More Chair Seats

Any idiot can handle a crisis, it's day to day living that wears you out

Anton Chekov

It's always difficult, very difficult to predict what chairs will sell.   I like Windsors and while they will always be my favorites, I remember thinking as I was loading for the last show, wow, that's a lot of black chairs.  I like milk paint and the different colors and effects you can achieve with it.  That having been said, I think I should add some different styles with a clear finish to my line of chairs.  Maybe something more "machine" based than all hand tools.  Again, I like using hand tools but classic Windsors may not fit every taste, budget or house.  Long story short, I'm trying to add some chairs that are maybe less expensive and ones that can be easily built in batches of 4 or 6 or more.

Its important when doing batch runs that the machines ( table saw, jointer, bandsaw etc..) all be set up very carefully and all the pieces all be exactly the same size.  If you start adding variances to the pieces, all economy of scale is lost.

Another thing I decided was that obviously the seats cannot be hand carved.  So for this chair design I decided to make a form and then vacuum press the 1/8" pieces to the contour I wanted.  What would be ideal is if the local veneer mill would sell me full size 4x8 sheets of 3/16" veneer.  Then, no glue seams and I could run the seat grain left to right, which would match the grain in the back pieces.  But until I look into that, I simply re sawed some pieces, maple in this case, to a strong 1/8" and drum sanded them and glued them up using my press.  I got my bags and pipe seals and the press seen below from Veneer Supplies.  The vacuum press works great and all you need is a compressor.  Best part is there's a valve that keeps the vacuum constant at about -28 hg.  I used a hand pump one before but it would always lose the vacuum.

Below you can see the chair prototype, a pretty simple side chair.  I hope it works to be a comfortable and visually interesting chair.  I further hope it doesn't look a chair you got at a garage sale for 20 bucks.  Time will tell.

Here is the prototype with the pressed seat.  The seat came out plenty strong even though it's only 1/2" thick.

The legs are going to be bent lamination as well.  I actually had to steam them first, then bend them, then let them dry some, and then I did another vacuum press but more on that later.