1 Attachment(s)
assembly starts....slowly
I don't have a lot of time up my sleeve when I finish work for the day so I only get a couple of hours in the garage most nights. Last night I used that time to sand all the dowels down. I just clamp one end in my wood vise and then go through the grits from 80-180 using a kitchen sponge as the sanding pad, it works well cos it's soft enough to bend around the 19mm dowel, it protects my hands from the heat generated and the scourer pad grips onto the paper/velcro backing of my half used sanding disks. The vise works well to since it holds the piece in place so you can sand aggressively. I've done rods in the past in my hands (holding with one hand and sanding with the other) and found it to be much more taxing, at least for dowels longer than 1.8m.
A bit of cutting later to get the lengths I needed and i was ready to put together my first couple of pairs of legs. Luckily I also remembered that the spacing between the top of the legs was not what counted when fitting the tops, it's actually the diagonal between opposing leg pairs. With that in mind I had to adjust my clamping forms so that the legs were closer, otherwise my tops would have been too small to cover the legs, a mistake that I made on my first set of stools which now reside in my kitchen (luckyily on those the tops are raised on top of a lazy susan bearing so it's not such and obvious issue).
Anyway, here is last night's result and the sanded and cut dowels in the background.
Attachment 320791
2 Attachment(s)
getting close to the tricky part
I've been away at the snow for a few days so I haven't had a lot of time to spend on the project but i did manage to do some sanding on the tops on the weekend. In fact i finished off all the edges so now all there is left to do with the tops is to cut the holes which will be tricky as i've already got the bases assembled and they aren't all millimeter perfect despite my efforts using the forms it seems that the warping of the dowels was enough to move things out of square. It's close on the diagonals but not so much on the sides. I might have to do some "convincing" when it comes down to it. I will try it out soon and see how i go.
I also slowly glued up all the remainder of the legs pair into the bases that i needed. I used epoxy for the second part of the glue up which was much easier in terms of the open time for the glue but it did make a bit of a mess in some of the joints where squeezeout got onto the legs, nothing some sanding wont fix...oh sanding, how i loathe thee.
Attachment 321510Attachment 321511
Shouldn't be too far off now, just clean up the dowel ends, sand, drill and fit the tops, clean up some more dowel ends, sand again and then apply finish. Remind me again why i agreed to make more stools.