Number 10

My neighbor has a nice grove of Staghorn Sumac behind his house, so I asked permission to cut a couple of sticks to take a look at it.

Unsplit, the wood with the bark removed is just a nondescript white color, interesting only because it often crooks off at an angle. However, it splits easily, and usually right down the middle, or close to it.

 

Once the wood is split, it shows lots of color. The center contains a very soft orange pith, which is easily scraped out, leaving a hollow, which shows a little darker than the olive-green grain of the rest of the wood.

 I didn't get back to my neighbor's house for about a week, and I was just itching to get some more of that wood, which I finally did. 
 The wood is rather brittle and hard to work with, so this stool took me a little longer and gave me a little more frustration than usual to complete. It seemed that even with all nail-holes pre-drilled, every time I tried to drive a nail, the wood would split, and the joints come apart ... but once all the joints are tied together with wire, the stool is almost incredibly tight and strong. The advantage of wire-tied joints is that if sometime in the far future a stool did start to loosen up at one joint or another, all it would take to re-tighten it would be to add another twist in the steel wire.

The seat of this stool is made of Western Fir, another of the old boards I found half-buried in the mud behind the garage this spring.
This stool is for sale for $65. If interested, please contact me through the comments section of this blog, or by email at lewagner2002@yahoo.com. Reference: Stool Number 10. (Sorry, this stool is already sold.) For general info about these stools, please see Introduction.