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I have to design and build a dozen dining room chairs, and I thought I would make a thread about it. I wanted to document the process anyway for future reference, and so here is a thread about building chairs-hope that gets you as excited as it does me! Please discuss and ask questions because questions always help me figure out why I’m doing the thing I’m doing and if that is the best way to do it. I have built 2 chairs before and fixed a whole lot of them, but never started from the ground up and had to figure out how to build a dozen of them reasonably economically. I imagine this thread is going to start with the design stuff and prototyping, and then involve making a bunch of jigs to make repeatable, interchangeable parts, and then move on to finishing and maybe some upholstery. Maybe throw a little furniture history in there. We’ll see how this goes. This is the picture of a chair we started with:  Built in the mid 18th century in Tidewater Virginia, probably near Fredericksburg or Tappahannock, for the Beverly family of Blandfield Plantation (still extant) who owned it for a good 200+ years until fairly recently. It’s handsome chair in a neat sort of transitional style common in 18th C America-it’s not quite Queen Anne but it has Queen Anne parts (cabriole legs) and not quite Georgian/Chippendale. It is definitely moving that direction though with the curved crest rail and carved/pierced backsplat. It’s like Chinese Chippendale and Queen Anne had a baby, but with a neat little trifid foot thrown in. I love it-3 furniture styles in 1, timidly trying out the hot new London fashion, but not quite ready to commit to it completely. Unfortunately, all that carving was going to be way too labor intensive, so we needed a simpler option. This is the next chair we liked:  Built in the mid/late 18th C (1775-ish) in Southside Virginia, likely Petersburg. This style was very popular at the time in SE Virginia and NE North Carolina, as we shall see. I really like it-it has a stark simplicity, but with some very graceful lines to it. From the seat up could almost be Shaker or even Art Deco/Nouveau. I don't like that it has a stretcher across the front-people put their feet on them (you can actually see how worn it is in the picture) and they tend to get broken, so we'll move it back a few inches and do more normal H-stretchers. So, I started drawing:  I was just working from that one image at this point, and I got a few things wrong, but overall it’s okay. It doesn’t quite have the motion of the other one, and I couldn’t quite figure out why until I did some more research and found this guy:  The rear legs splay out at a slight angle so the top of the chair is wider then the bottom which makes the curves look a lot bigger and dramatic than they really are. I've seen this a hundred times in old chairs, but never really thought about why it was done. This seriously complicates some of the joinery, but we’ll worry about that later. Back to the drawing board:  Alright, that’s really looking pretty good to me, but... In my research, I found these guys:   And I really liked the curved crest rail at the top. A little less severe than the straight one, and shows clearly the influence of Chinese furniture styles on English/American stuff:  So I drew the crest rail on one half with a sort of curve in it. I’ll probably mock it up in wood in both ways. That’s all for now-next time I’ll start cutting wood and mocking up a full size prototype to see how it looks and (more importantly) how it sits.
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Jun 19, 2020 01:55
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Sweet this is exciting! Ive been wanting to make a chair for a while, I want to play along from home.
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Jun 19, 2020 02:41
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I'm fuckin' here for this poo poo
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Jun 19, 2020 02:46
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That's a lotta chairs.
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Jun 19, 2020 11:13
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Following for reasons. I have never built a chair, but now I really want to....
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Jun 20, 2020 03:52
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:This is the next chair we liked: Look, if they didn't want me resting my feet on that bar then they wouldn't put it exactly where I can hook my heels on it so perfectly. Y'know, like you're doing. Super into this thread, hell yes.
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Jun 20, 2020 16:04
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Any idea what the largest measurement I'm going to need for one chair?
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Jun 20, 2020 19:45
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Any idea what the largest measurement I'm going to need for one chair? Is it a chair for goons or a chair for people?
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Jun 20, 2020 20:36
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Any idea what the largest measurement I'm going to need for one chair? Jaded Burnout posted:Is it a chair for goons or a chair for people? With stretchers and all mortise and tenoned with some big beefy corner blocks this should be pretty beefy? That is definitely a consideration though, and part of why chairs are hard. The forces applied to a chair are much different from a table, and because they are by nature mobile furniture, they lead a much tougher life than a desk or w/e. They get dragged around, leaned on, leaned back in, stood on, knocked over etc etc so it’s not just ‘can it support the weight of a big fat goon applied straight down’
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Jun 20, 2020 23:38
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I haven't had a chance to write it up and deal with the pictures, but I got a mockup mostly done. I also learned about Gantt charts from JB's house thread and am working on one for this project because lol nerd and it seems useful for laying out and breaking down the steps in this process. Part of my goal with this project is to make very detailed instructions for making not just a chair, but also the jigs to make a chair, so I am trying to get organized about it. Some stuff about the other two chairs I have built, and how they will contribute: Here is chair #1:  It’s a good chair, and very comfortable, but kind of big. We built a couple at my last job, and I made myself one out of extra parts. It will likely serve as a pattern for these chairs in part. I'm changing the dimensions and so that fucks with all the angles, but it's very useful to have a reference object around the shop. It's much stripped of detail to be a little more contemporary, but it is really based on a Queen Anne chair. The rear legs don't splay out like later chairs and it has a very nice curve to the back legs/splat that makes it very comfortable and follows the natural curves of the spine. We epoxied and screwed these together and they are very solid, but these new chairs will be mortise and tenoned together which makes construction considerably more complex. Here is chair #2  It’s a wing chair, and very comfortable, but not very practical for a dining chair. It was mostly mortise and tenoned together below the seat-the wings and stuff that are covered in upholstery are all kinds of bridle joints and glue and screws and poo poo. I built this off a set of patterns my old boss had so I didn’t design much, but it was complicated enough without having to design it.  I copied my own plans off those my mentor had, that he in turn got from his mentor who had taken the patterns from an antique chair he thought was particularly handsome and comfortable, so they’re like 50yr old plans taken from a now 200 yr old chair and I think that’s neat. This chair taught me that working from full size drawings/patterns is pretty necessary for building chairs. It's always easier to work out problems on paper, though there are still plenty of problems I can only seem to work out in wood in 3 dimensions, and it is extra useful on something like chair where nothing is square. With all the curves and angles, drawing at a smaller scale just isn't nearly as useful. It reminds me of the cover of this book, which is a great resource to have around. https://www.amazon.com/Cabinet-Maker-Upholsterers-Guide-George-Hepplewhite/dp/0486221830 Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Jun 24, 2020 |
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Jun 24, 2020 02:29
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That wing chair is amazing. You doing your own upholstery work or farming that out?
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Jun 25, 2020 00:35
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TheNothingNew posted:That wing chair is amazing. I wish I could do that upholstery! I farmed it out to a very good old school upholsterer. Working with him was actually neat-you need all these extra wood bits in there for pull throughs and to give the upholsterer something to staple too etc etc. For these chairs I intend to at least attempt my own upholstery. They are just simple slip seats, and it would be nice to be able to do those myself. I need to learn more about them-I know webbing is involved, and horsehair used to be, but I think polyfill gets used now?
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Jun 25, 2020 03:45
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:I wish I could do that upholstery! I farmed it out to a very good old school upholsterer. Working with him was actually neat-you need all these extra wood bits in there for pull throughs and to give the upholsterer something to staple too etc etc. Polyfill sounds right, but I am talking purely out of my rear end here. You're right though, a simple seat cover is almost a square, should be a good place to start. Just don't pick a fabric that has solid lines in it that you need to get parallel to the frame, maybe.
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Jun 26, 2020 03:54
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TheNothingNew posted:You're right though, a simple seat cover is almost a square, should be a good place to start. Just don't pick a fabric that has solid lines in it that you need to get parallel to the frame, maybe. Anyway, I started on the mockup and may have some time tmw to work on it some more. Here is a brief update: I usually start with the biggest parts first and then get the smaller stuff out of a board where I can. In this case it’s the rear legs, so I need a pattern for them. I drew the pattern next to the drawing I had already made-it’s basically the rear leg but in profile instead of head on.  Now we need to stick that to some plywood so it won’t wiggle around, so reach for the magical, irreplaceable, Super77  Some how I always get some of this poo poo on my arm hairs and it makes them feel really funny. Take to bandsaw, cut out pretty close:  Get out tiny spokeshaves, files, and hand planes to get it just right and fair all the curves. It’s much easier to take the time to get the pattern right than it is to fix a bunch of lumpy curves.  I love that tiny spokeshave and they don’t make them anymore   Looks like everything lines up and checks out. Now we need some wood. And I have sure got some wood.  Liriodendron tulipfera-Tulip Poplar, tulipwood (not to be confused with the pink and yellow rosewood species). Whitewood, popple, popular, whatever. It’s great wood! It’s cheap, easy to work, comes in big ole boards, isn’t too heavy and isn’t too hard! Unfortunately it is also a pretty unattractive green color. But it’s great for mocking stuff up or anything that gets painted. Anyway, lay out the pattern:  When I get around to the real chairs, I will need to pay more attention to how the wood grain runs through the legs as they are under a lot of stress and I will want to try and keep as much long grain running along the leg as possible. Finally time to saw some wood, and so to the bandsaw:  I ran one face on the jointer to get it flat, then planed the other side to get it to thickness (~1.75” in this case)  It seems dumb to cut these out twice, but it works better. I need to wait until the piece has been planed and jointed to make sure the sawn faces are perpindicular to the flat faces, and face joining and surfacing the whole huge board I sawed them out of would have been alot of work and the board might have wound up too thin then. Also, as the legs are cut out, they are gonna move around as the tension in the wood from drying etc. changes as it gets cut up. It would be best to let the parts rest a few days, before retracing the pattern and sawing to final shape but I'm in a hurry. All cleaned up.  I retrace the patten since it got planed off, and cut to the actual line as much as I could on the bandsaw. Then I used the jointer to clean up the straight parts where I could. Clamped them together in the vise and planed them to get the flat surfaces identical, because that is what matters. Nothing has to interact with any of the curved surfaces, so it’s okay if they aren’t exactly the same.  Stuck them against the drawing and marked a few reference lines on them. Always lay out matching parts together!  The legs are also shaped from the front too. Below the seat, the legs have a slight straight taper on the outside of the leg, and above the seat they taper a bit and then have a little curve sawed out. All the cutting is on the outside edge, so there’s a nice straight reference edge on the inside for all the joints and I don’t have to worry about getting all the tapers exactly the same.  From now on, there is a right leg and left leg leg, and hopefully I never mix them up! Back to the saw. I may make a jig to support these, but it worked fine to freehand them.  It’s not a huge amount of wood removed really.  That’s it for now. Getting the front legs and aprons all cut out and put together is next.
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Jul 3, 2020 03:08
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Fascinating thread, keep it coming
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Jul 3, 2020 12:51
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Love watching the process. Also those full scale drawings/plans just look great on their own.
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Jul 3, 2020 14:11
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Slugworth posted:Fascinating thread, keep it coming Yea this is my #1 read right now on the forums. Very good stuff. It reminds me if the old internet, when you could google how to make a chair and find someone with a site with stuff like this on it. And I mean that in the most complimentary way
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Jul 3, 2020 16:31
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Right when I was thinking upholstering those would be relatively easy, you reminded me that fabric moves and is impossible! Maybe like a chintzy print where you can't tell if its a little off would be better... Or cheat and do a solid color. Just so long as the weave isn't super obvious. Give it a run on your dummy chair, maybe. Fabric cutoffs aren't too expensive, you just need enough to cover one seat. Trial run chair is looking good so far. Kudos on having the patience to make a full dummy & get the kinks worked out.
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Jul 4, 2020 06:46
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Yea this is my #1 read right now on the forums. Very good stuff. It reminds me if the old internet, when you could google how to make a chair and find someone with a site with stuff like this on it. And I mean that in the most complimentary way TheNothingNew posted:Or cheat and do a solid color. Just so long as the weave isn't super obvious. I realized I'm probably gonna wind up making two dummies  This one is just screwed together and then I'll have to make another one to test all the joinery and stuff. Whatever-poplar is cheap and the more practice I get the better I guess.Alright so we have mostly been working from the front and side elevations on those back legs, but now we need to look at the plan drawing:  I sort of came up with this myself by looking at a few different chairs, including the cypress one I posted above. Seat height and seat depth are pretty standard because humans are the size they are. Both are around 17.5” The OAL width at the rear of the seat is ~16” and ~21” at the front. This is a little smaller than the cypress one, but that is a very generous chair and these are going around a tight table, so I shrunk it a little. I started with the two side rails. They get two angles cut on each piece. I think it’s about 3 degrees but I just used a bevel gauge to transfer from the drawing because numbers are dumb and hard.  I tilted the sawblade instead of using the miter gauge because I also need to rip the legs at the same angle. The rails are rectangles viewed from the side, but parallelograms viewed from the top so the front and back of the chair are parallel to each other. Next I milled the two front legs 1.75” square and ripped the outside, side edge of the two legs at the same angle I cut the side rails. I forgot to take pictures of that, but you can use your imagination. To lighten the look of the front legs, I ran a little chamfer on the inside on the jointer.  This visually just removes the inside corner so the leg looks less chunky. In my research, it seems like almost all of these chairs do have that chamfer on the front legs, and a good many also have it on the rear leg as well. It’s very common on Chippendale chairs too, but doesn’t seem to show up on earlier straight leg chairs-I guess tastes changed in favor of lighter, airier furniture over time. This is a great photo of a chair I really like that shows all the chamfers clearly:  Interestingly, I noticed that the rear stretcher is pegged from the inside of the chair through the chamfer. I guess it keeps the peg from showing from the rear of the chair, which is the angle a chair gets viewed from most often. The other stretchers are all pinned from the outside, and most of the other chairs I've looked at have the rear stretcher pegged from the outside too. Maybe I'm reading too much into this and need to take a break from looking at pictures of late 18th century chairs from SE Virginia And NE North Carolina..... The corner blocks aren’t very large either. Having spent a lot of time fixing broken chairs, I’m gonna make much beefier corner blocks because chairs with big corner blocks are much stronger. . Aaaaanyway, I cut the front rail out too. It’s square all around to it was easy. Upside-down half a chair screwed together.  Next comes the rear seat rail. This guy is a little complicated. It needs to be angled (3 degrees?) at each end to make the rear legs splay out, and it needs to be just the right length based on the ‘as-built’ chair, so I cut one end, screwed it to a leg, and did a dance with some clamps:  I was able to scribe the seat rail and do a little math to account for the thickness of the leg etc. and cut it to length. Went ahead and screwed the rear assembly together, and that let me scribe for the rear stretcher. More awkward clamp dances and…  It’s starting to look like a chair! Marked out some lines to chamfer the rear of the rear legs and clean them up. Should have done that before I screwed it all together.  The way the rear legs splay out makes the side rails overhang them. I’ll plane it off later and fare it all together. The bravest little spokeshave gets to help:  On to the crest rail. I’d gone back and forth over a straight or a curved crest rail, and settled on trying the curved on first. I plan on making a straight one just to see, but haven’t gotten there yet. Make a pattern.  French curve and spindle sander to the rescue. Don’t make patterns out of oak, it’s just what I had laying around. Trace the pattern (not shown), cut off the tops of the rear legs (not shown), cut out the crest rail (not shown), lay it up there and see how it looks:  Just like an 18th c. powdered wig (seriously a friend is a costume historian and I want to ask if anyone has done research into the silhouette of hairstyles vs. chair crest rails).  Pretty chunky, but we’re working on that. Saw it out again:  This curve should make it more comfortable and fit the curve of a human back better than it would straight across. Looking chairish  I did get the backsplat and shoe made and put it in so I do have a completed chair! Hopefully I’ll get a post done about that tmw.
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Jul 6, 2020 03:25
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Loving this thread. I've been a cabinet maker for most of my life, and I've repaired a few old chairs over the years. But making one from scratch is daunting, I'd do a dozen nice tables before I tried a chair. Prototyping in poplar is great, do the same thing for a lot of stuff. Also, I love the tiny spokeshave, I need to find one like that. Keep it up, it's looking amazing.
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Jul 6, 2020 04:31
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Poisonlizard posted:Loving this thread. I've been a cabinet maker for most of my life, and I've repaired a few old chairs over the years. But making one from scratch is daunting, I'd do a dozen nice tables before I tried a chair. They show up on ebay sometimes. There's magic in old chairs, and it's been neat trying to figure out where modern chairs lost the magic. I think it is the rear legs having that angle to them-it really seems to make it all work. When last we left our chair, it still really needed a back splat, and before it can have a backsplat, it needs a shoe. So, cut out something shoe shaped on the bandsaw:  Needs that nice molding on the front though. I’ll probably cut this on the table saw or finally get a shaper when I get into production, but for now it’s hand tools. Get out a gouge and cut off everything that doesn’t look like a cove:   That’s a little rough, but we work from risky and rough to controlled and smooth, so grab a 125yr old plane:  And start cutting:   Et voila:  Nice and smooth I just cut out some ½” plywood for the backsplat.  I didn’t really thing about how I was going to hold this all together. The real thing will be mortised into the shoe and crest rail, but that was gonna be work, so I cut a little shelf in the crest rail and wedged it against the shoe. Works fine for a mockup.  And that’s basically a chair! I cut out a plywood piece to sit on the seat rails and covered it in batting and some fabric for a quick and dirty trial seat. I did some shaping with a rasp on the front of the crest rail, but I think I overdid it. I think it should only be shaped on the back, so you see a clean, sharp silhouette from the front. At this point I had everyone I could think of sit in it. Basically, it’s fine. It’s a comfortable chair with nothing glaringly wrong. However, in sitting in it, we realized it is bigger than (wider mostly) than it needs to be. I want to try and cut an inch of width in the front and back, and that’s going to involves some changes to the crest rail and splat. That’s why I make mockups! I went to see my old mentor and get his opinion on the design and take a look at a few chairs he’s done over the years. One is very similar to the simple Petersburg chair that started all this:  He had copied an antique a client had years ago. It has a pierced backsplat vs. the plain one I am doing.  This crest rail is part of what made me realize I shouldn’t have shaped the front of mine so much, A bit different design from what I’m doing here, but it was closer to the dimensions I’m shooting for after I cut an inch front and back:  He’s always done the shoe and rear rail as one piece:  Lots of old chairs do it in 2 pieces to make better use of scraps etc. I’ll see how my material comes out before I make up my mind on that.
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Jul 11, 2020 02:26
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Well that makes for a very inspiring morning, wow. I really like that last one it's pretty wild. Those wore in so nicely!
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Jul 11, 2020 15:54
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Very nice. I like the clean lines on the Petersberg chair, I get why you're emulating that. Also wow, that backsplat is beefy! I like it. I remember my grandparents had dining chairs like that but the backsplats were very thin, like 1/8" veneer or something, I was always afraid as a kid to sit back in them 'cause I thought they'd break. They also rattled when you picked the chair up, which didn't help that impression of fragility. I do deeply enjoy the "ugh, this poplar chair is not good enough, good thing it's just for practice" vibe when it's nicer than half the furniture I own. Looks good.
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Jul 11, 2020 17:31
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Well that makes for a very inspiring morning, wow. I really like that last one it's pretty wild. Those wore in so nicely! TheNothingNew posted:Very nice. I like the clean lines on the Petersberg chair, I get why you're emulating that. I think the next (lol) poplar chair version where I work out all the joinery that doesn't have big screw heads sticking out all over I will stain and give a full finish so it looks nice-ish, even though poplar doesn't stain well. It would be good to have a sort of salesman's sample around the shop. I'm quite excited about the design really. I think it is contemporary enough that in different woods/finishes it could have some potential to be marketable, especially if I do actually get the production streamlined and can get the price down. Ebonised/limed/cerused oak is pretty hot right now and I think it would look pretty cool (or at least on trend) in black and white.
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Jul 12, 2020 01:56
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You’re not wrong. It would look really cool and a lot of people would love it. I really like the lines it’s making though. Really pleasing to the eye and it reminds me of some old chairs my grandparents had for a long time. I don’t know where they ended up or if they went with the table to my brother’s house, but it’s quite possible they just got entirely worn out from being ‘loved’ (aka used constantly for decades).
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Jul 12, 2020 05:12
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Kaiser Schnitzel!! I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with these chairs.
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Jul 12, 2020 08:28
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Just found this thread and I love it. Your user name is stellar and doesn’t get enough love. Great work!
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Jul 12, 2020 14:10
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rear end-penny posted:Kaiser Schnitzel!! I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with these chairs. Dont you DARE even THINK about sitting in those chairs Looking chairs only
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Jul 12, 2020 15:49
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I haven't had time to work on these this week, but hopefully I will tomorrow or Saturday. It's been hot af and it's much harder to get motivated to stay late and take something apart and do rework than it is to work on an exciting new thing. I did get some wood though. My lumberyard had been out of 8/4 cherry for a few weeks, but they finally had some and I needed other wood too. The FWW article I'm using as a guide says you can build a whole chair out of an 8' long, 10" wide 8/4 board, which is ~13BF x 12 chairs= ~160BF. I ordered 80BF and was pretty happy-everything was at least 8" wide and not hardly a knot in it, so I went ahead and ordered another 160 bf because cherry is super cheap right now and the guys at the lumberyard said the whole unit was nice like what I picked up today. That should give me plenty to pick from with plenty leftover. With all the small parts like stretchers etc. there shouldn't be much waste. I may also make the splats out of (cheaper) 4/4 or 6/4, which would cut down on the 8/4 alot. I love cherry and I haven't seen it this cheap ($3.06/bf! for 8/4) in a decade, so I'm buying what I can  , and it makes lovely beds. All coming out of the same unit from the same mill usually leads to a little more consistent color between boards so that was a consideration in trying to buy all the lumber at once. I need to ask where all this stuff is coming out of-my guess is PA/OH/WVA. I haven't decided about sapwood yet. This stuff seems to have 1 face with no sapwood, but then some sap on the back. I usually like the contrast of sapwood on cherry, but on period antiques you almost never see sapwood. They were using such big trees they almost always cut it out. I'm not trying to make these exactly period correct or anything, but it's a consideration. I think on skeletal, curved work streaks of sapwood can make the shape look funny. I have noticed with this poplar chair that sometimes things look crooked that aren't because of the variation between the white sapwood and darker green heart. My guess is when it comes time to actually cut up cherry I won't want to waste the sap and will end up staining it to blend better with the heart. Check out my dirty wood: 
Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jul 17, 2020 |
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Jul 17, 2020 01:30
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That's some cheap wood, drat. The little fact about why you dont see sapwood in period antiques is super cool, I gotta post all these old pics I have from loggers in the NW with the last 10' Doug fir. Also the tip about getting all the wood from the same mill is super simple but something I never thought of with wood.
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Jul 17, 2020 06:42
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:I gotta post all these old pics I have from loggers in the NW with the last 10' Doug fir.
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Jul 17, 2020 14:14
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I don't know how I missed this thread, but I am glad I found it now. Good choice on cherry, one of my favourites.
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Jul 18, 2020 02:02
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I haven't forgotten about this, just haven't gotten together an update. Got more 8/4 cherry. Best woodworking tip I picked up from my mentor is ALWAYS bring the guys at the lumberyard donuts and treat them like kings. When you say 'hey is the rest of that cherry wide like this stuff? I could really use some wide stuff' they give you this:  Biggest honk of cherry I've ever seen-2"x10'x16". It would make a great top for a sideboard or something. Gonna try not to have to cut it up into 2" wide rear legs (but it would sure yield alot!) The rest of the stuff was great too-all 10"+. Anyway, when last we left our chair it looked like this:  And the plan was to cut it down by an inch in width. So, chop chop.  I could have planned that better. I also wanted to make the aprons/rails narrower, and so I cut them down since I had to take it all apart anyway:  I think they do look better narrower and it will still be plenty strong. Now nothing fits:  At this point I needed to decide where I was going to take that inch out of the back. I really liked the shape of the crest rail and didn’t want to mess it up too badly if I didn’t have to. So taking an inch out of the splat width and the middle of the crest rail seemed like the best shot, and I figured I would try that first.  Couple slices and dices. Bandsaws are great for this since they can cut curved stuff safely without some insane jig  Cut the shoe down too, and took an inch off the splat so it all fits together.  Looks fine. I think I like it better smaller. Cut down the seat too:  Again, bandsaw=bestsaw Scabbed this beauty on the back so I could see how it sits:   And it sits fine. Really don’t notice that it’s smaller at all. Since I was making new crest rails (I wanted to try out the plainer, straighter crest rail in the original too) I figured I would make a new splat and start trying to figure out some of the joinery of the crest rail/splat/shoe, so that’s up next.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:33
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Going to agree with the rest, your mockup there is probably sturdier and better than the chairs I have at my dining room table. Can't wait to see what this looks like in that cherry!
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Jul 24, 2020 08:15
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Me: drat that sucks I liked that Crest rail, ah well.. Also me: ok, they are right.. it does look sharp tightened up. They're gonna look friggen amazing in a line all finished! Cant wait to try one of these. What is the flat back middle piece called and are you going to take any off that to match the inch you took off? Harry Potter on Ice fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 16:12
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Me: drat that sucks I liked that Crest rail, ah well.. I wanted to make a new splat/crest rails that would have real joinery (at least at the shoe/splat/crest rail joints) and start figuring some of this out. There are….some angles involved here.  Grabbed my trusty bevel gauge and grabbed the angles  And transferred them to a sort of story board.  Turns out they are parallel to each other, which I probably could have figured out if I’d thought about it, but it’s easier to just transfer angles. I have no idea what they actually are-I don’t measure. The tenons coming out of each end of the splat are going into mortises that are perpendicular to the top of the shoe and bottom of the crest rail, so they need to be angled away from the face of the splat by the complement? of the angle I just found. Did I lose you? It’s not that complicated. The tenons are perpendicular to the shoulders.  I grabbed the measurement for the splat shoulder to shoulder in the face as well-18.5”-so now I know how big to make my splat. Went ahead and routed a mortise on the shoe:  That was easy-now to try and figure out those awkward angled tenons. Milled some poplar and copied the pattern to the face with 18.5” between the shoulders.  Transferred the angles from my storyboard onto the splat to make sure I got them all going the right direction.  Story sticks really really help keep me from making dumb math errors or getting angles backwards or whatever. You can just see it there plain as day. Transferred some lines for the tenon width as well.  Alright now how the hell are we gonna cut those. I usually cut tenons with a dado stack and crosscut sled on the table saw, but that won’t work here without some insane jigs, and even then it would only cut one face. I could hold the splat vertically in a traditional tenoning jig and angle the blade on the table saw to cut the tenon cheeks, and then cut the shoulders on the crosscut sled but eh, seems like a pain and I don’t have a tenon jig that holds the piece vertically. There was also a ton of crap piled on the table saw. I am in the process of building a horizontal mortiser/router ala Matthias Wandel, but it’s not quite done and I would need to build a jig for that too. I had an idea that turned out to work. I did build a jig, but a really simple jig-a piece of plywood with a square cut. First I set my miter gauge to whatever the angle I stuck on my story stick earlier was. Turns out it’s about 3 degrees, who knew.  That will cut the shoulder, but doesn’t get us anywhere near ripping the cheeks, and my miter gauge won’t swing that far. Butttt, we know the tenons are perpendicular to the shoulders, so let’s stick a 90 degree angle in there and see what happens  Oh shoot I think this is actually gonna work.  The splat is 6” wide still so this was a little scary. It really needed a fence to hold it vertical, and I needed another hand to hold splat to plywood and plywood to miter gauge, but it basically worked, much to my surprise.  Cutting the cheeks was then easy-use the miter gauge and cut to the line.    They were a little crooked, but as a proof of concept, it’s definitely a success. Cut out the splat  And see if it fits  Not quite. Shoulder plane to the rescue  That’ll work   I was really excited my little bandsaw rig worked out as a proof of concept. I think with a few different jigs I could actually cut all the tenons (and there are some even more complicated ones to come) on the bandsaw. This has the advantage of being very very fast, and I trust my bandsaw enough that I think it would also be plenty precise, especially with a wider, finer blade that left a smoother surface. I built the horizontal mortiser largely with these chairs in mind, but I think in its current configuration it would be really slow. All the vertical travel is from cranking a handwheel, and it seems like it would be a lot of cranking. In addition, the router has to turn every bit of waste into a shaving-that’s absolutely going to be slower (and messier) than leaving the waste in chunks and cutting it off. I also really like the bandsaw because it is a pretty safe machine to use and I’m very comfortable with it, and routers are loud as hell. I’ll experiment a bit more with the router though and hopefully I can work some of the kinks out. It definitely has big potential for awkwardly shaped stuff though. The two new crest rails are up next.
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Jul 28, 2020 03:12
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Not sure if it's of any help at all, but I pirated the chairs section from that 1902 cabinet making book I've got. https://imgur.com/a/ptCEfSf
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Jul 28, 2020 14:24
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Jaded Burnout posted:Not sure if it's of any help at all, but I pirated the chairs section from that 1902 cabinet making book I've got. Thanks! What book is that? I have a couple similar old trade manuals and they always have some great ideas tucked in them and I love the drawings.
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Jul 28, 2020 17:50
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Jaded Burnout posted:Not sure if it's of any help at all, but I pirated the chairs section from that 1902 cabinet making book I've got. Yarrr this helps me out, thanks. I also enjoy old drawings and schematics
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Jul 28, 2020 18:05
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Thanks! What book is that? I have a couple similar old trade manuals and they always have some great ideas tucked in them and I love the drawings. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1528702832/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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Jul 28, 2020 18:32
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