SAKOF... Don't step on me Stool!

Boys and Girls,

Always looking for excuses to compel me to migrate the next projects over… Fortunately it doesn’t take much and shipwright's Sketchup Go Gurus topic about a Cabriole leg was the catalyst to bring across my example of a poor man's interpretation of "cabriole leg(s)" that was originally published on 10th. January 2018 at LJ.

This is the link to the 3D Warehouse, as the option was not available in those dark ages of pre COVID 2019,

The actual blog is below all these pictures.

SAKOF "What/Who" am I, roll call,

The above happy snaps are just some of the "puzzles" that kept family and friends going for quite a long time. 

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(Boys and Girls hadn't been invented back then)....

 
Everyone was posting pictures if their stools and then a few old timers felt left out and posted theirs…. Well I'm an old timer and never comfortable with being upstaged or mushroomed (kept in the dark)... I decided to present, to all you unfortunates, my SAKOF....

What does SAKOF stand for? When I made the stool, a friend of mine complacently inquisitioned me about what the hell was it for… (now ex-friend I should add). This being one of those experimental builds rather than a functional requirement, I answered it could be used as, 

 its a… Swiss Army Knife Of Furniture.

Of course it all started with SketchUp.

I actually purchased the Pro version of SketchUp so I could use it's Layout feature to create 1:1 ratio PDF prints that the laser used.

This was the first woodworking project I made use of my laser for. While the parts required were too thick for laser cutting, I cut some following templates that I then used with my router.

Being an experimental build, my choice of wood (actually I didn't know any better) was 19mm KD hardwood (Tassie Oak I believe) from Bunnings. I didn't realise that you could get 45mm KD off the shelf and thinking that 25mm would be a bit beefier for my weight, I made a sandwich of 19mm and 2×3mm laminates of the KD boards,

using my hand-pump vacuum press bag,

A quick bit of surgery on the bandsaw and I had 4 steadier legs than mine were and already shapelier,

Mounted the templates and quickly made those legs stocking worthy using my router table,

I found this gizmo called a Staedtler that I thought was a metal toothpick back in my school days.

When I Googled it I found you could draw circles with it…

(if only I had Google back in 1962, I might have used that gizmo in my Latin classes… to prick that prick of a Latin teacher… Brother Francis.

With a bit of tablesaw, drill press, scroll saw and bandsaw manicuring, parts started to take shape,

Then it dawned on me… I can cut templates for more than just legs on my laser… damn… I could have saved all that Google reading trying to identify that thing called Staedtler,

 
 and with a bit of disc sanding, the dings and dents were removed

Then all I had to do was screw it all up,

... OK… I may have neglected to mention that minor step of making a couple of threads… NO #4... with the H.

The plans called for dowels to attach the legs so they were dynamically adjustable… Had a piece of Jarrah

dying to be turned,

 
Then with some dexterous manipulation on the drill press, the holes for the dowels were evacuated,

The tricky part was then to align those holes with the legs themselves in the stool top,

And the same with the centre brace,

All that was left was the assembly,

but only after a bloody good shellacking,

 
With the dowels trimmed,

You finish up with a SAKOF,

The tragedy of this build and the christening of SAKOF is that as a joke, I started an email blog of what am I (as a sample)... It usually consists of a picture with SAKOF as the leading star, on the next page is a hint (if required), then follows the solution and the last page attempts to justify my twisted mind and reassure you that to be wrong is not catastrophic… A you may imagine I quickly ran out of most of the derivatives of "stool" and started a who/what am I using SAKOF as the vehicle to hold the props… Some may have been clever, but after around 120 instalments I was plucking more hairs out of my rrs… than a magician does rabbits out of a hat… I never had the luxury of Ellen Degeneres' script writer!

Fortunately back then I still had friends and consequently a captive involuntary audience for all my SAKOFs… hmm… they probably stopped speaking /writing to me near the end of my SAKOF streak… probably out of disappointment.

As always, if your stool is hard… read this article again or take a couple of laxettes for relief!