Wooden Stool Out of 1 Bar

From time to time, I am working in my workshop together with my girlfriend. The problem is, the drill press is ofter to high for her to work comfortable. I found a stool with the perfect height (around 17 cm). But it is a bit small for a save stand. So I decided to make a new one, same height but larger footprint.

To make it as easy as possible and also very cheap to rebuild I used only one framing stud, hand saw, power drill, some screws and something for measuring.

In the photo you can see the old one on the right and the new one on the left. The old stool is rock solid and works fine, when you want to reach something. But it's to small as a working plattform. As you can see, the new one has nearly the same length and height but it's much wider.

• 1 framing stud (34x54 mm, 5m long)
• hand saw
• power drill
• some screws
• tape measure

In the first step, the 5 m bar will be cut in pieces. Normally you should start with the longest pieces. In this case I want to get a specific height (around 17 cm) and a specific width (around 50 cm).The long side is not that critical, so I cut the feet and the connection pieces first and then the rest will be divided in 6 equal parts.

Cuttlist:

• 4x feet 14 cm long (14 cm + 34 mm top piece = ~17 cm)
• 2x connection pieces 43 cm long (50cm - 2* 34mm)
• 6x top pieces 50 cm long

I bought a planed bar, but still a bit of sanding is always a good thing.

An important point is the chamfer on the bottom side of the foot. With the chamfer you get way less chip out when you move the stool on the ground. I made the chamfer with the orbital sander, but you can also use a small hand plane or something like that.

After the sanding is finished, I drilled all holes. The feet get two holes and the top pieces one on each side. I used 4 mm screws, so holes are drilled with a 4,5 mm drill.

Last step, after cutting, sanding and drilling holes is now screwing everything together.

First the legs: I lay the the pieces upside down on my workbench to make sure everything is flat. To adjust it sideways, I just press a second piece against it, to have a reference surface. With in total 8 screws the legs were assembled.

As second step the outside top pieces: Now the two legs were connected by screwing the outside pieces on.

Third step is screwing the other 4 top pieces in place with some kind of equal space between them. I used some scrap wood as distance piece. In a perfect world, this pieces has the exact right thickness to have the same space between all top pieces, but I didn't find one. So I decided: the stool have to be rigid and not that much pretty. With the distance piece I screwed one top piece on the right, then one on the left and so on. So from the middle the 3 parts on the right have the same space between them and the 3 parts on the left also. The distance in the middle is bigger, but I can live with that.

From the original 5m bar, I had a small piece left over. So I decided to screw this in the middle, to make the stool even more rigid. Also the piece in the middle provides the legs from shifting. By using only one screw for each top piece per side, they can rotate, but after mounting the middle piece there is no movement at all.

If you want to, you can use some wood finish now to protect the surface. In my case, I decided that I don't need it. The stool is only for my workshop, I stand on it, so it will be dirty anyways really quick. Therefore I think wood finish is totally wast of money here. The stool costs only a few bucks, the finish with that much surface will probably double the costs.^^