Nice Save!

Here's what happened when I was tapering the mortises in the top of a step stool.  The old recycled pine was soft enough that my tapered reamer really chewed up one of the holes.  Three of them were OK, but one was so horribly disfigured that I thought I might have to scrap the top altogether and start anew.  The hole was no longer even close to the proper angle and the edges were chewed up.

This first stool came out fine; it's the other one that is the subject of this post

The platform of the stool in question - underside shown

These mortises started out round.  While tapering them, the lower left mortise went for a drive to la la land (sounds like I've been reading Ralph's blog too long).  I thought about it for a while and decided I'd try to save it.  The holes were bored at 3/4" diameter and when tapered, the bottom side was closer to 15/16".  I decided to make square mortises and tenons, about 1" on a side.  The lower left mortise I had to make about 1/ 1/8" square because the edges were so gnarly.  You can see some nasty edges in the above pic even after chopping the large, square mortise.  While chopping the mortises, the first three mortises were at approximately the proper angle, but to make the fourth at the proper angle, I'd have had to make it much larger.  So I didn't even try to make the fourth at the proper angle; it was still way off the mark.

Some of the tenons being formed.  These legs started out way
oversized, which allowed me to save this project.
(note: leg #4 at right has its tenon in a corner to allow shaping the leg at an angle)

After fitting the tenons to the mortises.  I turned the stool upside down and put the first stool right-side-up on the upturned feet of the second stool.  This allowed me to find out where the feet of the second stool should be.

Setting a stool with properly spaced feet on upturned second stool

Marking the feet locations on bottom of stool #2 feet

Here's the bad leg - note how far off-center the foot will be once material is removed

Marking the leg shape on the fourth leg
(most of the turned areas you can see from its former life were removed in shaping)

My leg blanks were far beefier than I needed and that saved this project.  I could shape the fourth leg in such a way as to make it end up at the proper angle.  I made the legs octagonal, tapering from 1 3/8" where they meet the top to about 1" at the feet.

Saved!  Glued up and cooking with wedged tenons

The moral of the story is: you can usually save a project - especially if it's not "fine woodworking".  You just have to think about it a while, weigh the options and perhaps try something new.  Not sure if I've made angled square mortises before, but these came out great.