Woodworking in a Tiny Shop: The Ol' Two Step

I'd made one of these two-step stools in early 2018 and it has been extremely useful. The two side panels are angled front and back for stability. The two steps are dovetailed into the sides. The three rails are dovetailed or half-dovetailed into the sides.

Sketchup drawing

Early last year I grabbed four small folding tables that were destined for the landfill. They've been sitting in (read: cluttering) the shop ever since, so I thought I'd make use of them. The tables were made in Thailand and Viet Nam. I tried looking up what the wood was, but just based on the look, I couldn't be sure. Oddly, even hand tools cause a lot of very fine dust, so I don't like using it much.

Three of the four table tops

Each tabletop was about 14 1/2" x 20" and that was just a little narrow for the sides of a stool I wanted to make.

Here I'm setting the existing two-step stool on one of the tabletops
that was dimensioned to 18" x as wide as I could get it

The tabletop wasn't wide enough, so I cut off and re-glued that slim triangle
exposed in the previous pic to make up the extra here

Because I angled the edges of the stool sides early on, I had to do some layout referencing off ends rather than nicely squared edges. For that reason I had been very careful to square up the ends.

The roughly marked rectangle (upper right in photo) will be removed
to create the lower step so I used a panel gauge referencing off the bottom end
to mark the horizontal line

The vertical line was marked referencing off the top end -
not optimal, but it worked fine.

The two side panels after making certain they were identical

After dimensioning the final five pieces of wood, shoulder lines were knifed together to get them exactly matching.

Marking the three rails together (stair treads were marked using one of these as a guide)

Marked the dovetails on a tread, ready for the saw

Because the two sides had angled edges, I couldn't reference off a "face edge" to mark the pin baselines. For the pins of the top step, I referenced off the end and use a scoring gauge. I had been very careful in planing the ends so they were straight and square to the face.

Marking the baseline referencing off the end - I never do this

I used a homemade scoring gauge to get a nice knife line

For the lower step, this wasn't possible, so I improvised. I aligned the step tread with the side where the dovetails would be and made a small knife mark at the depth of the step. Repeated this at the rear end of the step, then connected those knife marks with a deeper knife line. This was on the inside face. For the outside face, I squared the inside baseline around the edge to get a knife nick at the corner. Then I set a wheel-type marking gauge into the gauged line in the inside back of the side and used that setting to make a mark on the outside face. Connecting that mark and the nick gave me the outside baseline.

Using thickness of the step tread to mark a baseline for the pins

Dovetails complete

The outlines of the pins were marked directly from the tail boards. The cutting went well but there was still a bit of fiddling to get them to fit right.

The rail that goes below the upper step and the rail connecting the back edges of the stool were straight-forward. But the rail that goes below the lower step is more complicated because of the angled front edge of the sides.

In this pic, the stool is lying on its back.
The square is referencing off the angled front edge, so if I
align the top of the rail with the pin baseline (as shown), when material is removed
to let in the rail, it will leave a large gap (sort of shown by the pencil lines).

So I had to estimate how much to raise the rail (about 3/32") before letting it in to the side. I was conservative so that I could plane a little off the top of the rail to get it to fit right. That top edge had to be planed at an angle anyway to match the baseline of the pins.

Then I did some shaping of the rails, smooth-planed all parts and dry-assembled it.