the finished stools
we're working on some tables this week that go with the cherry stools that we finished last week. they were 'designed' by my friend and weekend neighbor, anna, for whom we made them .. anna has been designing and buying custom jewelry from kit for the past few years, so i knew she had a good eye and an excellent design sense. anna gave me the sketch above on her daughter's construction paper and after a brief discussion, we made the cad drawing above and the first prototype below.... click the photos to enlarge them.
i started our first prototype with some sort of 'out of the air' dimensions and we found the mockup to be too big for the space, and as a stool in general ...
but, with the prototype we were still able to work out the construction concepts, like the housed tenons shown below .. the housed tenons and the alternate height stretchers are key concepts that allow good noncolliding joinery that allows for slender legs with no loss of strength at the stretcher points. the housed tenons allowed us to not worry about the fit of the horizontal stretcher to the sanded curves of the sculptural legs. otherwise, i don't think we could fit the 8 curved ends of the stretchers efficiently enough for someone to want to buy the stools. we cut those mortises while the leg stock was still square, cutting the curves after.
the stretchers had to have an 1/8th" radius on all their edges to fit the routed mortises, but that was a small price to pay for the quickness of the solution ...
the final prototype, in oak below, was comfortable, particularly sitting across the diagonal of the seat, and fit the space well. anna accepted it and she and her husband selected some beautiful red leather for the seats. this week we're working on a pair of matching tables, 19 x 26 x 20 high that will be used mainly as side tables, but can be pulled together as a serving/coffee table for their nearby seating area.
the sketch for the small tables ... more to follow as we work on them ...
the finished stools
we're working on some tables this week that go with the cherry stools that we finished last week. they were 'designed' by my friend and weekend neighbor, anna, for whom we made them .. anna has been designing and buying custom jewelry from kit for the past few years, so i knew she had a good eye and an excellent design sense. anna gave me the sketch above on her daughter's construction paper and after a brief discussion, we made the cad drawing above and the first prototype below.... click the photos to enlarge them.
i started our first prototype with some sort of 'out of the air' dimensions and we found the mockup to be too big for the space, and as a stool in general ...
but, with the prototype we were still able to work out the construction concepts, like the housed tenons shown below .. the housed tenons and the alternate height stretchers are key concepts that allow good noncolliding joinery that allows for slender legs with no loss of strength at the stretcher points. the housed tenons allowed us to not worry about the fit of the horizontal stretcher to the sanded curves of the sculptural legs. otherwise, i don't think we could fit the 8 curved ends of the stretchers efficiently enough for someone to want to buy the stools. we cut those mortises while the leg stock was still square, cutting the curves after.
the stretchers had to have an 1/8th" radius on all their edges to fit the routed mortises, but that was a small price to pay for the quickness of the solution ...
the final prototype, in oak below, was comfortable, particularly sitting across the diagonal of the seat, and fit the space well. anna accepted it and she and her husband selected some beautiful red leather for the seats. this week we're working on a pair of matching tables, 19 x 26 x 20 high that will be used mainly as side tables, but can be pulled together as a serving/coffee table for their nearby seating area.
the sketch for the small tables ... more to follow as we work on them ...
3 comments:
Thanks for posting Dan.
These are very cool, and I am really happy to know that mock ups are a part of your work flow. I am copying/designing 2 stools right now as well. I know the only way to work out a few of the details is with a couple mock ups. "If it's OK for Dorset, it's OK for me." :)
Do you have any resources that you've used over the years that you think might be helpful for the rest of us adolescents? Thanks!
hi jason .. models and mockups ... can't live without em. particularly for chairs and stools and for determining how pieces will fi in spaces.. you just can't sit in a drawing. there's a category over there on the right called models and mockups. i just looked through it and there are some good older posts there ... have a look ... we like 1/4 or 1/6th scale. photoshop is our second best design friend.
I should have thought to look through your archives. Thanks for taking the time to share!!!! and..... Go Photoshop. :) I'm with ya there.
Cheers.
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