The Vectric article a few weeks back about the carved stool seat inspired me to give it a try. I had a piece of scrap oak wood a friend gave me that was literally headed to the burn pile if I didn’t take it. It was beat up and had screw holes on one side where someone had mounted a reloading press. It also had some cracks in the ends. But it was pretty thick so I had some room to clean it up to try and salvage it.
I don’t have Aspire, but I liked the seat profile that software enabled compared to the method outlined in VCarve. But like I said, I was inspired. So I took to CAD and designed a seat profile in OnShape using a feature that allows you to loft from one cross section to another while following some guides. This allowed me to get a profile that was pretty similar to what they did in Aspire. Granted, it was a little more work to get that profile compared to how easy it looked in Aspire.
Once I had my seat profile I exported the geometry as an stl file. I then imported that stl file into VCarve and used the 3D carving tools to carve the seat. Since my board was quite thick I didn’t need to make the seat in two halves and glue them together. I then used the files posted on the Vectric website, with some minor tweaks, to cut out the legs.
The only thing I’d do differently would be how the mortises were cut in the bottom of the seat where the legs attach. The first thing I’d do is change the corners from a dog-bone to a T-bone. This increase the gluing surface a tad bit. It would also hide the corners of the mortise joint. I’d also change the radius of the T-bone to be smaller to increase the surface area of the glue joint even more.
To finish the project I applied some Fruitwood stain followed by a couple coats of pre-cat lacquer my friend had that was about to expire.
