Hi everyone

Hoping one of you can provide me with some help on this.

I awoke on Saturday morning to that most conflicting of sounds - a chainsaw. It's a shame to see a tree cut down for no reason, the upside is that it can provide us with the stuff that we like to play around with!

The people at the end of my street were having two lovely tall pines cut down. As I hate to see perfectly good, although not the most interesting, timber go straight into a chipper I snaffled some logs about 500mm long and about 350mm round. My plan is to make some stools out of them.

As its freshly cut and not picked off a shelf I am not 100% sure how best to tackle it. Waiting for them to dry out will takes years - hoping this will be a shortish term project. For your green workers, can I attempt to work on them green or should I wait. My plans for them are I guess you could say reasonably rustic in design, however will need to cut sections out to make legs and will aim for a nice finish on the top.

Any thoughts, comments, advice or criticisms appreciated!

Cheers

Cam

Cam, I don't know if it will work but i'm interested to see what you come up with.
Oh and don't run with scissors (you did say ANY advice appreciated)

__________________
Built: a Bench, a Desk, an Archery Display, Planning a DVD Storage Unit,
If we are being chased by zombies, I WILL trip you.

Thanks Tony,..keep an eye out and see what happens - hopefully it will work!

Thanks for the advice too,...was just about to run down stairs with scissors in hand to get my lunch!

Common names bleed pretty good. If your logs really are Pinus sp., paint the ends with wood glue to slow down the rate of water loss. You could use paint, you could use some Shakespearean voo-doo mix of waxes and oils but I'm thinking of your end plan.
If you used a water-based PVA(?) glue, that's far easier to get rid of later than paint.
Can you afford, in your design, to make one single vertical cut in each piece, right to the center of the log (to relieve drying stress?)
Go ahead and work the wood wet. Conifers get pretty wolly and lots of fuzzies done that way, but you can burn all that off later with a little propane torch. However, I predict lots of splits and checks, even so.

Thanks for the input Robson Valley. Not really what I wanted to hear though!

Ideally I would prefer to not cut it through the guts,..I am thinking that I can at least rough cut some of it to get rid of the unwanted bulk - this will help to cut down on the drying time. I am not overly fussed by splits and checks - as I feel it will add to the stool. I am not after a straight from Ikea pine look.

I do like the propane torch idea,... thanks again

If you're making stools, use 3 legs instead of 4. Three legs will always be stable, no matter how the wood warps. Four legs will eventually wobble. Use a larger footprint for 3, though.

Cheers,
Joe

__________________
Of course truth is stranger than fiction.
Fiction has to make sense. - Mark Twain

Thanks Joe,..appreciate the tip.

Well, whip out the power saw and whack the sucker! Time for show and tell.
Joe's 3-legged idea will save all kinds of grief.

We never bothered with legs = just pull up a stump and have a slurp by the fire.
If it dies down, your stump might be next.

Righto you have convinced me - I will get cracking!

I normally wouldn't put so much effort into a log stool,..however it's a paying gig for a friend of the wife so will get a bit of attention.

The stool that is, not the friend of the wife!

Oh please, don't disappoint us for an instant! Ah, so. There might be some coin of the realm involved. No? I tried to advance a discussion of toad stools but the remarks went a bit fecal. I recall that I got punched in the head by someone who proclaimed to be an XX female.

If you get punched in the head you are generally doing something wrong I think!
Stay tuned for updates after the current project is finished,....