40VIDEO Assessing Your Footstool & Fixing a Wobble

In this video, I want to talk to you about the stool. We've got a completed stool here

It's a serviceable stool. It's going to lift your feet up at the end of the day and make you feel better

However, it doesn't really look like furniture, does it? It kind of looks sort of like a shipping crate or a palette or something like that

And that's because this doesn't have any refinement added to it yet

Now, in this case, because we're building this footstool in the most basic and simple way

I didn't do the sanding and refinement and things that I would normally do during construction

I wouldn't have put this stool together with the wood in this condition

So what we're going to do later is take this all apart and refine it

But before we do that, I just want to point out why this doesn't look like furniture

And I mean the first reason is because the wood's kind of rough

And you can see it here. We've got plainer marks. Plainer marks

You can see them, the lines here. That's because this surface was formed by a series of scallops

series of curved moves from a planar, thickness planar, that turned it from rough lumber to smooth lumber

or plain lumber it's called, but it's still not all that smooth, at least not for furniture use

So we got that. We've got some tearing of the wood here

The grain was running in one direction and the thickness planer was running in the other, so it caused that tearing. It's dirty. Some of the corners are

dented a little bit. This is all completely normal, by the way. We didn't do any mistakes

and if your footstool looks like this, you didn't do any mistakes either. This is just the way

lumber looks until you refine it. Another issue here is the saw and edge. This is about

as smooth as you can get a saw and edge with a hand saw, but it's still not nearly smooth enough

for interior furniture use. Also, we've got the factory edge here, very slightly rounded

and then the edge here quite crisp. So that's no good. You have pencil lines

all of these things I'm going to show you how to refine away, and then you can decide for

yourself how fancy and smooth and refined you want your stool to be. There is, I would call it a

semi-structural problem that you can approx. Your footstool almost certainly has, mine does, and it's a wobble

So refinement involves dealing with the surfaces, but before we get that far, we got to fix the wobble

because nobody wants a wobbly footstool. And we're going to do that using a process called scribing

I've done my best in this course to create a project and to put it together in such a way that

you be exposed to techniques and challenges and approaches and ways of thinking that will apply to all kinds of woodworking And scribing is a very powerful technique that you can use in all kinds of situations So now I need to go over to a truly flat surface so we can make sure that we getting rid of the wobble in the stool and we not compensating for any kind of a twisted floor So you have to find what you believe to be a flat surface

That could be, I don't know, kitchen counter. It could be a floor if it's flat

It could be different things. But right now I'm going to go over to my table saw, which is the flattest, handiest surface I have in my workshop right now

And we're going to do the scribing over there. So sure enough, I've put the stool on a very flat surface

my table saw and we've still got a wobble. It's extremely likely. Count yourself very fortunate

if your footstool doesn't have a wobble when you first put it together because the slightest

difference in angle from one leg to the other, that's going to make a wobble. So the first step

to scribing that wobble away is to stabilize the footstool so it doesn't rock and we need to use

some sort of a wedge. These are plastic wedges meant. for building and cabinet installation and things like that

Anything will do. You can just jam cardboard under there, or if you've got a wooden wedge, you can use that

But essentially what we want to do is we want to put the wedges in so that half the error is here on this side

and then half is over on the other side. Because this is the high side here on one side

and this is the high side over here. When there's a wobble, it's always diogenes

If you had sort of this was a high side and that was a high side, well you wouldn't have a wobble necessarily that the footstool would just tip over a little bit and it would be stable. So a wobble always indicates some kind of a problem in opposite corners. And so we'll put a wedge in here and split the difference and put the wedge in there. Now we're solid as a rock with the wedges in place

That's step one. This is where the actual scribing comes in. I'm just using a regular pencil

And if you'll notice, when I put the pencil down on anything, the tip is raised a little bit

Now what is that? That's probably 3.16th of an inch or so. And that's key. Because what I can do now

is I can put this pencil down here and I can simply trace. Now did you notice something

there the pencil line shows more wood over here at this end right here then it does over here

in fact there's almost no wood below the pencil line here if I can remove wood from

this leg right accurately right up to the pencil line and not beyond and I can do the

same thing on the other side because I'm going to scribe it If I can remove the wood right to those lines, I will have a stable footstool

And so I'm just going to go around and do all of the sides now

I Now I can do it here because the wedge is here but I can kind of rotate it out of the way

Not that I really need to mark it here necessarily. The mark on the side is the most important one because that's when I'm going to be removing wood to

So how do you suppose? how do you suppose I'm going to remove the wood I need to see more wood here less wood here

not a whole lot on this side but quite a bit more on that side if I can bring it

bring the wood of both legs down to that pencil line precisely I'm going to have a solid

stool this isn't a whole lot of wood so I can't saw it I can't use the handsaw I

might be able to use a power saw But that's tricky and it can be dangerous

What I'm going to use is my edge sander, which is a nice big, very, very handy stationary machine

that you certainly won't have yet. You might get one sooner or later

There are smaller versions and the one I'm going to be showing you. But you don't have that

You don't even have a small one. So how do you deal with that? Well, I'll just show you

This is the hand saw method, we'll call it. Instead of just relying on the natural distance between one of the flats on this pencil and the tip of the lead

so that 3.16th of an inch or whatever, the tip is raised above the wood

Instead of relying just on that, I'm going to park the pencil on a piece of wood

That would raise as the pencil. And now when I scribe, you can see here, now when I scribe, my scribe line is going to be much higher

It's going to be much higher. Actually, I just grabbed this scrap

I could have probably gotten a little bit thinner scrap. I don't really need to go this much higher

But the idea is that instead of by removing just the minimum out of wood, which is what I

scribed to before, I'm now making a mark that's sufficiently high that I could cut this

with a handsaw. The problem is I can't cut that with a hand saw because there's not, there won't be wood on

both sides of the blade to guide it. So the blade is simply just going to wander away from

that line if I tried to saw it. But here it's different. I can saw to that line and there's

going to be wood on both sides of the cut and the saw blade will be contained and it will work well

So that's the way you can do it even if all you have is a hand saw. But now let's go over

to the edge center. I'm going to show you how I do this and this

then we'll bring the stool back and see how we did. we done Rock solid and no wedges Scribing works amazingly well and if if you done scribing like this or have you ever do it in your career and you scribe once and you

get get the wood down to the line and then you try it out there's still a little bit of

wobble no problem just scribe again and it just means you didn't get the lines

quite right or maybe you remove too much wood on one side easily fixed and we got a rock

tool that's now worth refining because there's no point in putting a furniture grade finish

on something that's going to wobble. Now let's just say that you happen to own a belt sander

A belt sander is a handheld sanding power tool. It's one of my recommended tools if you're

building up your collection and you can use a handheld belt sander to do the same job that I just

did with my stationary edge sander. And that just involves clamping the stool to a solid surface so that it doesn't move around and

then holding the belt sander below your eye level and moving it back and forth and

working back to the line that way it's a free hand operation so it's a little bit more

skill dependent than what I showed you on the stationary edge center but it works really

well and it will also offer the benefit of smoothing the bottom of the legs too

So just one more little tip before I go. And as I said, this might not apply to you immediately

but chances are pretty good that you'll get a belt sander eventually. That's what this thing is here

And you, of course, you want to spend as little as possible on abrasive belts

This is a replaceable belt. You can flip a lever, take it off, put on another one

These belts come in different grit ratings, just like sheet sandpaper does

But the thing that stops them from working most often is that the poor

so the spaces, the valleys between the abrasive particles get clogged with sawdust

This one isn't too bad, but when you're working with softwood, it can get really bad

because the sawdust mixes with the resins and forms a kind of a hard impervious layer

So the sanding belt and its abrasives could still be good, but it can't really sand because the spaces are all plugged up

The solution to that is this thing. This is what's called crepe rubber

C-R-E-P-E. It's a French word. I don't know why they call it that, but it's a soft rubber

And think of it as an eraser. It's kind of like a big eraser. Instead of erasing pencil marks, it erases sawdust and resin from belts

So you just kind of turn it on. I'll tell you first. I'll turn it on and then hold this against the spinning belt

And you're going to be amazed, I think, at how clean this gets. Let me show you

Look at that. Almost as good as new. You can triple, quadruple, maybe even more the life of a belt with a block like this. And this block, even with heavy use, in a wood

woodworking shop almost every day it's going to last for years so just something to keep in mind for the future