Three Legged Stools - Intro to Chairmaking

Class Description: The People Collection Stools are made in the Student Craft woodshop by its staff and students. Berea College is one of about 10 work colleges in the country. Students get free tuition to attend, but commit to working 10 hours per week somewhere on campus to offset tuition costs.

The process of making these stools is designed for production. Shop made jigs and fixtures allow us to produce multiples. We’ll usually try to make 30 per production run. We are by no means a furniture factory, but we do aim to be efficient to keep costs down.

You probably won’t operate your home shop as a factory either, but I think you’ll appreciate the efficiency of this approach—and I think it will impact your productivity at home. The act of woodworking is as much, if not more, about developing a process as it is about putting a tool to a piece of wood.

There are many ways to accomplish any of the tasks we’ll be working on through the weekend. I encourage you to inquire about different ways to make tenons, or drill mortises, or shape seats. We can look at these methods as a class and take the path that suits us.

To get a sense of this production mode, over three days we’ll each make two stools. You can see how we make ours and determine how to adapt that process to your home shop.

We’ll use tools that are common to the home shop: Routers, the tablesaw, the band saw, the drill press and the lathe all play a part along the way.

L unches provided.

R equired Tools:

• Safety Glasses
• Tape Measure
• Pencil
• Random Orbit Sander & Sanding discs (80, 120, 180, 220 grit paper)

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