Hearth Stool

This stool is a simple little seat that combines traditional chair building techniques and good woodworking.

- By Shea Alexander

When it comes to furniture, one of the most basic things is a place to sit down.

However, building chairs is intimidating for many woodworkers. With all the angles and curves to get right, it can seem a bit complicated. So let's scale that back to a chair with no back, shall we? Well, that would be a stool. And if you take away a leg, it becomes a three-legged stool. Let's start there.

When choosing a species, anything reasonably strong will do. Some common choices would be Oak of any type. Ash, elm, cherry, walnut, and maple work too. The piece for your seat its only requirement is that it's tough, as the legs in a stool act as wedges, so you just don't want it to split. As long as the seat is free of voids and cracks, you should be fine, and crooked, gnarly grain is likely all the better to prevent it from splitting. For the legs and stretchers, you want as straight as a grain as possible with no runout. If you follow the growth rings from one end of the part to the other, you want them to go end to end without running off the side of the part.

The Seat

Starting with the seat, you want to first mark the center by drawing intersecting lines from corner to corner. I do this on both sides of the blank. Then you must decide which is the top and bottom faces. I prefer to make the top the bark side of the tree as it will give a more pleasing grain pattern when dished. Once that is decided, set your compass to 53/4" and draw an 111/2" circle on the bottom face using the center point we marked. This is the outside of the seat. We will then draw two more circles, one with the compass set to 5" and one with it set to 4".