Step Stool

Yesterday I put together a quick project: a step stool.

Finished product. Step stool!

My mom needed a small stool to go in the kitchen so she could reach some of the plates stored on higher shelves, but it had to be short enough to pass under the lower cabinets.

Finished CAD model.

Legs, also with dogbone for the inner corners.

CAM.

Time to cut it out on the CNC. I used some crappy plywood I had laying around; I wish I had better quality wood so it would look nicer but this wasn't too bad. During the cutting operation, the router's rotation started becoming intermittent and stopped working altogether. I thought the router finally failed but opening it up revealed a disconnected wire. After reattaching it and cleaning out some of the accumulated dust, the cutting went smoothly.

Cutting complete.

Free parts.

The tabs were a little large in one dimension and I just used the router to hand remove a bit of the wood for everything to fit together. Once I fixed that, I friction fit everything together with a hammer. Some sanding and a coating of wood poly later I had the final product:

Step stool in the corner.

I got really lucky that the plywood was only around 0.7 inches thick while in CAD everything assumed 0.75" thick wood. This effectively added just the right amount of margin to the tabs and tab holes to account for CNC's lack of rigidity. In the end, it all turned out nicely.