The ideal stool weighing 930 grams: the story of a carpenter with thirty years of experience Part 1
If you want to know how a real professional thinks, read this story carefully. Participant FORUMHOUSE under the nickname Oliosh_mura has been doing carpentry for thirty years. He honed his skills so much that he managed to make a stool weighing less than a kilogram. How was the evolution of his skill - read on.
Start
I'll start my little story from afar. My childhood was in the 90s. We had little furniture in our house. Among her was an old stool, which was already fifty years old and broke: a leg came off. My brother, with the help of an ax and a knife, carved another leg out of the kindling log that resembled the original. Next, it was necessary to make grooves in this piece of wood. But here it is already better - there was a chisel. Of the adhesives in the house was epoxy, glued to it. The holes for the pins were made with a nail - such were the times.
First Science
But most importantly, we learned how these connections work. Not finding anything complicated, we decided to assemble our stool, since there were a lot of logs prepared for the winter. Since that time, I have collected a large number of a wide variety of wooden products, including items whose main purpose was to be simple and unpretentious furniture.
Long and painful work on connections
The original idea of joining individual wooden parts at right angles was quite complex. The durability of the joint was highly dependent on the accuracy of the manufacturing of the contacting parts. In some of my models, I did not bother and fastened them bluntly to the screws - it was not enough for long. There was nothing without grooves, pins and other things. Filling the voids with a mixture of glue and sawdust was more self-deception than a solution. If you made a thorn, wherever it went, then chiselling a hole in the leg with a chisel, perpendicular to the surface, was a more difficult task. Only hard types of wood in the butt part of it withstood such a mockery. Even when I finally got an electric drill, the precision of the parts left much to be desired.
The first good option
Having made the most successful version of the stool, having assembled it with a minimum of glue, I finally came to the conclusion that the structure, which is a parallelepiped with ribs made of wooden slats, is stable only in statics. Any rotation, swinging on one leg and other methods of bullying will not lead to anything good. With almost any build quality, the classic hexagon stool loosened.
Design nuances
The parallelepiped is stable only with a solid face, that is, the further development of this model would be to fill the openings with a panel or plywood. Actually, this model with plywood inserts has long been used in the manufacture of tables and cabinets. Chairs with partially filled edges are also an extension of this idea. But then the stool turns into a box without a bottom. But what about the aesthetic perception? After all, we do not want to sit on the boxes!
Improvement
I started experimenting with corners: I began to move the legs of the stool apart to give it stability. That is, I gave the stool the shape of a truncated prism. At the same time, the connection of the edges became more complicated, but the essence did not change. The structure was loosened in the same way.
The most stable and simple figure, as you know, is the triangle. The task of changing the existing rectangles formed by the legs of the stool into triangles was tempting, but required a higher skill in carpentry. The simplest solution is diagonal edges in the form of an oblique cross. It turns out a fairly strong structure, but technically difficult to implement, because the leg connectors (tsars and prodogs are no longer the essence) entered the massive leg now at an angle. The initial idea of making cylindrical connectors and drilling the legs at an angle required turning skills and special fasteners for drilling. The construction turned out to be massive - again nothing without hard wood. The idea of moving the connectors and leaving the slanting cross to the jibs visited me, but the implementation did not seem possible. It was necessary to calculate and design all the details of the stool.
Process mechanization, CNC machine
As time went on, I assembled various furniture using a power tool, but over time I got carried away with CNC assembly. Initially, the portal of the machine was stationary, and the long longitudinal carriage moved along the profile pipes using a belt drive. A conventional hand router as a spindle, I more or less mastered.
The first stool assembled with this machine was a copy of a craftsman's work that was discovered in a school museum organized by my wife. This is such a decorative stool, rather a stand. The birch, from which I made it, dried up over time, cracks formed, however, due to its small size and moderate use, the structure retained its strength.
Wood deformation is a problem
Further, according to the same model, I made a stool of normal dimensions: 43 centimeters high. The main element of the fastener was a cross at the height of two-thirds of the stool. Despite the initial precision of manufacturing, almost all parts, especially massive ones, for example, the insert into the lid, varied greatly in size. The deformation, as you would expect, goes across the grain: the tree shrinks and deforms across the growth lines. But along the lines, deformations are much less pronounced. This is how I have come across a description of this phenomenon in the literature, but my own experience is the most expensive.
To be continued!
Did you make something with your own hands? Write in the comments!
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