Jeff's Guitar Stool + Guitar Stand

Jun 15, 2025

In early April of 2021 I went sailing with a friend. I had a blast and since then have started sailing (during the season) about two times a week. Sailing is always a fun time, but I have a few good anecdotes.

I went sailing with Jeff (who I made this stool for!) and a few other friends. At some point I slipped and one of my legs was in the water. My friend with the boat said, “help Frew!” but before anyone could help I was back on the boat. Jeff later guiltily said, “when Frew was falling in the water that’s when I realized, I’m having a good time.”

Another time we were sailing with some folks who’d never been sailing before. We were launching the spinnaker (a stretchy, typically colorful sail that is used to go fast while sailing with the wind.) Literally every other story here is with spinnaker launch mishaps, and these are just the top few. Launching spinnakers is always a fun time. Anyway, somehow we launched the spinnaker such that it got stretched across the back of the main sail. The boom (the horizontal pole the main sail is mounted to) punctured right through the spinnaker. Oops.

A relatively common mistake when launching the spinnaker is for it to end up in the water. When that happens to us we call that shrimping. Normally it’s a hassle and slows you down and you need to use a lot of strength to get it out of the water. Once when we were sailing with newbies the spinnaker also somehow got caught on the rudder. We probably could have just pulled it up but I was worried it would have created a huge tear, so I carefully got it out with a pretty small (quarter sized?) hole.

My favorite story is recent: from the Wednesday before this post was authored. When you are pulling on a rope, if it’s heavily loaded (like something heavy is on the other side, or wind is pulling it, or whatever) you call pull perpendicularly to where the rope is running, so instead of pulling directly against the load, you pull diagonally. This gives you more mechanical advantage.

I’d internalized this as a universal rule: pull perpendicular. One of our regular sailors was out on Wednesday so I took her job of launching the spinnaker. When it came time to pull the spinnaker halyard (halyards allow you to raise a sail) I followed this rule. I pulled as hard and as fast as I could and immediately… fell backwards into the ocean. Thankfully I held onto the halyard and was able to pull myself back onto the boat. It was so fun.

Most of the sailing we have done in the past couple of years has been in the context of racing. When you race you have a way to focus your skills and understand if you are doing better or worse…

I’ve completed my first commission (I guess maybe it’s not complete till Jeff has it…) as planned about six months ago. Before reflecting on it, take it in:

New Stuff

This is the first stool I’ve made. This design is new to me (as far as I know it’s new to the world.) This was the first piece I made with box stretchers (stretchers going in a square between each adjacent pair of legs.)

This was the first time I used leather in a design. And obviously it’s the first time I attached leather (upholstery tacks) and treated it (mutton tallow.)

Near Mistakes

There were a couple mistakes I made while designing and building this chair that I was able to address to my satisfaction.

I put a stretcher in the way of Jeff’s foot when he used the stool. Thankfully we checked that the stool worked for him before I glued everything together, and we decided to just leave out that stretcher. I plugged the holes with black walnut blanks. That stretcher was unimportant anyway, since there was another stretcher (the footrest) below it.

Note the black walnut plug. There was a stretcher here.

One of the holes I bored for the posts that the guitar would rest on was at the wrong angle, instead of fifteen degrees off horizontal, it was almost perfectly level. This is a huge difference. You can usually get away with a degree, maybe 2 off the planned angle, but not this much. I used a file to correct the hole. I’ve done this before, but only with stretchers. With a stretcher you are anchoring the piece on both sides, so you can be pretty confident that once wedged it’ll be fine. I was unsure that would work with a post that is only anchored in the one place, but I made sure to use my biggest wedge and was prepared to adjust it and reinforce it with a hickory dowel if I did end up adjusting it. Thankfully I didn’t have to and the wedging perfectly corrected the angle.

You can see that the hole is not round, but oblong.

Other Minor Mistakes

One of the rear legs is a little wonky. I don’t find it obvious, but it forced me to make the posts for the guitar slightly different lengths, which is conspicuous. On a chair this would be even more subtle, because the shorter legs would amplify the incorrect angle less.

The legs opposite from the ones closest to the camera are parallel to the grain of the bench. You can see that the leg to the right (finger pointing at it) is not aligned with it’s mate. You can also see that the post on the right is shorter to the post on the left.

A couple of the tenons were too short. Instead of the tenons being flush, they are recessed, leaving an unsightly hole in the leg. They are plenty strong, just a place where the piece is not as smooth as I’d like it to be.

The wedges that I made for the tenons were not the perfect widths for their respective mortises. This means that there are very small (like 1/8” at the most) gaps on the side of the wedge. It doesn’t look too bad, but when you touch it with your fingers it feels “not smooth.”

I am not happy with the taper of the legs. I wanted it to be more dramatic, but because the legs are so long it’s too subtle. If I made it again, I’d make the taper smaller at the top and even bigger at the bottom, though I would need to do some strength tests.

The seat shape works, but it just doesn’t cry out to me as beautiful. I wanted to find a way to make the rear less weird, but all of the options I looked at were somehow worse than what we ended up with. It is better than what we started with (which was even longer and looked too much like a Xenomorph to me) at least.

Room for Improvement

The following are not mistakes, but changes I’d consider if I made this again.

The rear stretcher is about 1/3rd from the top. I did this to make absolutely sure that the guitar’s body wouldn’t touch the stretcher. Instead I’d the stretcher should be lower, likely 1/3rd from the bottom, and if there’s a chance that the guitar touches it I’d just wrap the stretcher with leather. The reason for this is that there is some slight flex at the bottom of the legs without a low stretcher. When placing the guitar on the posts there’s a subtle flex. It’s fine, it’s strong enough, but a lower stretcher would be better.

The footrest is exposed to grime in a way that most other parts are not. I used hickory for the footrest, but I think some other wood (white oak?) stained dark and finished with something hardcore like wipe on poly or maybe shellac would have been better. I have done zero research on how to prevent grinding dirt into wood, but I think it would be worth digging into for another piece with a footrest.

I’d like to explore leatherwork more. I didn’t love the leatherwork, but the outcome is ok and I think it could be even better if I were better at stretching the leather over the wood. Practice!

I originally planned to make the guitar posts have an interesting taper, but that went out of the window when we added leather to the posts. I feel like the posts are a little uninspired, mere cylinders with leather on them. I don’t know how yet, but they could definitely be more beautiful.

This was the first time I took a commission. Working with Jeff to come up with the design was fun and definitely a learning experience. Communicating, even with pictures, was at times confusing to both of us. Sharing orthographic drawings, even to scale, is insufficient to get clarity for most people. Were I to do it again I might try to make a scale piece to get agreement on dimensions, but unless he could sit on it I still wouldn’t have been able to verify the ergonomics.

Commission work, like racing while sailing, is a way for me to improve my skills in a way that I may not improve otherwise. It forces me to learn things I may either not be interested in or maybe just naturally avoid without some external factor (the customer) forcing me to attempt.

But also: it’s father’s day today. My dad was an avid sailor. When I was small my dad had his own sailboat (a Hunter 23) along with a motorboat and a houseboat. At some point times got tough and he had to get rid of one. He wanted to get rid of the houseboat but I begged him to keep it, so he sold the sailboat.

Dad died in 2019; I never got to talk to him about the fun of sailing as someone who was actively sailing. We never discussed launching a spinnaker, or manning the jib, or even the mindless work of getting the boat ready or packing it back up. We never discussed woodworking; making tools, chairs, or tables.