Make a wood bar stool

This is a classic bar stool design and can serve many purposes. I am giving this one to my son to use as a guitar stool.  He’s been using a flimsy drum throne for years and like this is long overdue.

As I was designing this, I kept thinking to myself how easy this project would be to build. It’s just four legs joined together with dowels. As it sometimes the case, actually building something comes with challenges I never expect on paper.

Big challenges were getting the compound angles for the legs cut accurately, and cutting the connector dowels to the proper lengths. The solution was to make a simple assembly jig…or frame…in which I could position the legs to get a good fit.

But I found the biggest challenge was keeping the parts in order. There are eight dowels at four different lengths. Labeling everything will help enormously. I did that and still managed to get things mixed up! Thankfully, I discovered my screw-up before the glue had dried!

Plans:

• WWMM Bar Stool (pdf)
• Sketchup File