This plan can help you create a beautiful and practical stool named the Shogun stool, because stools of similar shape and construction have been often seen in Japan throughout history. 

Shogun stool is very unique and practical piece of wooden furniture that can be carried around with us, and also can be placed in almost any area in our home.

 

Shogun stool plan
Project type
Project difficulty
Simple, requires experience and precision (difficult woodworking joints)
Skill level
for advanced beginners
for DIY enthusiasts
Level of workshop equipment
Basic hand toools
Basic power tools
Applied woodworking joints
Dowels
Mortise and tenon joint
Dimensions

Height 469mm (18.46in); Seat 400mm (15.75'') x D 330mm (13'')

 

You can see what it looks like in the picture, and the plan contains all the necessary dimensions and drawings for the making of the stool. In our plan, it is suggested to make the seat from two types of wood, which makes the stool look more attractive and interesting due to the difference in wood texture. This, however, is not a common practice when it comes to such stools since their value is rather more practical than decorative.

Stools like this are a very practical piece of furniture because they are easily portable and practical to use while doing certain kinds of housework. We recommend that you make a few pieces and place them around the house and in the yard to always be at your fingertips. In the drawings you can see that we used the Axle part (Part 5), which you can use but you don't necessarily have to. If you carefully make the stool from high quality wood, the use of this part becomes unnecessary. To make your stool as durable as possible, make it from high quality hardwood. You won’t need much wood, and the stool will look nice and serve you well for decades. The design of this type of stool can vary in many ways, which you can see  on the Internet when you type ’Japanese stool’ into the search engine. The seat of the stool in our plan is made by gluing together 6 pieces of the same shape, and there are mortises for gluing stool legs. You can choose your seat to have either a concave shape to make it more comfortable (which is what we did), or it can be flat.

 

Exploded view and parts list
Shogun stool - Parts list
Assembly drawing
Shogun stool - Assembly drawing

 

The stool you can make according to this plan is not intended for heavy weight people. If you need to strengthen the stool, you can do this by adding the central crossbar part (central rail or central stretcher) that interconnects the parts of the crossbar (Parts 6). By introducing this change to the construction and increasing the dimensions of the construction, you will obtain a chair that will support higher weight limits.

 

Download project in PDF file format
Download project (high resolution images)

Submitted by Ceh Jan