cool stools

the finished stools
were working on some tables this week that go with the cherry stools that we finished last week. they were designed by my friend and weekend neighbor, anna, for whom we made them .. anna has been designing and buying custom jewelry from kit for the past few years, so i knew she had a good eye and an excellent design sense. anna gave me the sketch above on her daughters construction paper and after a brief discussion, we made the cad drawing above and the first prototype below.... click the photos to enlarge them.
i started our first prototype with some sort of out of the air dimensions and we found the mockup to be too big for the space, and as a stool in general ...
but, with the prototype we were still able to work out the construction concepts, like the housed tenons shown below .. the housed tenons and the alternate height stretchers are key concepts that allow good noncolliding joinery that allows for slender legs with no loss of strength at the stretcher points. the housed tenons allowed us to not worry about the fit of the horizontal stretcher to the sanded curves of the sculptural legs. otherwise, i dont think we could fit the 8 curved ends of the stretchers efficiently enough for someone to want to buy the stools. we cut those mortises while the leg stock was still square, cutting the curves after.
the stretchers had to have an 1/8th" radius on all their edges to fit the routed mortises, but that was a small price to pay for the quickness of the solution ...
the final prototype, in oak below, was comfortable, particularly sitting across the diagonal of the seat, and fit the space well. anna accepted it and she and her husband selected some beautiful red leather for the seats. this week were working on a pair of matching tables, 19 x 26 x 20 high that will be used mainly as side tables, but can be pulled together as a serving/coffee table for their nearby seating area.
the sketch for the small tables ... more to follow as we work on them ...

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