Building a 3-legged stoolA 3-legged stool is an interesting project because it's a bit of a joinery challenge, usually done with hand tools. I'm using the pantorouter to make the stool, which makes cutting the joints much quicker, but there is still the challenge of the geometry and tool set-up.
That said, cutting vertically like that means having to mount the piece vertically and not being able to use nice clamps on the table (they'd get in the way), and the set-up is more difficult, So if you have a horizontal template for your pantorouter (which you should already have if you have the metal pantorouter), just use the horizontal template for most of the joinery.
Except I cut that bevel in the wrong direction, so I have a mirror image of what I have in the plans. Rather than cut new pieces, I decided to just make the stretcher assembly go counter-clockwise instead of clockwise. Afterwards I changed the plans to reflect what I actually built, so if you are using my plans (without making a similar mistake), the steps in the pictures and video will be correct.
This tenon needs to be cut with the tenon oriented vertically on the table. The table is tilted by the angle that the legs are tilted, and the workpiece is placed on the table at the angle of the bevel on the ends. I had to switch to a bigger bevel gauge to be able to set it from the far edge. Note that I added an extra "stop" on the near side of the workpiece. Cutting tenons can make for large sideways forces, which can cause the workpiece to slip on the smooth pantorouter table. The dust hood brush, in combination with a vacuum hooked up to the dust hood, is surprisingly effective at gathering the chips, with only a few escaping. It makes it harder to see the work though, so I end up looking at the template to make sure I make a final pass making full contact all the way around.
The tenon is in fact square to the top and bottom, but the end-face of the wood is not quite rectangular (it's a parallelogram) due to the compound miter, which is why the tenon isn't parallel to the side.
I still needed to cut some round tenons in the ends of the legs. Given the thickness of the legs and the angle, the largest I could make these tenons was 1 1/8" (27.5 mm)
With a 1/2" (12.7 mm) router bit, I need to sweep a circle of 41.3 mm in diameter to leave a 28.58 mm tenon. I need to sweep a circle twice that diameter with the follower because the pantograph reduces to one half, so that's 82.6 mm at the follower. With a 22 mm bearing on the follower, I need a 60.6 mm diameter template to get that circle of 82.6 mm. In the video, I erroneusly converted 1 1/8" to 27.5 mm, so my template was a bit too small. But I made the inital cut with the bearing on the largest part of the conical template, and it fit perfectly, so left it that that without re-checking at the time.
I made it slightly conical so that I could fine-adjust the size of the tenon by how far back I ran the follower bearing against it.
Then checking the fit against a 1 1/8" hole while it's still clamped in place, so I could re-trim it slightly smaller if needed.
After gluing most of them together, I face jointed them on my 12" jointer, then ran it through the thickness planer.
I put some clamps on the ends to ensure that the joint lined up as I glued and clamped it. It ended up close enough that sanding was sufficient to make the joint perfectly smooth.
I didn't use any clamps because the shape is rather awkward to work with, though a band clamp around the legs could have been handy. I have a band clamp, but it wasn't worth digging it out for this.
I marked it on the top and drilled from the top, then inserted from the bottom. Had the legs not been an equilateral triangle, I would have had to mark it on the bottom to make sure the triangle matches.
But one thing you can't get on a homemade pantorouter has is the dust hood, which is surprisingly effective at catching the chips. The metal pantorouter is not cheap, but if you want to get $100 off one you can go to: www.pantorouter.com and use discount code MW3
Some months after I published this video, Yiyong Leng wrote to me: After watching the video of you making a three-legged stool with PantoRouter, I decided to make a similar one using the traditional Chinese construction method, because this three-legged joint is the most traditional type of Chinese stool. I've noticed that no one on youtube has ever uploaded a video of this kind of three-legged stool being made by the traditional way, so I'm sending you my video of making it. Building a traditional Chinese three-legged stool This is a video in Chinese, but I think it's easy to understand. I hope you like it!
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() tenon joints
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