Campaign Furniture Camp Stool Question

Re: Campaign Furniture Camp Stool Question

Gary Smyth

No matter how strong your Hickory is, why are you considering making the legs less than 1 1/4"? 1 1/4" is reasonably small diameter. If it will support the 225 lbs. (probably more if it is hickory) then go with it without reduction. Stop the mental anguish and go with what you have read works. OR you can reduce the diameter and risk the whole project to save a few bucks. To say nothing of destroying the proportion "look" of the seat.. As a comparison, Shaker chair furniture legs are typically 1 1/4" diameter. However, Campaign furniture chair legs I've seen are turned larger than 1 1/4" and connected by brass screw in studs. I have seen camp tables that have thinner diameter legs, but not seats.

I'd dump Schwartz in favor of Nicolas Brawer and his book "British Campaign Furniture". It's a much better source, for the real thing.

Hickory

Ellis Walentine

As you noted, William, hickory is extremely tough. While I can't tell you the minimum diameter that will meet your criteria in this stool, I can suggest that it will likely be smaller than mahogany or commonly available domestic species. For a while, I was making Japanese fighting sticks, or "jo sticks," with a friend of mine who has a black belt in aikido. In Japan, these are traditionally made of a species of red oak, but my friend wanted something tougher than oak, because of the failure mode and possible danger to the fighters. While oak and many other species often actually break in two upon impact, hickory will flex to the breaking point and then bend over in a tangle of splinters, without separating. Our sticks were 1" in diameter, and, anecdotally, I couldn't imagine a 250-lb person breaking them if they were used in your camp stool. My hunch is that they would flex before they broke. Sadly, I can't guarantee this, but you might want to try the 1" diameter and do whatever torture testing you need to assure yourself.

Another note, typically there is a safety factor built into anything engineered for human support, e.g., chairs, ladders, etc.. This may vary a lot depending on the margin of safety you're after, but it is always greater than 1.0x the design load. I always over-designed things, and I never had anything fail in normal use. You might want to do the same with these stools.

Hope this helps.

Ellis

Re: Campaign Furniture Camp Stool Question

Keith Newton

That is a lot of stones to be loading onto those stools. While switching to Hickory should add at least 30% greater strength, Im not sure I would want to use a round leg instead of rectangular in section, at least at the pivot point. The wider face to face contact area could really take some of the stress off any torsion from the activity above, which would all be between the hardware inside the round hole for the round section.

Shortly after I finished the Sunroom on the back of our cabin, I ran across some neat folding moon chairs and a rocker that I really liked at a outdoor store, so I bought two of the first and one of the rockers. When I bought them, the label said maximum weight limit of something like 225#, which I had forgotten about since none of us were that heavy. Then we got some new neighbors, father and son, both of which were over 300#. The first time they visited, dad broke the rocker by trying to spin around without getting up, and not long after that, the son plopped down into one of the moon chairs and ripped a seam.

The reason for sharing that, is that once it's made and away, you have no control over how many stones are dropped onto it.

If you went with a rectangular section, you. could lighten it by tapering towards the ends, or routing out to make essentially a I-beam, so you had more fibers spread apart, but light in the middle, but that might not look like you were wanting.

Jeez, Book recommendation too much.

Gary Smyth

Earlier I recommended Brawer British Campaign Furniture. Today I checked and the going price from several booksellers (if they even have one) is over $300. If you want a copy get to an interlibrary loan. I noticed that Amazon advertised $41 but even they can't get copies, even used, for anywhere near that price. I didn't know the price earlier. I apologize for perhaps leading you on a bad book search.