From offline publishing on 12/11/2005

Since school is out for the winter holidays, I’ve decided to take on a small woodworking project. A friend of mine wants an oversized stepstool designed to match a bed he recently purchased. He had shopped around for other stools, but could not find one that was oversized enough or that matched the design and color of his bed.

The bed is made from Hevea Brasiliensis (rubber trees), but rubber wood is fairly difficult to find here in Phoenix. So, I have decided to make the bed from hard maple because it is widely available and rubber wood is in the maple family, so it’s close in grain and color. I’ve never worked with hard maple before, so this should be interesting.

This is the first time I will come up with the designs for the project myself. I normally use plans I can find on the internet, and have even modified plans significantly to meet my needs. So, I decided to try and use some CAD software to model the stepstool. That didn’t really work out. The design process was WAY too time consuming, and the CAD software required WAY more detail than I really need for the build process. Guess I’ll be using pencil and paper…