This
3/4 view shows the underside of the stool. Here you can see the stretchers
we created from the front panels of the original design. The original
design called for panels roughly three inches tall. This filled in the top
half of the space under the stool, making it look almost like a box sitting on
the ground rather than a footstool. It also looked quite
hefty.
Because this piece was for the ladies who are the font of all honour in Meridies, we wanted something lighter and more airy. To meet this need, we decided to rip-cut the front panels down to the width of the tenons. This cost us some in the structural stability. The shoulders on the tenons added to the stools ability to resist racking. The front panel originally ran underneath the seat, making it stronger and more resistant to compression. After due consideration, we decided that the one-inch thick maple slabs had sufficient strength to resist compression, and were hard enough to resist the fiber compression caused by racking stress all on their own.
This view also reveals the most obvious flaws in our joinery technique. If you look closely at the under side of the the mortise and tenon joints for the seat, you can see the tear-out damage that was caused by the bore as it cut through the bottom of the void. We made the initial cuts from the top town to avoid tear-out on the visible top of the seat, but were unable to avoid tear-out on the bottom.
Techniques we might have used to avoid tear out include scoring the outlines of the hole at both sides to cut the wood fibers, cutting from both directions and meeting in the middle, or using a tightly clamped backboard underneath the work piece.