How To Make An Adjustable Pottery Stool | I Like To Make Stuff

hey i'm bobby i like to make stuff today we're gonna make an adjustable stool for throwing pottery [Music] my wife makes pottery and a while back i made her a pottery wheel and one of the other things that she needs is a pottery stool now what makes a pottery stool kind of specific and unique is that it needs to be able to lean forward so that you can put your body weight over the wheel as you're making something and to do this those pottery stools have independently adjustable legs so that you can bring two of them down and make them longer to lean the entire thing forward so today we're going to make an adjustable pottery stool now you can buy these and they're about 100 so we're going to try to make it a little bit cheaper but more specifically i just want to make one basically it's a really simple stool it's got kind of two metal u's that cross and then they'll have some sort of a ring for stabilization then we'll add some sort of a top to it but the big thing is that these sections right here are adjustable up and down and to start working on this under metal structure we're going to use some emt conduit emt conduit is a steel pipe with a really thin wall and it's good for a lot of different things but it's not good to weld because it has a galvanization layer on the outside of it galvanization is really really dangerous once you start welding it so i've actually set up a thing to remove that layer from the outside of these pipes there's a few different ways you can do this and one of the ways i looked up is just to soak them in vinegar so i've got these pipes in this pvc pipe full of vinegar it's been in there for about i don't know 15 hours or so and you can see that it is now bare steel there is no galvanization layer on this anymore so i'm going to take these out and clean them off and then they should be good to safely weld this actually worked out really well and i think if you leave it in there for even longer it would do an even better job but it got almost all of it off there's a little bit still here on one end and i think it's just where the pipes were actually touching each other that seems to come off really easily with a little bit of sandpaper so i think that at this point these are safe to use now another option for removing this if you really want to go that route is to use muriatic acid but then you also have to neutralize that because you know it's acid and it can be kind of dangerous if you want to look that up go for it but this is a safe and easy way to accomplish the same thing really quickly i wanted to point this out this has been out of the vinegar for maybe three or four minutes and you can see that there's already a layer of rust beginning to form on the outside of this so when you do this just realize that it's going to be immediately prone to surface rust it's going to be really shallow and as you continue to work with this you're going to have to clean it off before you put a final finish on it [Applause] [Music] so i got to figure out exactly how to mark this and i know that i need to find the center points of each of these and kind of start working out from there because i have to figure out how long i want the piece that's going to be right under the seat to be before the bend starts and then how big that bend needs to be and then how long the rest of the legs need to be so first off i'm going to find the center point here and then just kind of i don't know work out the rest of it from there so now i've got this is the outside edge so the curve needs to start basically right here and start to work this piece down that way this is a conduit bender it's a really inexpensive tool you put a piece of conduit in here and then you just use your body weight to bend it over this curve it's got some different measurements here for the different angles that you're going to need but the thing i figured out here is that this actually might be exactly the right size so if we put the kind of pivot point here right on that center line it looks that where you come off at 90 degrees is about where i made this mark so i think if we just work from the center point in both directions we'll end up with about the right width for the entire thing definitely a little more than 90 but or less than 90. but i think that's actually pretty good because it will make the legs wider than the seat area this one's a little bit too close to 90. i need it flared out a little bit and i don't think i can undo that so i'll probably have to bring this one in just a little bit you know what i did i used the wrong mark which doesn't matter but it's kind of funny because instead of using the center mark i used one of these as the center mark now this is going to be plenty tall enough cut off here but i just should have saved some material [Music] that was pretty easy actually this is very easy to use a lot of leverage on it getting these things to match up at the same kind of curve and the same angles a little bit more difficult but this stuff is so thin that you can actually bend it by hand to kind of make some small adjustments so next up i'm going to cut off both of these to get everything about the same height but i'm not going to do the final length cut off until i get the whole thing assembled where'd you get that shirt bob i like to makeup.com shop [Applause] [Music] [Applause] good thing is this stuff is so thin that you can cut it with a hacksaw with very little work i just happen to have this already here so it makes it faster [Music] so now we have the kind of two u's and these need to be fit together like this and be on the same plane we can do that a few different ways uh maybe cut a section out so that there's actually three pieces or and i think this is what we're going to try to do we flatten this section and this section so that they lay together and then we can drill through both of those to make a bolt go through into the actual bottom of the seat but that's the next step then we need to worry about making some sort of a piece to go around here to lock all these together [Applause] [Music] [Applause] this works pretty well except for this section that broke off a while back is not compressing that so i'm going to flip it over [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] that actually worked out pretty well and was easier than i expected especially using a cheater bar to really clamp it down the vise worked better than the hammers just a little bit more uniform and squishing it so now i'm at this point and i was just telling anthony this is as far as i've thought into this project so at this point i'm just making it up as usual now i need to figure out how to put these together but i also want to make sure that i do the order of operations right because as i start assembling things it's going to be harder and harder to work on different pieces before we get too far ahead we need to drill holes in these legs so that the adjustable bottom sections to the legs can go up in there that's going to be a lot easier to do when they're like this than once they're connected so let's drill some holes measuring up from i was trying to figure out how to measure where these holes need to be but actually they don't really have anything to do with each other so as long as we measure from one place and they're evenly spaced on individual legs it doesn't matter how they relate to explain what i'm thinking here i actually bought these little things for putting in an adjustable leg like for a tent or a paddle for a kayak or something like that that you need to be able to extend so these little nubs go in one piece of metal one tube and then that tube goes in a larger one so just you've seen these before you squeeze these together to loosen it you slide it up and then they pop out into the other hole to lock it into place so i need to make sure that the holes i'm drilling are big enough and not too big for these to fit [Music] i through figure out how tall this thing needs to be and also there's gonna be a shorter leg that sticks out and that's gonna have some room to stick out so really this could be quite a bit shorter i think and then just like a little room of adjustability in there so i think i'm going to take off about five or six inches from here i think yes [Music] this is a piece of half inch which this is not what i'm going to use because it still has the galvanization on it but i wanted to show you this size versus the three quarter which we're using for the top section so this is going to fit in here as the adjustable section of the leg and so i need to make sure that i have enough of this but also i wanted to point out that the diameters of these don't really fit so there's a lot of wiggle room in here i think what we'll end up doing is 3d printing a little cap that fits on this one on the inside that snugs up to the outside of this one to kind of keep it centered up here where the pin pops through it will be held so we just kind of want to stop it down here from being able to do this back and forth first up let's go drill some holes i got all these holes drilled but as i was doing it i realized that this entire thing wants to pivot because it's a round bar and so some of the holes are a little bit off this direction now that's not going to actually affect anything but it doesn't look great another way to do this that i should have thought of ahead of time would be to clamp this on the mill and then just be able to slide this entire thing back and forth on the same plane and not have to worry about loosening the vise and taking it off and turning it by accident stuff like that so if you're going to do something like this and you have a mill or some sort of a slide at your disposal use that i got all those holes drilled and i went back in kind of ground down the outside too just to make it smooth because your fingers are going to be touching the outsides of those but i wanted to next move on to actually putting these together so if these were exactly the same they're not but imagine that they were the holes were all in the exact same place it would all line up perfectly except for the fact that one of these has to sit on top of the other and that makes the bottom of these pieces and all the holes about an eighth of an inch higher on this piece than they are in this piece so we're going to deal with that later on probably at the very bottom on the foot that goes on the leg so i'm not too worried about that right now but before we start actually bending all this into its final shape we gotta tie it together so what i've done here is found the center points what i think are roughly the center points between the two pieces and so i'm going to clamp these together and then start to square up these corners to try to make sure that the two pieces are as perpendicular as i can get them then we're going to tack weld them together and then go back and finally add a full bead on all four of these lines where these pieces cross once we've got that as one big piece we can start bending all of the legs to make sure that they're perpendicular and parallel where they need to be [Music] i'm not i'm never going to be able to get all of these square because the pieces kind of have different bends in them so i'm just trying to find like a middle ground between all of them [Music] i got those welded together and i wanted to point out it's super ugly we'll clean it up later on but if the galvanization had still been on this metal it would be kind of white and yellow kind of a cloudy dust stuff on the outside of it and the smoke coming off of it would have been really nasty so again never weld this stuff unless you've taken off that layer okay next up we need to figure out how to attach this to a plate maybe just a temporary piece of wood so that we can actually then start to bend the legs and make sure that they are equidistant from each other then we have to figure out how to tie them all together to keep them in that position perfect see it's adjustable because you can sit this way or that way now basically now at this point we need to bend these out to get all of the distances between these and these the same and to make sure that the gaps on the sides are also the same so we're just going to square it up luckily because we flattened these sections it's pretty easy to bend each one of these [Music] independently 14 and a half 14 and a half 10.6 10.6 10.6 10.4 that's good enough all right to get these four legs to stay where i've got them currently i need to put some cross bracing or something to tie them together the original idea was to take two of these tubes cut out a section weld them into a cross notch the ends so that they could go into the legs but it ended up just not really working for a bunch of different reasons i also tried to make a big circle to bend a circle that would fit down in there but i can't bend a radius tight enough with the tools on hand so this is where i ended up i've got some really small pieces of rebar left over from something i cut them down to length and they're just currently pushed in here with a kind of pressure fit and they hold in perfectly so now that i've got these in place i'm going to tack weld them together tack them to the walls and then go down and do full welds to lock this in place after that we can start working on the legs [Music] [Music] so my concern here was that since you're kind of sitting on it at an angle you'd be putting a lot of pressure down which would want the legs to bend inward but i think this is plenty strong enough like we won't know until we actually sit on it full weight but i think it's gonna be fine the next thing we need to do is to make the legs to go in here now these are just the half inch pieces of pipe that i was talking about before these are going to go in here and we just have to drill a hole in them and then put this piece up inside of it so that it can drop in these little nubs can pop out through these and hold the legs in position now because of this curve we actually couldn't go too much higher with the legs it kind of bottoms out around there so around in this area we've got plenty of room to make these pretty extendable all right to get the legs ready i looked on some of the commercially available ones to figure out what the total adjustable heights were and i found that they were about 18 to 25 inches so from that i measured what i have so far and then how much extra i would need to have in the additional leg piece i cut down the half inch pipe to what is about right it's a 11 and a quarter inches and i drilled a hole on the end so now we're going to take this thing and stick it in here you can put it in the other way i'm putting it in this way so that we can more easily get it out that works the same now those are captive in there we can stick this down in here squeeze them together there you go so if you want to move it up and down you just squeeze that in slide it down so that totally works i just got to do that to the other ones and then we're gonna make the 3d printed pieces to keep these from wobbling around so much [Music] so now we need to lock these in place so we're going to head to fusion 360. after we measure the inside of the big pipe the outside of the small pipe we'll go model up something that can fit in there all right that was super easy i just measured the inside and outside of both of the sizes of pipe made some circles and extruded them out to make a little cap now we can send this out to the printer and print out one for each leg if you want to learn how to do this and a whole lot more with fusion 360 we do have an online course called fusion360 for makers you may want to check it out we'll put a link down below i did several different iterations of those little caps and ended up on a couple they're basically the same except for this one has a little slot cut out of it and that's how it fits over the rebar so these pieces just drop right in here they fit in pretty well i printed these in petg so they're pretty tough i think they should hold up just fine and the hole is actually just the right size to fit these legs in and they end up being pretty stable now we still have to glue these things on so i'm going to use some five minute epoxy to get all of these caps glued in place and then once we paint it they'll kind of blend into the entire thing but before we do that i'm going to go ahead and transfer these four mounting holes onto this base so that i can start to drill the holes and then take this and work on the seat separately while the frame is in paint so i need to make sure that i get diagonal so i can find the center point and get this thing set pretty much in the center [Music] what i want to do here for the seat is actually put some bolts in that are flush mounted here but facing down and that way when we put in the nuts from the bottom of the frame it'll tighten the entire thing up and then i'll probably just glue those into place so that they can't spin and so once we get that then we'll actually cut the outside shape into something a little bit more comfortable than a square [Music] now we've got this shape here that we can kind of drill out and then use a chisel to kind of knock out the edges so that the head of that bolt will fit down in there and not be able to spin too easily [Music] [Applause] [Music] got all four of those in there and that actually worked out better than i thought so using some five-minute epoxy on the backside of those will really lock them into place i also need to remount these holes a little bit to make them big enough to fit those bolts and one of the last things to really figure out here is the foot that's going to go on the end of each one of these legs i thought about a lot of different things trying to make some sort of a ball foot maybe something rubberized something that could pivot since the entire stool is going to be able to go back and forth but what i ended up on is actually just using a hardwood dowel i think this is going to be the simplest solution to get started and then if we find that we need more contact or it needs to be slippery or less slippery then we can always replace it so i think what i'm going to do is take this dowel cut off a section drop it in here and then round it over that way it will contact the floor no matter what orientation the stool is setting and we can drill a hole and drive in a screw so if we ever need to replace the tip of each one of these feet we can [Music] so now these things should fit right in here they're going to be pretty tight so i may have to kind of hammer them in then i'll drive in a little screw to hold that in place to stop it from kind of sliding in or coming out you could also take these to the lathe if you really wanted them to be perfectly round but in this case i'm not really sure that this is the final solution so we're kind of just making a temporary insert and then if i need to i can come back and swap these out with something different later [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] after cutting out two of these circles they worked all right but i found that the rotary cutter is actually the cleanest way to cut this stuff and get a really nice edge to it so if i were to do it again i would go all the way around with that one particular tool now that i've got these cut we need to attach them together and then attach them to the wood so we're gonna make a little cake here out of the foam and some spray adhesive we're gonna put this on both sides of each connection let it dry and then it will stick together and bind once we've got that laid up here then we're going to cover the entire thing with marine vinyl so it's waterproof and you can easily wipe it off and then we'll just staple it underneath [Music] just gonna let this dry [Music] after a whole bunch of staples this is where we're at it's not perfect but it's definitely going to do the job i'm not an upholsterer so i did have to look up exactly how to do this and it turns out that getting rid of these dimples has a lot to do with the thickness and the flexibility of the material that you're working with and so i just did the best i could to kind of work my way around and tighten it as i went so kind of looks like a blue bottle cap whatever it's good enough at this point we have the whole thing done so we just need to put it together [Music] all right that is a stool now we just have to take it up try it out [Music] so [Music] obviously i don't know that you would use leaning forward like this in any other context other than making pottery but making an adjustable stool or chair or table is really easy with this inexpensive material i hope this gave you some ideas for a project and if it did i would love to hear about it down in the comments if this isn't your thing we have tons of other types of projects that you may want to check out and if you're not subscribed be sure to do that as well that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you next time maybe a little bit less than a 90 degree edge curve turn bend turn curve bend i know you want the stool to lean forward see perfect down down there i couldn't get an uh i was doing so well what happened thickness and the flexibility flexibility the flex flexibility

Channel: I Like To Make Stuff

Views: 137,605

Rating: 4.9116154 out of 5

Keywords: i like to make stuff, iliketomakestuff, diy, woodworking, metalworking, electronics, 3D printing, prop making, potters stool, pottery, pottery making, pottery wheel, pottery for beginners, potter's stool, chair making, chair making at home, adjustable potters stool, angled potters stool, welding conduit, welding conduit tubing, preparing conduit tubing, vinyl wrap, vinyl cushion, vinyl cushion repair, iltms, diy pottery wheel, pottery stool, how, how to, how to make

Id: ecMk4YXUfkU

Length: 25min 12sec (1512 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021