Rocker Blade Jig

 

If you can't change it, you got to stand it

Ennis Delmar, BrokeBack Mountain, Annie Proulx

So I come from a casework background and as such I try to use that knowledge and those tools to simplify or at least speed up certain aspects of chair making. 

A good example is how I make my rocker blades. Years ago I made this jig to cut some large circles out of plywood for some project and I altered the dimensions to work with cutting the rocker blades. 

The base for the jig is this 12 by 52 inch piece of ¾ plywood.  Its fastened to the bandsaw table with a couple bolts drilled thru the table. 

The hole that the rocker pin goes in is 46 inches from the blade. As you have probably guessed the bottom of the blade is a section of a circle which seems to work fine and 46 does give a nice steady rocking motion.  

 

I built this one with looks like mostly pocket screws but anything will work provided the bottom stays flat and free from obstructions.  

Below you can see the top side. Its just a big T shaped piece that measures 52 on both axis.  The pin hole is 46 away from the blade and a couple toggle clamps hold it firmly in place. I figure out the angle of the front legs where they meet the floor (which is the same angle as the stretcher) and set the bandsaw table to that angle.  Then clamp it in place and cut it. The typical size of the blank is ½ x 6 x 42 which seems to work well. Also please note that there is a left and right. 

Further note the blade pattern I use is from Pete Galberts rocker plan found in FWW. I use the same pattern on all my chairs the only difference is on smaller chairs I shorten the length a little.

Old Pictures

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. 

Frank Deford, Everyone's All American

So in the process of sprucing up my blog, I've been looking thru a lot of old pictures and these are some random ones that caught my eye.  It's been a long trip with lots of ups and downs. Yeah. Long trip so far.

Mr Dog...Forrest

Huge moose me and the girls saw coming back from daycare. Not 2 miles from my house in Presque Isle.

A couple Philadelphia Rockers and a contemporary rocker in yellow. Think I painted the contemporary rocker final coat black milk paint mixed with green...which would explain the yellow.

Top view of my Contemporary rocker

Back view of my Rod Back Contemporary rocker

Fan Back arm post showing how they are all wedged. White glue. Before I discovered hide glue

Rod back arm chair I built for my father. This chair was chosen out of a field of 12 to reside at The Connecticut Museum in Hartford. I told my dad about it and he asked, did they pay you for it? 

Sack Back, shadows

Corner of a cherry dresser I built for my daughter. Gorgeous cherry color. If you look closely you can see the divider is dovetailed in to the side of the carcass.

Sack Back bench I built for my old neighbor. If memory serves this is the first piece I used my own turnings on...vase and tulip turnings. Beautiful;l cherry seat.  Maple turnings and white ash spindles and arm and crest.  The legs don't have much splay...not sure why.  Oh I remember...it was going in a tight space a transition between the foyer and kitchen. 

A gorgeous hand smithed hold down from Alaska. He doesn't make them anymore.  

So this happened

Here's an interview the Bangor Daily did about me. I tried to talk about not only chairs but also the nature of art and craftsmanship. 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1103360949739817&id=100001977660888

Leveling a Rocker

I leave off, for I seek to hold the wind in a net

Sir Thomas Wyatt

This is a bench I built awhile back, sold to a professor and Harvard Medical School. Really have to build another one...the next one will be Tavern Green. I think. Anyway, this post will be about leveling a rocker side to side.

Unlike regular chairs, in which you level it left to right then measure the seat front and seat back, then trim the legs, rockers are, or rather can be, much harder to level.  Because the slot is cut with a router, the only real way to level the rocker left to right is to chop the bottom of the slot deeper with a chisel. This I have found is a tedious process.

So the last rocker, or one rocker anyway, I had a great idea.  What if I measured the leg length relative to the seat AFTER the legs were reamed and set in the chair.  That way, the shortest one, the shortest leg would become the baseline leg and the other legs could then be trimmed to this length on the lathe, and then the slots cut with a router.  Let me back up. The legs are trimmed in pairs, front to front, back to back.

So here you can see the difference in leg lengths after reaming and placing the legs in the seat. By using dividers, my large ones, I simply find the length of the shorter leg and then mark the longer one.

Then I turn the leg to length on the lathe with a parting tool, and viola the legs are all the same length. Well, the front two match and the back two match.  This means that once the rockers are placed in the slots, the chair will automatically be level left to right.  Ez-pz.  Below you can see the difference on the length.  Not a huge difference but enough to be a pain leveling, especially with maple as in this chair.

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you'd left open

John Barrymore

Well the holidays are done and now the business of winter is in full swing.  But much solace can be be taken from these two beautiful happy faces. It is a period of change so Elsa and Anna were happy to have a joyous Christmas.

And now to chairs. I love dividers. There I said it.  These two beauts are from Starrett...a 6" and 12" respectively. One thing I love about chair making is you are always learning something new. Sometimes it's something big, sometimes its a small tweak to a method that makes a small but nonetheless significant difference. And know that when I say a significant difference I really mean it made something easier.

And so today I came up with a wizz-banger. I've always loathed leveling a rocker. A non rocker is easy. Wedges, trace the difference, cut, done.  But rockers have routed slots and therefore the slots have to be traced and chopped which is a major pain. The problem lies in the inconsistency of reaming. Some legs simply get reamed too much despite my best efforts.

SO today I thought why not check the length of the legs AFTER they are reamed and seated. So I checked them with my handy dandy 12" divider and viola they were off as you can see below. Now admittedly it's not much but try chopping out end grain hard maple and you'll fast appreciate this small difference.

I marked out the difference and I was a simple matter to turn to the new length. I turn the legs to length anyway so a different mark is no big deal.

The pics above and below show the small difference. The one above ( these are both back legs. Do not compare front to back...only front to front, back to back ) the shortest leg is the base line and the longer one, below, is turned shorter.  I have yet to install the rockers but this does make a difference in the final balancing of the chair.

Steamed Rockers

Beauty is whatever gives joy

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Maybe a little persnickety but the gaps when I let in rockers are driving me nuts.  I didn't photo the gap that was there but suffice to say it was unacceptable.  The problem was that that I must have mis-reamed the legs, leaving the routed slots for the rockers non co-planer.  What to do....

I thought long and hard and decided to steam the rockers and let them into their slots and see what happened. I usually deal with gaps with wedges but the gaps were pretty significant and honestly I wondered if steaming would work..

As you can see the results were spot on. Really good contact between the rocker and the routed slots.  All gaps eliminated and the rockers fit perfectly.

Anyway, I'm happy with the results.

Time sinks

Deep sadness, overstruck by deeper strength

Union Officer describing Robt. E Lee at Appomattox Courthouse

After a rather disappointing last show, I decided that maybe I needed little more modern chair.  After all, not everyone lives in an old farmhouse.  So to that end I decided to come up with a modern chair that could be easily built in lots of 6 or 8.  I had designed a small side chair years ago for a potential client that never panned out so I decided to dust that off and make one up.  Above you can see the original quick and dirty prototype.  And below the side view.

I thought that a bent lamination would be the strongest way to make a bent back leg so I did that and broke the leg as I tried to glue it up. So I steamed more pieces and bent them, and then did up a bent lam.  Tick tock.

More views of the time consuming glue up.  I do have a vacuum bag that works great but still.  Its a messy time consuming process.

Below you can see exactly how far I got with this chair.  The seat and back are more bent laminations.   The back legs have to be fit with a plane because each back is different.  Each leg comes out a little different and has to be fitted. The seat pan has to be shaved to fit the rails.  Long process.

What I'm coming at with post is this.  As a professional chair maker I have to make every minute count.  I can't spend oodles of time on chairs or designs that I know will never pan out.  This chair will never look better than a $40 buck garage sale chair.  And I know that.  There comes a time in every design or build where you really have to think where is this going.  And where will it end?  What will the end product be?   Some designs are just dead ends. Time lost but lesson learned.

Some things you do are just dead ends...times sinks that will never go anywhere and you have to cut them loose or they will drag you down.

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.

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.