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While waiting for a flight to Alaska today I decided to spend my morning knocking out prototypes of a folding camp stool using bamboo turnings.
The first piece of custom furniture I ever owned was a bookcase that my grandfather made for me. The bookcase was huge – almost 7’ tall – because all I did as a kid was read, write, build stuff and blow things up with fireworks. On any given Saturday night, I’d be hunkered down in my waterbed (don’t ask) with a stack of books and comic books.
And everything was stored on my bookcase.
The most significant decorative details of the bookcase were the split-bamboo turnings that my grandfather used on many of his case pieces. My family has a deep but confusing relationship with bamboo, but both my grandfather and father used them frequently in their work.
Today I decided to revisit the bamboo turnings of my youth and make a series of folding camp stools using some leftover bits of sapele and bridle leather from a bunch of campaign commissions. This morning I turned about 10 bamboo legs. Six were suitable for stools. And three made it into the photos shown here.
Turning bamboo shapes is easy. What was tricky was making the legs of the stool strong enough to support a modern American and laying out the “nodes” of the “bamboo” so the hardware pierce the nodes and everything looked proportionally correct.
I tried several layouts that used two and three nodes. I thought I liked the more complex turning, but then I switched to the simpler turning to assemble the stool.
Whenever I build prototypes, I try to knock out as many variants as possible without fussing over the surface finish. This stool is no exception. These stools are not as finely finished as a stool I’d sell, but I can get a feel for the curves and the overall form by knocking out a leg every 10 minutes.
OK, I have to get on a plane in 10 minutes. So further prototypes will have to wait. These are about 70-percent there.
— Christopher Schwarz
