This was my first woodworking project, made 1 year ago for my wife's birthday. I used my father-in-law's BT3100, a drill press at work, and my small Craftsman router to make these matching step stools for the kitchen.
The wood is edge-glued Aspen panels from Lowe's. If I was doing it again, that probably wouldn't be my first choice.
The roundover work on the top matches our kitchen table (as does the stain color).
The legs are angled 10 degrees in both dimensions, which makes it quite stable to stand on. It would be very hard to tip it over.
My favorite part is the lettering. I used MS Word to print out the letters on legal paper (Georgia font), then used carbon paper to transfer letters to the wood (which was very smooth and white, easy to see the carbon papered letters). Then, I used a 1/16" straight router bit I picked up at Ace to route out all the lettering. The actual routing probably took me an hour or hour and a half.
I did all the staining and poly'ing before assembly, but all the surfaces that were to be glued were covered with either wood scraps (helped to handle the pieces while poly'ing) or masking tape.
The top is held on with glue plus four hidden wood screws through the cross members (don't know if that's the proper name). Of course, the legs are glued and screwed to the cross members.
I've been wanting to share this here since I found the forum a couple of months ago, but just now got around to finding and reducing the pictures.
Thanks for looking,
-Billy
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