You're Not Getting Any Younger: Chairs

Sunday, January 26, 2020

Chairs

I've been meaning to post this for a while now. Over the summer, I made some dining room chairs to go with our table. Here are some photos of the process.

The seat backs are cherry bent laminations. I resawed a board into flitches about 1/8" thick, and glued them back together by clamping them to a jig of the right curvature.

I machined the back spindles from ash, and the legs from hard maple. Both of these I did on the metal lathes at school. I offset the tailstock so that it was closer than the chuck. So as the tool moved in horizontally, it cut the taper automatically.

Cutting the taper this way was way easier and faster than trying to do it on a wood lathe. And the results were very consistent.

After the round stuff was machined, I cut slots in the ends, to receive wedges later.

The seats are cherry too. This shows all six seats, and I've just finished the process of cutting slots spaced about an inch apart, and cut to the right depth. Notice the paper template glued to the front left seat blank. I set the depth of the skil saw using this template.

Six kits, including seats, back rests, spindles, and legs.

I needed to drill holes for the spindles in the seat backs, but each hole had to be at a different angle, because the rails fan out. Here I've marked all those angles, and I tilted the drill press table accordingly.

All holes for the spindles drilled.

I used the cutter on the right with an angle grinder to rough carve the seats down to near the bottoms of the grooves. Then I used the sander to get closer, and smooth out some roughness. Then I used a palm sander to finish up and make it all smooth.

I used the bandsaw to cut the bevels on the seats.

A finished seat, before assembly.

I used a forstner bit to cut the mortises for the legs. I tilted the table on the drill press, and also had a jig with an angle too, to get the compound angle right.