Stepping Stool

During the summer of 2021, my mother requested that I make her a stepping stool. Of course, I agreed to do it because I love my mom and also I enjoy building things that I know will be useful for others. So I got to work on designing the stool on SolidWorks. I decided that I wanted the stool to be rectangular in shape and have angled feet.

Now that I had my design drawn out, I then thought about how I was going to cut out the pieces of wood from the 1x4 planks I had. The regular rectangular pieces would be easy because I would only need to cut them to length, but the feet were not going be that simple. I decided to use a jigsaw to make all of the cuts. The jigsaw would especially assist with making the angled cuts on the feet.

The drawing above is a template for me to cut out the stool legs. The construction lines mark the edges of the 1x4 and the solid lines mark the cutting lines. I printed this out to help me make the cuts.

Here you can see me making some of the cuts with the jigsaw and the resulting pieces of wood. I am not very well equipped, so I must resort to using saw horses and clamps to hold the stool together.

Above are the images of my fastening the upper part of the stool together. In the top left image, I align all of the pieces to see how they fit together. In the other pictures, I am adding pilot holes and screwing the pieces.

Finally, I fasten the legs to the upper shell and then I test the strength. I decided that the stool looked pretty raggedy so I set out to paint it before I gave it to my mom.

Here is the finished product! I was actually quite shocked by how sturdy the stool was. I really enjoyed working on this stool and my mom gave it a thumbs up!