The Literary Workshop Blog

One of our family’s favorite children’s books is called Very Worried Walrus. It was part of the Sweet Pickles books published in the late 1970s. Each book featured an animal character (such as Moody Moose or Responsible Rabbit) whose all-too-human foibles got him or her into trouble. Some of the stories are better-conceived than others, but the story of Worried Walrus is perfect. If you ever find a used copy, get it.

The premise of the story is that Walrus is about to ride his bike, but he is worried about all the things that might go wrong. His companion, Positive Pig, being of an optimistic disposition, encourages him to try anyway. Nearly the whole book is taken up with Walrus spinning out a tale of mishap upon mishap that ends with him being nearly drowned in a river and trudging miserably for endless miles at night in the rain. Of course, it’s all in his imagination, and once Pig shakes Walrus out of his self-inflicted nightmare, Walrus reluctantly gets up on his bike, starts riding, and immediately crashes. He gets up, dusts himself off, and realizes that he is fine–and that’s where the book ends.

It’s an insightful, funny lesson about the senselessness of what we now call catastrophizing. And the story has proved to be a reliable guide as I have considered the best approach to safety in the workshop, especially when I have gotten my kids involved and taught them to use my tools.

Periodically I have published articles that feature my kids participating in the craft. And every time–and I mean every time, aside from this blog–I have published an image of one of my kids doing woodworking, some well-meaning grown-up has wagged a virtual finger while providing a mini-lecture on safety.

“Shouldn’t that toy box have a soft-close support for the lid so the kids’ fingers don’t get slammed in the chest!?!”

No, sir, it shouldn’t. The kids know the lid is heavy, and they know better than to let their fingers get caught in it. Same as you. How dumb do you think my kids are?

“Shouldn’t that child be supervised while she uses those tools?!?”

Sir, where do you think I was when I took the picture? I was standing right there. Do you think these pictures just take themselves?

But my favorite safety-first reaction was when a nationally-circulating woodworking magazine ran a picture of my kids using handsaws and eggbeater drills, and one reader wrote in chiding me for not having my kids wearing safety glasses.

Sir, have you ever actually used tools like these? When was the last time you were sawing a board by hand and had a wood chip fly up and hit you in the face? How often does an eggbeater drill spray dust in your eyes? What possible use would safety glasses be in an environment like this? Do you wear steel-toed boots when picking up a package from your front porch? Do you wear welding gloves when pouring hot coffee–you know, just in case?

(My actual answer to the letter was a little more diplomatic, but that’s what I wanted to say. I feel better now. Thanks for listening.)

That letter in particular got me thinking not about injuries that could occur to my kids but ones that have actually occurred to them. I made two quick lists, one of things my kids have gotten hurt doing, and another of things my kids haven’t gotten hurt doing:

My kids have hurt themselves while…..

• Walking down stairs
• Walking up stairs
• Closing a door
• Skating
• Getting in the van
• Drinking milk
• Cuddling the cat
• Playing soccer
• Jumping on the trampoline
• Playing on a Nintendo Wii

My kids have not, however, hurt themselves while…..

• Shooting a bow and arrow
• Tending a campfire
• Sawing boards
• Handplaning boards
• Using an electric drill
• Using a sharp carving gouge

Just like everybody else, my kids have hurt themselves while doing ordinary, everyday activities, yet not once has the injury been debilitating or life-threatening. My kids actually have a superb safety record in the wood shop. We’ve had a few cuts that required Band-Aids, but that’s it.

That’s because they know the tools are sharp. When you use tools regularly and in the proper manner, you develop a respect for what they can do–both to the workpiece and to you. I remember some years ago I had ordered a new blade for a hand plane. My kids noticed that the the blade was wrapped up with paper announcing “Caution! Sharp!” I could practically hear the kids rolling their eyes. “Of course it’s sharp!” they said. “It’s a woodworking tool!”

I am not saying that I would hand a sharp carving chisel to just any 8- or 10-year-old. Children have to be gradually introduced to tools of all kinds if they are to learn to use them properly–which includes using them safely. In our house, age 10 was a rite of passage: that’s when each child got his or her first pocketknife. It’s the smallest Swiss Army Knife with a little blade, a file, and scissors. Carrying that tool around gets them used to using sharp blades to solve little real-world problems like opening boxes and snipping threads.

My wife and I also taught them how to handle pots and pans on a hot stove. When they were preteens, we assigned each one to be a kitchen assistant one night a week. That included helping with food prep, cooking, and cleanup. Now as teenagers, they can each cook a whole meal–and wash the dishes afterward–totally unsupervised.

When they were younger, my kids were shocked to learn that some of their friends still weren’t allowed to use the stove. I know their parents were just trying to keep their kids safe, but they’re also depriving their children of the opportunity to learn real-world skills. If people don’t learn to cook or clean or fix things as kids, then when are they going to learn these things at all? When they’re as big as we are? By then it’s far too late. The body may be “big enough,” but the motor skills required to deftly flip a pancake or drive in a nail won’t be there unless the skill has been practiced already. Instead, these young adults will have learned that “I don’t do that. Mom and Dad do that for me.” It’s called “learned helplessness,” and it’s debilitating.

I have discovered that many of us adults are pretty poor judges of relative risk–telling the difference between things that look risky but aren’t vs. things that don’t look risky but are likely to cause damage. I know parents who wouldn’t let their kids touch a pan on a hot stove, but they’ll give their kid a smartphone and allow hours of unsupervised access to the internet and social media. But let that kid try to saw a board in half with a handsaw, and we immediately run up and try to put safety goggles on him.

I promise I’m not an advocate of free-range parenting. I’m just not into smothering children. I want my kids to grow up into mature, responsible, independent adults who know how to use tools to solve real-world problems. Learning how to do that involves taking little risks here and there. No risk, no learning.

When I’m deciding when to allow my kids to take risks, I have found it useful to think through the worst-case scenario. Not in an “Oh-my-gosh-that-looks-so-dangerous!!!” way, but in a “what is really the worst that is likely to actually happen?” way. In other words, given the laws of physics and the tendencies of human nature, what is the worst thing that could go wrong here?

At the stove, it’s a burn, a cut, possibly some broken glass–nothing that you or I haven’t had happen to us in our own kitchens from time to time, and nothing that first-aid can’t take care of. It’s the same with most hand-powered tools. With a hand saw, for example, it would be very difficult to inflict an injury on yourself that couldn’t be treated with a Band-Aid. A chisel used inappropriately could send you to the ER for a few stitches–and I know because I’ve done it to myself! But that’s about the worst accident that’s likely to happen.

There are, of course, other kinds of woodworking that are far more dangerous, like ripping thin boards on a table saw or cutting up a fallen tree with a chainsaw. Those are activities that, if something goes catastrophically wrong, could leave you permanently disabled.

Then again, so can driving a car. But somehow, I’m guessing that if I posted a picture of a 15-year-old kid using my chainsaw (even with proper safety gear) I would get a few safety-mongers wagging their fingers, even though that same kid can be legally allowed to guide a 1-ton piece of metal at the rate of over a mile a minute down a concrete path within mere feet of other, similar machines, many of which are being operated by people who could well be texting or drunk–as long as I’m sitting next to her.

In reality, we take reasonable risks like driving and cooking every day because we know those activities are worthwhile and necessary, and because we have developed the skills to do these things fairly safely. We didn’t learn those skills by avoiding those activities. At some point, we had to put the car in gear. We had to turn on the stove. That’s why I think it’s really important for kids to grow up using basic tools of all kinds: hammers and nails, drills and screws, saws and hatchets, wrenches and screwdrivers, without grown-ups trying to wrap them up in unnecessary safety gear. They also need to know how to use pots and pans, spatulas and kitchen knives. And they need to know how to use that most basic tool of all–fire. Because soon they will grow up and need these skills, and I won’t always be there to supervise them.

Life is harder than it looks. Cooking, woodworking, even just tending a fire–these things aren’t easy. When you first start building fires, you will be surprised that the trick isn’t usually to keep it from spreading and burning down the whole neighborhood; the trick is to keep it going at all. On a screen, a few swipes or taps or clicks in the right order will usually get you the results you want, whether it’s the image of a fire onscreen or a fast-food meal delivered to your doorstep. But if you want a real fire or a real meal, you’ve got to learn to use the tools yourself. No risk, no learning.

Take something as basic as flipping a fried egg in a skillet. It’s a simple thing, but it takes practice with tools that, if used inappropriately, can hurt you. Because the egg will not simply conform to your will just because you want it to flip. It seems to me that we are raising a generation of kids who think that tasks are supposed to be easy, that the egg is somehow going to flip by itself–or that Mom will always be there to flip the egg for them–or that flipping an egg is as easy in real life as it was on that cute restaurant game they played on the iPad as kids. But in real life, if they want a nicely cooked egg, they’re going to have to spend some time right next to a hot stove burner.

What’s the worst that is likely to happen if we let them try cooking over a hot stove? Maybe a burn or a cut.

But what’s the worst that is likely to happen if we don’t let them try to cook or use a sharp tool or light a fire? A lifetime of dependence, an irrational fear of minor injuries, and a complete lack of real-life skills. I don’t want to run the risk of my kids not learning how to cook meals or do simple household repairs, even if that means we go through a box of Band-Aids every so often.

You and I are going to disagree about exactly how much safety to impose on our kids, and that’s okay. Families are different, and kids are different from each other. I’ve known 8-year-olds that I would trust with a chef’s knife and 16-year-olds that I wouldn’t trust with a Q-Tip. You have to use reasonable judgment in these things.

What I’m asking for here is that we apply the virtue of moderation to our sense of safety. Of course we should take reasonable safety precautions, but that doesn’t mean that all precautions are reasonable. Some are unreasonable. Reasonable safety precautions are those that are focused on preventing the most common and the most catastrophic accidents, and that allow the work to be done in a reasonably effective and efficient way. There is such a thing as being too safety-conscious. You know you’re trying to be too safe if (1) you are trying to protect yourself or others from threats that don’t actually exist, or if (2) your safety precautions are more likely to cause harm than to prevent it.

A classic example is the guy who insists on wearing work gloves while using the band-saw. Wearing gloves sounds safer than sending a board through a moving blade bare-handed, right? Wrong. Because the moment that blade hits the glove, it will pull the glove down into the machine and probably pull your finger down with it. Better to use the band-saw bare handed and risk a few splinters or even a nick with the blade itself.

In the same way, if you’re going to teach your kids to cook at the stove (and you should), why not have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, too? And make sure everyone knows that it’s okay to use it!

When we are learning a new skill, we all need a generally safe environment in which to take small, limited risks in which the worst-case scenario isn’t catastrophic, and in which other people aren’t constantly on the verge of panic because they are imagining everything that could possibly go wrong. No risk, no learning.

But if we allow our children to take smaller, reasonable risks in the process of learning valuable skills, they stand a good chance of growing up to be capable, independent people who can be trusted to get the job done, instead of becoming young Worried Walruses who are paralyzed with fear about all the horrible things that might go wrong if they pick up a drill or turn on the stove.

In my last two posts, I showed how I made the oak framework for my new joint stool, which I’m making with expert guidance from the book Make a Joint Stool from a Tree by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee.

So far I’ve been working oak from logs. But for the seat, I used cherry wood that I also got from a tree.

This cherry tree came down in the back yard of a friend in Alabama during a 2020 hurricane. I hauled off as much of the wood as I could, sawed it up into very rough short boards, and made a bunch of wooden spoons out of it. The rest got stacked up to dry.

Because this joint stool will live in my kitchen, which has cherry wood cabinets and trim, I decided that a cherry seat would complement the space nicely.

Making the Seat

I had originally quarter-sawn a bunch of the cherry logs to about 2″ thick, knowing that they would have plenty of time to dry before I got around to using them. But the top should be much thinner.

The plan was to resaw this little plank on the bandsaw, glue the two pieces together, plane it all down, and end up with about a 3/4″ thick seat.

Resawing a thick plank and gluing the pieces together results in a nicely bookmatched seat.

But if you look closely at the above picture, you can see that the two pieces are not anywhere near the same thickness.

My plan for the seat had gone awry almost immediately. The bandsaw’s blade wandered, leaving one side just shy of 3/4″ thick and the other side well over 1″ thick on one edge. So I needed to remove a lot of material from the face of the thicker piece.

(Side-note: you can see in the background of the picture above that I already have a joint stool, which is a modern reproduction of the form. I have no idea who made it, but I bought it at an antique shop a few years ago. And while I’m not replicating the existing piece’s dimensions exactly, it’s very nice to have a full-scale model from which to work.)

The fastest way to remove stock is with the coarsest tool. In this case, the coarsest tool turned out to be this hewing hatchet. Its edge is beveled only on one side, and it’s designed for squaring up small timbers.

There’s a specific technique to using it effectively to hew to a line, but I won’t detail that method here since I didn’t pause to take pictures of the whole hewing process.

But as you can see, I was able to knock off enough thickness, and I can handplane the surface down from here.

For heavy stock removal, it’s best to use a handplane with a blade sharpened to a slight curve, or camber. I used my wooden jack plane, whose blade I keep shaped and sharpened for exactly these kinds of jobs.

You can take off a thicker shaving if you plane directly across the grain like this. Just be aware that the edge on the exit-side is going to break off some. If this were going to be the underside of the seat, that wouldn’t matter. But this will be the show-side, so I made sure to plan for a bit of loss in the overall width.

You finish by planing the surface down with the grain.

Thumbnail Profile

Once I had the whole piece glued up and planed down, it was time to add a thumbnail profile around the top edges. I had never done this by hand before, but the book shows how it’s done. It’s a surprisingly simple process, and I will definitely use it again on other projects.

Start with the ends. Decide how far in you want your thumbnail. Mark the depth with a cutting gauge or a sharp marking gauge. Clamp a batten across the workpiece in line with your scribed line. Use a saw to cut a very shallow kerf. Just a few light strokes will do.

Now use a rabbet plane to remove the stock. A skew-rabbet like the one pictured above works best. But I imagine that any rabbet plane or shoulder plane would do a decent job if you were to take a light cut. Fortunately I had picked up a wooden skew rabbet plane at an antique mall a year or two ago. They’re actually fairly common on the secondhand market right now, and unlike a lot of wooden molding planes, they are often in usable shape and can be tuned up pretty easily.

Once you have planed this rabbet onto each end, you can plane the rabbet along the long edges, too. Use the same method, though it’s not necessary to saw the kerf if the grain is fairly straight. Just use the rabbet plane held tight up against the batten. It doesn’t even matter if the rabbets at either end are cut to precisely the same depth. Just adjust your strokes with the rabbet plane to make sure the rabbets meet all the way around.

Now that the the rabbets are formed, you can round over the edges. Again, you start with the ends. Plane a chamfer first. When you’re working on the ends, be sure to skew the plane so as to cut the end-grain cleanly.

Then plane off the two corners of the chamfer. The result will start looking like a round-over.

You can plane the initial chamfer around the whole workpiece first, and then go around and take off the corners on each of the four sides. Or you can just work one side at a time, which is what I’ve done.

You can plane or scrape off any remaining corners if you like. And if you really want the round-over to look round up close, you can sand it down perfectly round. I didn’t, though. It’s enough for me that it looks like a round-over from a distance. I don’t mind feeling facets, and it won’t make any difference when you’re sitting on it.

Attaching the Seat

The book admits that the seat attachment is the most fragile part of the stool. The authors note that antique joint stools are often found with missing or replacement seats. The traditional method was to attach the seat with pegs driven through the seat and into holes in the tops of the legs. Because the holes go into angled legs, the angles create a sort of “dovetail” effect that holds the seat on.

I don’t doubt that the result is good if you do it right, but I also know how much this stool is going to get used, pulled around, and picked up by the top. I think there’s a reason that the seats of these stools don’t always survive. If the tops shrunk or cracked a bit, or if someone pulled up on the seat just a little too hard, the seat could pop right off. Then it would be very difficult to reattach it firmly using the same method.

So I decided to use a method that wasn’t really an option for a 17th-century joiner: wood screws.

I made four brackets out of some oak offcuts from the project.

Because these brackets are on the underside, they didn’t need to look pretty. In fact, there was only one part of these brackets that needed to be precise. Everything else could be shaped quite roughly.

Here’s how I did it:

First, I chose a wood screw, and I cut an offcut into this shape.

The stock is approximately 2″ wide and 1″ thick, and long enough to be cut into a right triangle, but the exact dimensions didn’t matter. As you can see, I cut one end at 45 degrees. If your upper stretchers are consistent in thickness, then you can just cut both ends at 45 degrees. But if the stretchers’ inside faces were left rough, as mine were, then you need to figure out what angle you should cut the other end at. Don’t just assume it will be a perfect 45 degrees.

Fortunately, the angle is easy to establish. You don’t measure it with numbers. You just gauge it with a sliding T-bevel.

Use the sliding T-bevel at approximately the same place you’ll put your bracket. I’m screwing them to the short stretchers on each end. Each bracket’s angle is cut to fit a specific corner. They won’t be interchangeable, so I made and installed them one at a time, so as not to get them mixed up.

Transfer the angle to the bracket, gauging from the 45-degree cut.

Cut to the line you just drew. As you can see, the angle between the seat and the stretcher is not precisely 45 degrees. But this bracket will fit the angle perfectly.

Now to make the inside of the bracket.

Figure out exactly how deep you want the screw to go into the underside of the seat and into the stretcher. Gauge the distance using the screw itself. Make sure the screw will penetrate the wood enough to hold it securely but not so far that it pokes through the side or the top. Be sure to account for the whole length of the screw, including the head, since you will want to countersink the head.

Mark that depth with a marking gauge.

Make a shallow saw cut on each line. You only need to cut as deeply as the screw head is wide, not all the way through to the corner.

Split out the center with a chisel. Working from both sides will get the best result. Why not just saw all the way until the kerfs meet? Because splitting out the stock leaves more of the wood in the corner, resulting in a stronger bracket.

Now drill a pilot hole in each face you just sawed. The pilot hole should be wide enough for the wood screw to pass through easily.

Countersink each hole so the screw head will seat nicely and pull the bracket in tightly.

Set the bracket in place, mark the location of each hole, and drill smaller pilot holes into the seat and side stretcher. Use a drill bit with a depth-stop or some other kind of depth indicator so you don’t drill too deeply or stop drilling too soon.

With the top screwed in place, flip the whole thing over and take a look at your work.

With the joint stool assembled, it’s time to do a final once-over before applying the finish. I used a card scraper to level out a few rough spots and take off stray pencil marks here and there. And of course I signed and dated the underside of the top.

The Big Finish

I applied a couple coats of Danish oil to the whole thing. The Danish oil I use is my own mixture: one part each raw linseed oil, polyurethane, and mineral spirits. I apply a first coat very thoroughly so it saturates the whole surface. I let that sit for 10-15 minutes. Before it becomes tacky, I apply a second coat, ensuring that any spots that look a bit dry get plenty more oil. I let it sit another 10 minutes and wipe off any excess oil.

I let the stool dry in direct sunlight, which both dried the finish and darkened the cherry top.

Should the finish become damaged or worn, I can just apply more, though I haven’t needed to do so with any other piece I’ve used this finish on.

After drying for about a day, the stool is ready to be used.

Immediately after I finished this, I thought to myself: “I want to make another one.”

In my last post, I showed how I did the layout and joinery for my new joint stool, which is a 17th-century design that I have wanted to try out for years. I built the piece from wood taken from several logs I got locally, one of which was an oak tree that once grew on my property. I’m so happy to be giving that tree a second life in this stool.

The stool itself is designed to sit on, or really to perch on. Your feet can rest comfortably on the lower stretchers if you like. Despite the flat top, it is a remarkably comfortable way to sit. It’s a wonder this design ever fell out of favor.

It also makes a great end-table, if that’s your preference.

In building this stool, I am following a book published over a decade ago now: Make a Joint Stool from a Tree by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee. This book is an invaluable guide to building this project, but the book is so much more than that. The principles and techniques they illustrate are widely applicable to all manner of furniture making.

Detailing without a Lathe

Traditionally the legs on these joint stools are turned, and they do look lovely when done well. I, unfortunately, am still lathe-less after 20+ years of woodworking, so I went with a different design plan.

The book very thoughtfully offers an alternative for those of us who don’t work in the round. It shows how to cut stopped chamfers with a lamb’s tongue detail on the legs. It was the first time I tried this kind of decoration, and I rather like it. And because you may wish to use this kind of detail on your own work, even if you never make a joint stool, I’ll walk you through the process here.

Between and below the mortises on each leg, pencil a line around the leg. Then pencil a second line about 3/4″ or 1″ further away from the mortises. The second line will be your stop, and the first line will be the beginning of the lamb’s tongue.

Use a pencil to mark the depth of the chamfer. I went about 3/8″, though I probably should have gone deeper for a bolder detail. Make a saw cut on the second line, and chisel into it to make a stop on each end of the chamfer.

I used a drawknife to carefully remove most of the waste. A chisel works too. Work right down to the layout line–and to the bottom of your saw cuts. A spokeshave is useful for leaving a nice, finished surface. That does it for the chamfer.

Now it’s time to shape the lamb’s tongue on each end of the chamfer. Using a mallet and chisel (bevel down), you start at your first line and scoop out the first part of the lamb’s tongue.

Next, with the chisel bevel-up, round over the lower part.

You can see the result here:

Use the chisel to make sure the chamfer and the bottom of the lamb’s tongue meet together nicely. Don’t get too fussy with how each one comes out. There will be little variations between them, and some will probably be cleaner than others, and that’s okay. From a distance, they’ll all look great.

It really helps to be working with stock whose grain is dead-straight.

I formed this detail on three of the four corners of each leg. The inside of each leg just got a rough chamfer all the way down.

When you need to remove layout lines, the card scraper will take off whatever the eraser leaves.

There are fuller instructions in the book, but that’s how I did it. The result is a softened, lighter look to the legs. Plus it removes the sharp edge that would otherwise start splintering as the stool gets used over the years. Always remove sharp corners on your furniture, or they will be removed for you.

In my final post, I will show how I made and attached the top of the stool.

Ever since I got this book, I have wanted to make a joint stool from a tree. The grainy picture alone should give you an idea of how long ago that was.

The book is Make a Joint Stool from a Tree by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee. Although I wrote a review here back when it first came out, I never got around to building the featured project until now. The reasons for my delay were manifold, but they mostly came down to (a) lack of trees, and (b) lack of a lathe.

Then about five years ago, the tree problem was solved for me when we took down a 100-year-old oak tree in my front yard in Alabama. It yielded a small pile of straight, clear, white oak boards, some of which I cut into 2X2s that I expected to make into legs for chairs or stools once they dried.

I brought all of the stock with me to Ohio when I moved here, and now the wood is at 12-15% moisture content–quite dry enough to build with. Along the way, it got mixed in with some red oak that I harvested that same year. Both woods are ideal for this project.

I still don’t have a lathe, though. Fortunately, Alexander & Follansbee provide guidance in their book for making shapely joint stool legs without a lathe, and this is the result:

For a first attempt at this form, I’m happy with it. The legs are white oak (well, at least three of them are) and the stretchers are red oak. The top is cherry. All the stock is from wood that I got right from logs. It was a fun project, and I will definitely make another one, even though I will do a few things differently next time around.

I’m not going to indulge a build-along instructable post here. If you want that, buy the book!

Rather, in this post and its sequels, I’ll walk you through several elements of the process that I found especially interesting, as well as some problems I needed to solve, some of which went beyond the scope of the book. So consider this post a small tribute and supplement to Make a Joint Stool from a Tree.

Layout

If you’ve only every built furniture with right-angles, the joint stool is a good introduction to angled mortises and tenons. But because the legs splay only in two directions (as opposed to chairs whose legs often splay in all four directions), the angles are simple to visualize. There is only one angle.

The challenge, however, is determining the exact length of the stretchers. The distance between the tenon shoulders on either end actually determines where you should cut the mortises. It’s hard to describe why, but as soon as you start building the stool, you’ll see what I mean. If that distance between the shoulders is a bit too short, then the stretcher would want to sit too high. If it’s a bit too long, it would want to sit too low. So you have to lay out the locations of the stretchers very precisely.

That doesn’t mean you have to do it with numerical measurements, though. After giving the problem some thought, I grabbed a big board out of my scrap pile. (It was a drawer bottom I had mistakenly cut to small.) On it, I drew out the angles and used the full-size diagram to lay out the angles and the locations of the joints, as well as the precise length of each piece. I planned for the legs to be 23″ long when finished, and everything else was gauged from that single dimension.

I departed somewhat from the dimensions of Alexander & Follansbee’s stool, which is shorter than mine and employs a 6:1 angle for the legs. Mine is more like 12:1. Because it’s a taller stool, the splay angle needs to be shallower. As long as the legs extend just a little bit beyond the top of the stool (when seen from above) it will be perfectly stable in use.

With the full-size template, I was able to cut the stretchers to the proper length and mark the tenon shoulders right from the legs–no measuring required. I’ll set the template aside for when I decide to make more of these.

Sixteen Mortise and Tenon Joints

Yes, there are 16 mortises to chop. That’s a lot. I cut them all by hand.

But I found that after my first few, I got a lot faster. The process was not nearly as laborious as I had imagined.

I considered removing the bulk of the waste with a Forstner bit on the drill press and squaring up the holes with bench chisels. It would perhaps have been a little faster to do it that way, but I don’t particularly enjoy squaring up round holes, and the air-dried oak cut really well under the mortise chisel. I’ll do it this way again.

Sixteen mortises are cut to accept sixteen tenons, which did not take nearly as long to make, thanks to some tricks recommended by the book.

Normally when cutting tenons by hand, you first saw the cheeks and afterward you saw the shoulders. But with this method of construction, you saw the shoulders first.

You also intentionally undercut the shoulder on the back of the stretcher, as you can see above. That way, the shoulder on the face is guaranteed to pull up tight against the leg with no gap. That does mean there’s a slight gap in the back of the joint, but no matter. The joint is quite strong enough.

With the shoulders cut, you then cut the tenon cheeks. But you don’t saw them. You just split them off.

I remember the first time I saw Peter Follansbee do this–on an episode of Roy Underhill’s show The Woodwright’s Shop. I was almost mad at him for making it look so easy. But it IS easy. First split off about half the thickness of the cheek. Then set your chisel in the layout line and split that part off. Check the fit in the mortise, and pare off any bit that remains too thick.

This method works because the wood’s grain is very straight. It’s been split out of a log, after all, not sawn out any which way. So the wood splits pretty straight. This also works because the joint won’t be glued together. The real strength of the joint will come from the drawbore peg that will lock the two pieces of wood together. But we’ll get to that below.

Because the mortises meet inside the leg, the ends of each tenon must be trimmed so as not to bump into each other when the frame is assembled.

I did the work roughly with a drawknife.

And yes, this leg has a stray saw cut in the top. It doesn’t affect he integrity of the joinery, so I just left it. The book guides readers away from perfectionism and reminds us that it is perfectly acceptable to leave tool marks, layout marks, and even small flaws in the work, long as those things don’t compromise the structure or ruin the overall form.

Drawbored Mortise and Tenon Joints

There are lots of good tutorials on drawboring, and the book covers everything you need to know. But it doesn’t hurt to show how it’s done, because it’s genius.

I first bored 5/16″ holes through the mortises about 1/4″-5/16″ from the edge. The lower stretchers each got one hole. The upper ones got two holes on one side and one on the other. The holes mustn’t intersect.

Insert the tenon in the mortise and use an awl to make a mark slightly off-center, toward the shoulder of the tenon. That last part is important. You are intentionally going to bore holes that don’t match up, but that are slightly offset from one another, and the direction of offset is critical to the success of the joint.

Pull the tenon back out and bore the holes where you marked them. I repeat: on the tenon, the hole must be offset toward the shoulder. How far should they be offset? The exact distance doesn’t matter. Make it about the thickness of a half-dollar coin.

Thus, when I assemble the joint and drive in a peg, the offset holes will pull the joint up very tight, and there will be enough friction in the offset holes that the peg will never work loose.

Drawbore Pegs

I bored 20 holes in 16 joints, so I need 20 pegs.

Because the whole joint will depend on the structural integrity of these pegs, the stock should be chosen with care. The grain should be dead-straight all the way through the peg, and the wood should be as dry as you can get it–ideally drier than the stock they’re being driven into.

I found some off-cuts about 5″ long. These were from the end of one of boards I cut to make the stretchers, so they are at least as dry as the surrounding wood. And because boards tend to dry out more on the ends than in the middle, I can expect these pegs not to shrink on me.

To insure the grain runs straight for the whole length of the peg, they must be split out, not sawn. For successful splitting, don’t try to split narrow pieces off thicker pieces. Instead, split your stock in half, then half again, until you are close to the size you need.

Using a chisel to split the wood will inevitably make the split want to run out because the chisel edge is flat on one side and beveled on the other. So once you start the split, set the workpiece loosely in the vise and pull the chisel back a bit toward the flat side, as you see above. That should straighten out the split.

On a sacrificial block, use a chisel to carefully shave down each peg to a slight taper. You may have to turn them end-for-end at first to remove the bulk of the waste safely.

This looks much more dangerous than it is. Oak works particularly well in this way, especially when your chisel is perfectly sharp. Other woods may not shave so well in this way. I’ve tried making pegs like this from hickory, for example, and that was noticeably more difficult.

On each peg, you’re aiming for a nice, long taper. The peg should drop easily into a sample hole but not go all the way through.

On a few of these pegs, I used a spokeshave to finish shaping them.

Notice the peg is nowhere near round in cross-section. That’s intentional. It is better to leave the pegs somewhat square, or hexagonal, or octagonal in cross-section, as the corners will grip better in the surrounding wood. It is also a good idea to shave the tip to a dull point so it can slip through the offset holes.

It takes a while to make enough pegs for the whole project. You may wish to make one or two extra, in case one turns out to be a bit too thin or breaks unexpectedly when you start tapping it in.

Assembling the Joints

Woodworking is a curious process. You start with a pile of wood, and you work steadily for hours or even days making cuts and planing surfaces and shaping joints, and for that whole time, you still have what looks for all the world like a pile of wood.

Then, suddenly, in just a few minutes, that pile of wood comes together into a recognizable form. What was a heap of seemingly random bits of material is now a stool or a cupboard or a table. It’s almost magical the way it happens.

The assembly is the fun part, especially since assembling drawbored mortise-and-tenon joints is a relaxed process. You’re not worrying about clamping things up before the glue sets or anything like that. Because there’s no glue, there’s no hurry.

I assembled one end, then the other, and finally connected them with the remaining stretchers. Tap in the pegs just a little bit at first, until you’re sure each piece is in the right place and everything is coming together as planned. Then go around and tap the pegs further in to snug up the joints.

I did have a bit of trouble making sure that the pegs cleared the opposite stretchers when they came through the backs of the joints.

I had left the insides of the top stretchers quite rough, since they will be hidden and out of reach of anybody’s fingers. They vary in thickness quite a bit, since there was no need for them to be a regular thickness. As long as they don’t obstruct the drawbore peg, they’re fine.

So back to the pegs. How far do you hammer in the pegs? Well, I just tapped each peg in with a hammer until it stopped. If you’ve done this before, you know what I mean. Once you stop feeling the peg advance, and the peg has come through the back, and the shoulder of the stretcher is snug up against the leg, you should stop. You’re done. Some pegs will go in father than others.

Then I trimmed off the pegs with a dovetail saw.

I sawed off each peg. The easiest way to do this without marring the surface of the leg is to rest the spine of the saw on the surface and saw carefully so the teeth don’t touch the surface. This leaves the pegs just a little bit proud of the surface. You can trim them flush with a chisel if you like. Or you can just whack each one with a hammer to set it flush. The hammer method is faster.

On the lower stretchers, I sawed off both ends of each peg. (It hurts a little bit to see your hard work on the peg come off as waste, but you get used to it.) On the upper ones, where they won’t be seen, I left the pegs long on the inside. Just a little something for the conservator to appreciate.

Once the stool was assembled, I leveled the feet. You can do this very precisely by hand. I also chamfered the feet with a spokeshave so they won’t split in use.

As you can see in the photo above, I’ve added chamfers and a lamb’s-tongue detail to the legs in order to break the sharp edges and lighten the structure visually. In my next post, I’ll show you how it’s done.