Starting the Stool Build - 11:00

Sometimes life deals lemons.  In this case, I am stuck at work all day today and all day tomorrow.  No time to be in the shop at all.

How am I going to build a stool today?  The answer is:  I already did!

I freely admit that I completed this stool earlier in the week.  Monday was a federal holiday, and also the last day I had off before the build off.  You be the judge!

To keep with the spirit of the Stool Build-Off happening today, I will post my progress from Monday in real time, as if it were today.

A side effect of posting now having done the build on Monday is I only had to take some pictures of the project while it was in progress.  I got to spend the rest of the week setting up the blog posts to go with the build.  I think this results in a much better chance of my writing being intelligible as opposed to trying to write and post during the build itself.  I'm pretty sure I would not have been able to post anywhere near as much content if I did both simultaneously.

This series of posts will come out mostly every hour until the build looks complete.

Here is my progress at about 11:00 am last Monday:

I started the day yesterday with the intent of cleaning my shop and sharpening all of my tools so all I would have to do is get up, run down to my shop and start hacking away.

Intentions are good.

Here's what really happened:  I didn't get anything done the night before at all.  Even worse, for some reason I did not get to sleep until the middle of the night resulting in my early jump down to the shop not happening until about 10:30.

Oh, well.  We must all endure.

One of the reasons I was hoping to get started early is that one is not allowed to make noise in our apartment building except between the hours of 9 a.m. to noon, and then again from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Hand tools are mostly quiet, except when it is time to bang on something with a mallet or a hammer.

Getting a late start pretty much killed any chances of pounding mortises before three o'clock.

Luckily, a few days ago I got my stock roughed out to size.  I started playing with my new Moxon vise and planed all of the legs into octagons.  Actually not octagons because the legs are not square, but wider on one face than the other, but with a deep chamfer on each corner.

I marked out lines with a pencil to define chamfers.

First chamfer  done.  The Moxon works well for this.

Another view of the front.  I had to change what I was using for spacers to allow for optimum results.

One done, three to go.

Next up:  Making squares round.

View the rest of my build here.