Lining Up Posts

A divorce is like an amputation: you survive it, but there's less of you

Margaret Atwood



I knew it had been awhile since I had last posted and but April 17? Wow. See above quote.   Anyway, I have a student coming tomorrow and it's high time to get back at it. 

This post is about how I line up and ream the arm posts.  I'm sure there are other ways but this is how I do it.  If you've followed this blog at all you know I use sightlines and a square and a reamer from Elia Bizzari to obtain a 6 degree hole. Just be careful not to over-ream and all is good.   But in order to get the ends to land at exactly the same place, I use winding sticks.

You can see here the side view. These arms are spot on.  And the process is dead simple.  I use the back of a yardstick painted green and a length of aluminum angle.  The yard stick butts against the back of the posts and the aluminum angle rests over the ends of the arms.  Then just sight down and you can see how the posts relate to each other.

This one is pretty much spot on.   One caveat...this does not show you slope ( the angle left and right relative to the seat ) so be careful not to get tunnel vision. In other words, keep checking the reamer tip against the square.  But this is a eazy-peezy way to have both the post land at exactly the same spot.

Below you can see my fancy winding sticks.  I also use this same method when reaming the back posts on my rockers.  Works great there too because the angle is really irrelevant ( within reason). Symmetry is much more important.

For those of you who merely read my blog for the literary wit, winding sticks ( like wind up for a pitch ) are use to flatten wood and show relations across distances.  Think of it this way...if you had a black stick and a white stick, both strait and flat.  And you placed them at either end of a table that was also flat. And you peered ( sited) from end to end across the table you would see a white line and a black line parallel to each other.  This would tell you that the table was flat.  Now imagine one end of one stick you placed three quarters under. When you sighed down the table, the sticks would be "out of wind".  Now imagine that there were no quarters but the sticks were not parallel.  This would tell you that the table was not flat.