STEP STOOL BUILD - Simple Woodworking Project

how's it going everybody i hope you are all having a wonderful day in today's build we're making a step stool designed for primarily reaching things around the kitchen let's get started [Applause] before we build it i wanted to show you what the finished product looks like it is a three piece the top to two side legs and the legs are attached to the top in a dado that runs the entire width of the top at 15 degrees angle that's it super simple incredibly sturdy and frankly quite handy to have around the household all right now that you've seen it let me show you how i built it all right so for material choice today we are using walnut and once again on the bottom here is an eight quarter inch walnut that is about 12 inches or so wide we don't really need that full width i think in this project we're looking for about nine and a half inches finished with and then on the top section of the screen that you see here is a five quarter inch walnut i know it doesn't look quite like a walnut but it is once we mill it you'll see it and the one thing that i wanted to mention is well two things i wanted to mention one is you don't have to find boards that's this wide i did kind of look through all of my lumber to find something that's suitable for this project and frankly i don't have a whole lot of lumber that's this wide and you may not either so uh you know feel free to definitely glue up a bunch of pieces to together to get to the width that you need for this project if you're building it the uh other thing is the top uh having it be thick is actually pretty important for this particular project because we're creating a dado essentially and the depth of that dado kind of gives us the strength from the legs and how it's holding together and there's really nothing else keeping it together the top being thicker allows you to dig deeper dados that gives you more strength ultimately so it's going to be an important thing so anywhere from one and a half inches thickness of the top is probably an ideal situation anyways let's get to processing this lumber and then i can talk to you about joinery okay so i stopped everything because i realized that i was making a cut that i don't really want to make when it comes to walnut especially live edge walnut you've got this lighter tone which is on the outer most part of the tree and then the core of the tree is this dark chocolatey brown color and my intention is to keep that light tone as well as the dark tone on this step stool but what i was doing is registering my cut off of the previous straight edge that i had on this piece and that created this skewed of cut of the you know lighter toned wood and i didn't want that i actually want it to be parallel to the darker tone so what i've done is i made a rough line that i think is where the lighter darker tones are and then i just made another second line that's kind of parallel to that line and that's going to give us a nice straight dark and lighter color wood and a straight bite that does mean that i have to make this cut at a skew angle and it also means that i have to replicate this line to be parallel to this side and then also i have to square off this side and this side it produces a lot of you know waste material but if you do start off with a oversized piece for your projects you can always make adjustments like this if i had cut this piece to be very close to actual dimension i probably wouldn't have the liberty of doing that so keep that in mind and that's what i'm doing here i'm going to make that skewed cut and then readjust everything all right let's get back to it [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so we thought of the milling completed and this is the top piece and these two are our legs we now need to consider joinery and the journey for this is actually really really simple essentially what we need to do is create a channel on the bottom side of the steps tool such that the channel will accept these legs [Music] now if you make this channel or dado perpendicular the step stool is going to the legs are going to come out in a perpendicular fashion and that's fine for the most part but it's not the most stable structure so instead what i want to do is flare this outward at a 15 degree angle this poses a little bit of a joinery challenge because what we need to do then is we need to set our table saw blade to 15 degrees and make these cuts at 15 degrees but in order for the legs to sit flush we actually need to make a cut 15 degree cut down here as well and ultimately in order for the steps tool to sit nice and flush on a floor surface we also need to make a 15 degrees cut here anyways before we do any of the joinery stuff i want to make sure we sand all of these surfaces particularly the legs because we know once we sand everything the thickness of this is going to change ever so slightly and the thickness of this is going to play a very critical factor in the width of our dado so let's send everything then we can measure the thickness of this material to cut our dado and then i'll talk a little bit more about the actual joinery since we're working with 15 degrees that means we need to change the blade angle to 75 degrees and now we can drop the blade to the appropriate height and that's going to be the depth of our dado you could be very particular about this but honestly i'm just going to eyeball it and then say that's about right so this is going to leave us about a third of an inch or so and that should be plenty good and i'm going to set the fence to about one one quarter for the outermost cut so it's going to leave one one quarter of an inch of material on this end and we'll kind of cut progressively towards the inside so we're going to take the first cut this way and then we'll rotate this over to the other side and make the second cut and then just kind of keep moving in until we have the right width for the dado [Music] what you see now is a bunch of little ridges that's left over by the table saw blade because we were not using a flat top grind blade where it has like a raker at the top that creates truly flat bottom and so all of these can be cleaned up using a router plane let me show you how that's done okay so this is a router plane there's a little blade down here you can drop it at a specific height and then you can kind of clear the material at the bottom of a dado so i hope you can see how this works so basically the blade comes in and just takes out the material you want to take small passes at a time because this is not you know the most powerful tool and also is really not designed to take big bites at a time now if you don't have a router plane because i recognize that this is a very specialty tool for very specific tasks you can actually use a chisel and that's going to be able to help you clean out you know this area just fine so our table saw blade is still tilted at that same angle that we used to cut the dados and what we're going to do is we're going to now cut our legs i want the overall height of the stool to be about 10 inches tall and because of the dado kind of taking up some of the height and there's only really a third left over i'm going to make these about a third of an inch shy of 10 inches all right so for the dry fit i don't want to push anything all the way in because i fear that i might not be able to take it out but i just want to get a general sense of whether or not this looks appropriate and if this is going to fit and that appears to be the case so um i can kind of tell already that the angle in here or the bottom here is kind of in line with the angle that we cut and it should based on you know math uh and also we didn't change the angle of the blade so there's no uh potential for us to make an error that way okay so it's time for glue up um it should be pretty uneventful uh let's just you know dab some glue in here and hammer these bad boys in it's a little tighter than i expected so you know we're using a little bit of a convincer here okay so i think we got it down i am generally not a violent person but i certainly felt like one today come on go in there so if you're new to woodworking i highly recommend you buy a heavy duty mallet i call it a convincer because when in doubt and you can't get your joints to fit in this situation you know uh it's there's not a whole lot of ways it can break apart so that means you can use the convincer and keep trying to convince it i'll stop beating the dead horse you may have noticed that there's a little bit of text on the top of the stool and they wanted to kind of show what that is it i did it off camera on the cnc machine uh because you know this is not really the purpose of this video the purpose of the video is to show you how i make this stool uh but this little saying is kind of a family thing on step stools for my wife's family and so it says this little stool is mine i use it all the time to reach the things i couldn't and lots of things i shouldn't many of you don't know this my wife has a twin sister and a couple of years back i made a stool for her that had the saying because her mom also has a stool just like this and so now i wanted to make this particular stool for my wife whom would have the same thing so every person in the family would have a stool that kind of says the same thing which i think is nice um anyway so in case you were curious what it says that's what it says okay so with all of that being said let's break the hard edges i'm using a block plane here you can just use the sandpaper but i like to start off with a black plane on something super geometric like this and then eventually i'll come back with a sander to clean it up and that kind of gives it a nice little soft profile [Music] for finishing we're keeping things pretty simple um i'm using natural cellulose lacquer mixed with a little bit of lacquer thinner on an hvlp gun normally you know for a project this size i probably would use the rattlecannot solute slacker but i'm out of it so we're using a gun [Music] well that's all for today guys i hope you enjoyed this week's video if you did please be sure to click the like button below and consider subscribing to my channel for more content like this if you're not a subscriber already if you did not enjoy the video please leave a comment down below let me know what you think and what kind of videos you want to see in this channel thank you so much for watching i greatly appreciate your support and i will see you oh that was one not too many and i will see you [Music] this is so stupid on the next one [Music] you

Channel: WoodcraftBySuman

Views: 45,068

Keywords: woodworking, beginner, diy, workshop, woodcraft, woodcraftbysuman, suman, how to, how to make, joinery, woodcraft by suman, sarker, step stool, stool, furniture, furniture making, walnut, live edge walnut, router plane, how to build a step stool, wood working, wood stool, how to make a step stool, how to build a stool, woodworking project, diy step stool, build a step stool, woodworking projects, furniture design, diy projects, step stool diy, step stool build, stool diy, diy stool

Id: EkbdGBhM_90

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021