Making the Staked High Stool from the Anarchist’s Design Book

Since buying the Anarchist’s Design Book by Christopher Schwarz I’ve been itching to build myself a staked high stool for use in my workshop. The design looks simple enough but I’ve fallen into that trap before.

For years I’ve thought that my workshop could really use a perch of some sort for those intricate little jobs or just for pondering the next task. The chapter on building this stool is available for download courtesy of the ever-generous Mr. Schwarz.

As soon as I saw the design I thought it was something I could tackle. I had a couple of hours to myself today so I finally put the pedal to the metal (or should that be “put the pinus to the bandsaw”?) and made a start on building the stool.

I found a couple of pieces of 2″ thick construction grade softwood which I squared up on the planer (jointer for my US friends) and fed through the thickness planer to bring them down to the 1 ⅜” called for in the plan. I glued them together edge to edge and clamped them up while I turned my attention to producing the legs and stretchers.

I had some stock laying around which had come from an old door and by good fortune the mortices in the stiles were far enough apart to give me enough wood to produce the stock that I required. I cut the door stiles to length by hand and ripped them to width on the bandsaw before cleaning and squaring up on the planer.

I now had 6 pieces of straight-ish grained wood at 1 ⅜” square section and about 26″ long (the plan calls for 5 pieces but I had enough stock to make a spare piece – just in case!). The next step is to make the square legs and stretchers octagonal so I was back at the bandsaw with a jig that holds the pieces at 45 degrees to the blade as I feed them through. By moving the jig sideways it adjusts how much of the corner of the stock is removed and with a bit of trial-and-error I got the jig in the right spot and fed each piece through 4 times to knock off each corner. I now have 6 octagonal section pieces and a 24 story sticks!

And that was where I had to leave it for today. The glue will dry overnight on the seat and I’ll be back in the workshop again soon to shape the seat, taper the sticks and create the tapered mortice and tenons.