Tripod Design

Here I’ve got two 5-gallon buckets. One we’re going to use to cast the base and the other one I’m going to use to cast the lid. I’m going to cut the lid off so that I’ve got this top section saved. For both the lid and the stool base, we’ve gone ahead and cut, on a bandsaw, two rings out of ¾-inch melamine. The purpose of these rings is twofold. One, they’re going to create a flat, smooth, controlled surface for us to apply our D-FRC to. But they also serve the purpose of forming a perfect circle out of this bucket. What we want to do is use this collar - press it down here - to actually control and make sure that, at the top, it makes a perfect circle. For the base we’re going to do the same thing with one exception. I’ve actually glued a couple knockouts - these are little rubber knockouts. If they look familiar it’s because they’re basically a large, rubber bouncy ball that we’ve cut on a bandsaw and glued to this ring that we’re then going to place into the surface, or into the top, of this ring. Pull this back up tight.

And there you go. Easy to demold. Easy to assemble. The whole objective here is to use minimal materials and something that’s readily available like a 5-gallon bucket.

See how to cast the tripod stool.

I’m going to start by pouring the material while it’s still pretty wet into the base of the top form and also into the base of the base form. This is a little runny, so we’re going to make a mess. I’m going to lightly vibrate this by tamping it on the table. And what that’s going to do is just make sure that I have very few air bubbles on the top here when I go to demold it.

Let’s slide that off to the side here for a minute and let it set up while I go ahead and pour a little bit of material in the bottom here, to do the same thing.

Now, I’ve mixed up in this bucket a full 50 pounds of casting blend. And I just want to make a note here that we probably won’t use all 50 pounds. This is still pretty wet, so I’m not going to be able to lay up very much of this material. But I am going to go ahead and just kind of paint the surface all the way around, by pressing the material in, and kind of smearing it around the surface just to get a thin layer. Okay, so this is still a little on the wet side. What I’m going to do is take a break, going to let my casting blend that I’ve mixed here sit in the bucket for about 10 minutes. What that’ll do is give this a lot more body so I can start working it up on a on a vertical surface. And that amount of time will allow what I’ve poured in the base to set as well, which will then allow me to tip and move and turn this bucket around while I’m actually casting with the casting blend.

So we’ve waited about 10 minutes and it looks like our mix has set up enough. It’s not runny anymore. It looks like it’ll actually hold its shape on a vertical application. So I’m going to ahead and continue filling this mold. Instead of actually doing this with it laying down, it’s a lot easier for me if I just stand the mold up here a little bit, press the material in, go ahead and turn it, grab a little more, and there we go. That’s the lid to the stool, here. And I’m going to set this off to the side to cure. Then I’m going to bring the bucket over and I’m going to do the same thing where I’m going to apply the material with the bucket laying down. Looks good.

Watch how the tripod stool is removed from the mold.

Let’s move on to the lid. Now I’m ready to take the lid off of the base. And this is going to get a little loud cause we’re going to basically bang the base onto our table, forcing this to slide off. Okay. There we go.

Now that we’ve got the base removed from the bottom of the lid, we’re going to flip the lid over and. just using our thumbs, going to force the lid out of the bucket. Got that free. Last thing we want to do is remove the wood rim from our lid.

The details for this tripod stool are available online.