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.

Chair Seat

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

 Used to be I would leave the sightlines and the different scribblings that comprise a chair on the bottom.  Never really gave it much thought. No one ever saw it and it wasn't painted so what's the big deal.  But lately, not really sure why, but this struck me as something of a short cut...lazy maybe.  So I have been planing the bottoms just before assembly.

Also I now use a clean rag when I wipe the finish on the bottom of the seat.  What happens is by the time you get around to wiping the oil the milk paint has been sanded three or more times, so a lot of color gets transferred to the seat in the oil.  I know this is being very persnickety but it bugs me.  I like to flip the chair over and see a bright, clean surface.

Here are some different shots of a seat I recently made for a rocker.  I actually timed myself and came in at just over an hour, not bad.

This is a nice curl of end grain.  The above drawknife is made by, I think, Ray Larson. I takes a wicked edge but due to the very low angle is really only good for pine and butternut.  But even so, a small price to pay for a tool that cuts like this one. 

And believe it or not this girl starts 3rd grade tomorrow...tempus fugit.  

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. 

A Different Way to Bend

"There's no room in here!"

Wayne Burby

The quote is from a great old guy I used to work with who was always griping at the mill that there wasn't any room.  He was a funny, sweet guy and honestly he was right; often times there wasn't enough room.  His saying has sorta turned into my own joke when I find myself tripping over stuff or looking for too long for things that I JUST PUT RIGHT THERE!!!

I recently went on a cleaning spree and tossed pieces of wood and took stuff to the salvation army in order to have a common area where all my patterns, papers and forms can go in a somewhat logical way. 

The picture above shows a bench I'm building for a client and while I have wanted to build this for awhile, the prospect of 14 bending forms and the subsequent 28 clamps was a bit much, but the book also had this board that had holes drilled in and pegs, sorta like my own little Plinko board. 

Here's a better shot below.  The turned and steamed pieces, Maple in this case, are threaded thru the pegs and thus held in the right bend for a few day in the kiln, then taken out done.  The best part is the they can be stacked two high, seven wide so I can do all 14 on this one 2x16x 20 piece!

And here's the first one steamed and bent.  The thin piece of wood prevent denting.  I finish turned the tenons top and bottom before steaming and while I seriously doubt the sizes to hold, it would sure be nice if they did.  I turn my tenons on the lathe but once they are bent I can't so I'd have to size them by hand.  Not a huge deal but much faster on the lathe.

Another thing I've recently tried and it works is doubling the slats for my rockers and then doubling them again between the clamps.  I used to do these one at a time, and man dragging those clamps around was a pain.  But now I can do four with just two clamps.  The Irwin clamp pulls the middle together, and the K-bodies finish the clamp and hold it in place.  So for one chair I went from seven forms and 14 clamps to 4 forms and 4 clamps. 

Sadly Wayne isn't around anymore, but I did laugh to myself thinking of Wayne and his comments about room.  I think he would approve.

Fast Logs

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.” 
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Hopefully my first and last post ever using my phone but I dropped and broke my laptop and got another one I hate so until I get a new one..guess I'm stuck with this. And I have have no idea how to turn off the underline.   At any rate, I picked up some gorgeous logs today.  They had a lot of logs in their yard today so I picked a good day.

As I said they had a lot of logs to chose from so I got a couple of really nice ones.  Just a few thoughts on what I look for.

I like watching Roy Underhill and he said something awhile back something  that I have been thinking about and I have determined he is right.   I used to buy fast growing ash logs with wide growth rings because they are simply easier to work with a drawknife, that is to say the lines are easier to see and follow.  I never really thought too much about it being stronger. The common folk lore is that slow growing trees are stronger.

Well, Roy's claim is dead on. Fast growing ring porous wood is stronger. The growth bands seen in a fast growing tree have much more solid wood and less honeycomb late wood..as a result there is more solid wood and less honey comb wood structure.  While slow growing wood with more rings per inch may be lighter, for a chair this is exactly what you don't want.   You want, and I only buy fast growing ash with wide growth rings.

Otherwise, see below.  This was also the result of too many chairs at once and pieces getting mixed up, but honestly the post broke with not much effort. Lesson learned. Two actually...buy fast growing logs and label better.

Now if I could turn the underline off...