A Rustic Post & Rung Stool With Green Wood

I needed a project to use the fresh-cut wood that I split out last month.  The inspiration probably came from some Follansbee work I've seen, but I'm not sure.  I've thought about these post and rung stools for a while.

I took four of the split billets to make the posts.  At first I tried to use the drawknife to work on them.  But there were knots and inconsistencies in the wood that made that very difficult.  So I ended up using the hatchet, a scrub plane and a course jack plane to get them roughly 1 5/8" square, then octagonal.

Planing to roughly square

First two octagonal posts

Two posts octagonal, two square awaiting octagonizing.
Note the difference in color; the two octagonal changed color overnight.

Since the billets were anything but straight and regular, there are some areas on the octagonal sections that are still in their split state.  Here's something interesting.  When the wood was first split, it was fairly light in color, but turned an orange-amber color over the course of a few hours.  Then the wood sat for a couple of days.  When I planed it up, the newly exposed sections stayed fairly white.

For the rungs, I got the parts to about 7/8" square with planes, then octagonal with the drawknife.  The 5/8" tenons were made with the drawknife.

With one surface flat (left side), drew the size I needed

Layout lines and a sizing stick guided my hatchet work

Then a plane made them ~7/8" square and drawknife got them octagonal

Marked the ends with a 5/8" circle and a line showing growth ring direction

Then used drawknife to make 1 1/4" long tenons
(the tenon shown is round - not how I made the rest)

Note how I left octagonal facets on the tenons.
My thought is that these will dig in to the mortise walls for better hold.

Then chamfered the ends to help them ease into the mortises

Six long and six short rungs

Ideally, the rungs would be very dry when fitted to the mortises of the relatively wet posts.  That way, when the posts dry and shrink, the mortises would tighten around the tenons.  But I had no great way of drying the rungs (and no moisture meter either).  I waited a few days and they felt fairly dry.  They also seemed lighter (per volume) than the posts, so I went for it.

When I was ready, I bored the mortises in the posts and glued up the front posts with their connecting rungs right away.  Same with the rear posts and their rungs.  After letting them sit overnight, I bored the holes for the side rungs and glued them up.

With post clamped level in the vise, bored the holes for the long rungs.
The rope by my right elbow is a plumb line that I'm using with a mirror to judge fore/back plumb.
The large square on the bench is used to judge left/right plumb.
I later changed this method to be a bit simpler. 

Gluing up the front legs and their rungs

One of the things I've seen in other people's work is the use of overlapping tenons to lock in half of the rungs.  I tested this out on some scrap to see if there would be any problem boring a mortise that partly cut into a tenon of a neighboring rung.

Bored a hole and glued in a stick, then on an adjacent face bored  
another hole that overlapped the first hole.
At the bottom of this mortise, you can see where the auger bit cut
part of the first tenon.  There was no problem boring through it.

So then I bored the mortises for the left side and right side rungs.  I got creative when boring so that those holes would be at right angles to the first sets of holes.  Mirrors, squares and levels were used to complete the task.  Even so, I got some of them a little wonky, so the stool glued up a bit out-of-square.  Noticeably out-of-square for me, but probably not for anybody I'll show it to.

Leg near bench is clamped lengthwise and that clamp is held in the vise.
The level showed the leg was parallel to the ground.
Note the other leg - it's cantilevered way out in no-man's land, 
so I used a spring clamp and a stick to support it. 

I used that stick and spring clamp to adjust the outrigger leg
so the whole assembly was parallel to the ground.

Here's one of the holes bored, intersecting the tenon of the adjacent rung.
Apparently that rung didn't get fully seated in its mortise. 

The glue-up was a little stressful.  It was a challenge pulling all the joints tight.  A big hammer and plenty of clamps helped.  The stool didn't clamp up exactly square.  It's a little rhomboid when viewed from above.  It also had a little twist in it - I had to shave the bottoms of two legs to get it to sit nicely on the floor.

I really didn't have a solid idea of what I would do for the seat, but I wanted something woven.  I researched cattail rush, but now is not the time for harvesting rush.  I know I could buy some, but wasn't ready for that.  I had some Danish paper cord left over from a project last year and started using that.

The stool, with seat getting started

I ended up ordering more cord to finish the seat.  Maybe I'll write more about doing the seat in a separate post.