I’ve been working on a stool for the past 9 months or so and I finally have a completed piece so I wanted to share a little of the development from initial drawings to finished piece.
Here is a pic of some of my sketches for the stool.
A cardboard model really helped me to visualize and scale the piece accordingly. I decided to choose 2″ x 1/4″ flat steel bar for the structure.
All welded up with 1/4″ steel supports below the seat. I really liked the look, but structurally it did not work. It pretty much pulled itself apart as the legs want to buckle under any kind of weight. On to my next challenge.
After a lot of head scratching and some different welding and structural attempts, I bent the back legs to 90 and added a 1x wood detail to the legs. It was significantly stronger, but still not there. The legs were still a little shaky and the back legs would kick out a little when you sat down. I then added two steel rods at diagonal from the two front legs up to the seat. This made the stool pretty stable, but I wasn’t sure I liked the supports and I still wanted it to be a little stronger. So the design sat for a while.
I recently took another crack at the design. I decided to make the first version of the stool chair height. After some thinking, I came up with the idea to tie the two opposing legs together with welded steel rod, which really strenthened the structure of the piece. I thickened up the wood legs to 6/4″ walnut and decided to shorten the steel leg section to add some contrast on the backside. I also moved the radius detail on the seat back 2″; it was a bit uncomfortable to sit on and now its out of the general seating area while still having the detail I like.
The finished stool sits at 19″ which is an average chair height.
The wood legs are attached to the steel with stainless steel screws.
The high&tight is now available at my etsy shop for $425. http://https://www.etsy.com/shop/micklish?ref=si_shop
