up after I've got my piece, you might mark this like this just to make sure you do get them in sequence then we stand these up like this and we run a bead of glue a zigzag like this, no more no less that's it do we spread it? no, we just do this exactly very fast this is so effective this is the way I've done this for 50 years and it works great then we drop this answer here just rub the two surfaces until that bead of glue comes up right in the middle there and then we've got it equally spread over the whole length, we go to the next one and do the same, just rub, do the next one just keep rubbing until the bead comes up right in between, that takes out the excess and it means the glue is equally distributed across the whole and it'll actually grab and it'll stop moving so you know that you've got it nice and evenly marked that way, slide this up, we want to take up the slack, that should go, here we go, here we go and keep the ends aligned here as you clamp, if you apply pressure there may be some slippage it may slide a little bit but you can correct that, See, that glue bead just be dried out there and same with this one bring a third clamp in first off you do want to take up the excess glue from this side even though more glue will come out, this piece of wood is a two by that had rounded corners don't worry about those, we are going to plane them out after, we bring this clamp into play This counters the pressure of the clamp underneath, so this is actually, these two clamps are causing this to bulb this way but this clamp will counter that and level it out so we'll have a nice even surface when we come to plane afterwards so cinch them up still got glue coming out of that joint line even though I've already wiped it off so you can see having those perfect meeting faces doesn't allow for any excess, there we have it glued up leave it overnight and that will be ready to make the seat and cut into a circle tomorrow.
We'll look at the legs I've got a couple of options here, the wood that I used to make the rounds seat I could use that for the legs but I found these old door stiles in the burn pile and I was hoping I could use these up because it's very nice wood, I can see very tight annual rings growth rings down here which makes it very slow-growing wherever it came from so I like that but then you may have something like this in your burn pile you may have some wood that you've used you may want to use something like this the inside would this is ash it's fine the outside it's got a little beetle in the outside that left a series of holes but that won't have gone into the heartwood I don't think, so i have these options I've got this and I want to cross cut, I probably can get four legs out even though I only need three out of that, no guarantees, but this one if you do have something like this you can find the center of the tree here and you hopefully we'll be able to split off some sections like this just persevere don't give up it seems impossible think is impossible to get ready, people get ready there's a trainer coming, a crack committed here hopefully this will suddenly pop wow, we go so this one and the next one we're going to split this down here away from that centre just like this that was a little bit how I expected that first one to go That's following the grain, I can see why it was a little bit more difficult to split off it had a knot in there that will affect some of what you do and then of course you can split here, I will only get one leg I probably should have gone there and then this outside edge will make the leg so that's how we would use something like this to make our project but what we're going to do in this case is I'm going to take one of these, measure my overall length, I need about 13 inches so this is 27 and a half so I'm going to split this, cross cut this here just with my handsaw, like I did the seat like that, very simple, I want to get rid of this groove on the side here like this what I've got and I already measured this I've got just over three inches about three and a quarter and the material is 1and 5/8 inches thick so it means I can get a 1 5/8 section here from this piece that's the same with this and then I can get my second piece and this is where I go back to my axe but I could just as well use a handsaw to rip down this, this is working so nicely that it's ready to go it doesn't have to be parallel and you'll see why in a minute, but I have one more to get here so this one might not split quite because usually like with this one, I had equal pressure from both sides with this one I don't necessarily have that so I could reach for a handsaw I'm going to see what I get, that worked perfectly too so that saved me quite a bit of work one more of this one and I have my three legs so let's see if this is going to oblige as well so any material that's inch and five-eighths inch and five-eighths inch and a half and half anywhere that size will work so those are my leg pieces now got my leg pieces using this looks like some kind of fir, Douglas fir or something like that smells like it that's what we're going to use the legs Glue's gone off we're ready to the surface plane both sides of this you want to get these radiuses out but we also want to make sure it is pretty close to level, this is my clamp in the vise here, it works perfectly for things like this just bring it up, just below the surface here clamp it good and tight and then clamp the work piece itself in the clamp in the vise, in the clamp, make sure it's tight not going to move, then take your plane and set it hard so you can set quite a deep cut we're going to plane across the grain not with the grain to start with like this to get this down so you can see the plane is working across the grain to straighten out the undulations, keep tweaking it to get the depth you want, this is working perfectly I don't like the knot but it's not much I can do about it we're not trying to plane a true face like we might for a normal piece of furniture it wouldn't particularly matter if it has some minor twist in this surface therefore I'm not even going to chest it for those kind of issues, I'm taking more of that far side then I am off near me because I'm going to flip this around in a minute knots are hard on the plane, not too hard, some knots are harder than others, this is this is kind of a spruce so I'm down it's close to where I need to be got my exercise breathing heavy and flip it around, work the other side and we do the other side of course, and my knots pretty hard heavy on my plane, heavy on the clamp there's another one, shame I have to plane that one down because this one is going to be coming off so so there I am down to the surface level I can work with along the grain now, why did I not go along the grain? is much easier to plane across the grain for this type of work so now I may need to reset my plane after I've taken off the high spots that I created it, you can hear it hitting those highs, so I'm gonna keep going till I get down to a continuous shaving all the way across pretty close back your iron off, hard work yes but great exercise this is high, it's got a hollow in there it's not really much and I'm happy with that I think now I have to do the other side, there it is just to give me some kind of a visual on it now to see just where we are with it eyeball it from one side to the other and I don't have any twists in there so it lies close to flat on the bench which is great and now I have to do the other side, double up on my exercise, we'll do that and then we'll get back together.