Woodworking Project Development: Stool Samples

You folks have seen a lot of the projects that we've developed here at WWGOA. And that's what I want to talk about today is what we do in order to develop those projects for you. So as a specific reference, I want to talk about these stools that somebody might build for their shop or for their house. And, you know, these don't just come out of thin air. Stools, in fact, develop from somewhere. A lot of times when you're developing a project, you don't want to go right to a full-size sample of the project. You want to start with a smaller prototype. And in fact, that's what I did here. I made some smaller stools. They were really just stool samples. And in order to make sure that everything was okay, I had a number of people come in, check 'em out, make sure that the stools look just right. And in fact, they were big enough that people could sit on them and make sure that the stools felt okay when they were sitting on the stool. Eventually, as I worked on this project, a number of people came and checked out my stool samples and by sitting on them and doing a variety of other things, I finally knew that my stool samples were okay and I could move on and start to work on a full-size stool. So I got to the point just about where I am here, where I got my full-size stools out. People came back and they looked at 'em for me. They made sure that when they were here, sitting on them, my stools felt okay under their butt. And that's part of how this process goes. In this case, as I worked on my stools, I got help from other people to make sure that my stools were okay. Once those other people provided some advice about my stools, then I knew that I could move on and that I was going to have a good looking stool at the end of the day. So, that's the kind of advice I want to give you on project development. Start with small pieces, like I did here, my stool samples. Once your small pieces, your stool samples are okay, you can move on to a bigger version of it. Have other people come check 'em out and maybe you'll be lucky like me. And at the end of the day you'll have some great stools in the shop.