Restoration of a primitive piece of furniture

               This little foot stool has been in my family 
                          for as long as I can remember.  
It is made of what appears to be a slab of oak that was shaped with an axe or adze.
With legs that were shaped with a spoke shave, a very crudely made piece.   I am only able to guess at the age of it, probably somewhere around a hundred years old if not older.

It has had a broken leg since I was a kid, my dad fixed it with liberal amounts of glue, but it truly needed more than that for a repair. When that repair failed, I threw it in a box and have carted it around with me for the past thirty years.  I recently uncovered it from a box in the basement and thought it was time to do something, either throw it out or fix it right.

Time for deconstruction.
Fortunately old furniture comes apart easily for the most part, joints shrink with age and older glues don't have the holding power of todays modern adhesives.  The legs came out with a little hammering with a wooden dowel.  I measured the legs and took notes and photos.  I thought I would only have to replace the broken leg, but when I got the legs out, there was extensive damage from powder post beetles that were attracted to the glue in the joints and they had eaten into the legs making them to weak to reuse.

Roughing out the new legs on the lathe

Using a spoke shave to shape the legs and reproduce the original finish

The original legs were made from rough lumber and completely shaped using draw shaves.  I used the lathe to rough out the shape and then final shaped everything with hand tools, to reproduce the original feel of the wood.

Fitting the new legs in the old holes

The legs are held in place with a tapered spline

Legs installed with spines ready to be trimmed down

New legs stained and ready for varnish
This project brought back a lot of great childhood memories, sitting on  it next to the fireplace on winter days warming up after sledding or hunting.  My dad used it as a foot rest to his rocking chair, where he would smoke his pipe and read next to the fire.
Now we will enjoy the stool next to our fireplace.