I continued the messy and relentlessly dull process of cleaning my filthy carport and adjoining shed through this past weekend, still with the explicit and more enticing goal in mind of finally getting my table saw unearthed and calibrated. It turns out that my shed (a long rectangular affair constructed with 2X4s on a cement pad) is going to require, at the very least, a new roof. So, as I'm prepping the saw for the chair wood, I'm sure I'll be cutting some roofing lumber as well. Good thing that the nice not-too-warm and not-at-all-rainy weather is holding out down here in the Sonoran Desert. I keep telling myself that this is the time of the year to do all this dirty stuff outside and that I'll be rewarded in mid summer with a tight shed. The table saw - and other tools too big to store in the house - will finally have a clean, dry place to live when the inevitable mid year monsoons and dust storms arrive. While we're all waiting for - or, in my case, working towards - the eventuality of when chair wood finally meets saw blade, here's a few more drawings to mull over.
There should be enough presented below, in fact, for anyone reading this blog to beat me to the punch and build a copy of this chair for themselves - at least the basic frame - before I do. When I ran my old model airplane web site and discussion forum on Jetex.org, I occasionally found myself spending weeks drawing a plan and posting it there, only to find that one of my online buddies would build a copy of my design before I could even clean off my worktable and make one for myself. I don't think I have enough viewers on this blog just yet to find that happening, but I'd be pleasantly surprised, actually, to have someone out pull this off. Even in the best of times, I'm a notoriously slow - yet fastidious and exacting - builder.
The first drawing for this post (below) shows the six different components comprising the basic frame. Each component is given a 4-view and requisite dimensions in inches. You'll note that four short laths are required per chair, as well as one each of the medium and long ones - all 0.875" X 0.875". Two each (four total) of the 1.75" X 0.875" legs and two cross braces are needed for each chair.
The centers of the small circles indicate where dowels will eventually be drilled, which I've now decided doing exclusively with the Miller dowel system (more on that in a moment.) The dimensions - in addition to showing overall lengths, widths and depths - show the distance between these drill point centers. Note, for instance, that the medium length lath has its drill points spaced at a greater distance than those found on the short and long laths. Drill point locations are also noted on the 1.75" X 0.875" cross brace 4-view. In all instances, the drill points are centered on these pieces (ie: at 0.4375" on 0.875" wide ones and at 0.875" on the 1.75" wide one.) As far as the legs are concerned, each one receives a 0.25" deep X 1.75" wide dado at the noted location.
The next pair of drawings (below) show completed front and rear leg assemblies. A 3-view of each assembly, hopefully, makes it clear as to how these parts line up. Note the location of the drill point circles. Beyond the fact that the rear leg assembly is taller than the front and includes the longest 0.875" X 0.875" lath, the two assemblies are essentially front-to-rear mirrors of each other.
As mentioned above, I'm now eschewing the time-honored blind doweling technique described in previous posts in favor of using the newly developed Miller dowels at all attachment points. This will not only speed up the assembly process considerably but, by all accounts, I should have stronger joints when it's all said and done. I recently purchased one of the dedicated 2X sized Miller drill bits along with some of the matching 2X red oak dowels.
Although red oak isn't an exact match to the European beech I'm using for the main structure, the color is similar enough to almost blend in. There is something desirable, actually, in having a slight contrast of color with these exposed dowels. I may even choose a darker, contrasting-colored dowel for some of the attachment points. I'm thinking, in particular, the four where the legs meet the cross braces, which will be the most exposed of the dowel heads. These might look particularly nice in teak.
So, what's left after the basic frame is built? Well, I'm still working out details regarding the armrests and armrest supports. There will be a basic mortise and tenon joint that will have to be performed on each of these, but nothing too outlandish or too hard to pull off. The seat and back - which both feature a significant bend in them - will be a bit more involved.
Making the seat and back will entail some interesting low angle finger joinery on the table saw with Baltic birch plywood, some jig building (make that LOTS of jig building) and then, finally, some veneering . . . certainly fun, but also certainly very time consuming. Then, mix in the usual unrelated roadblocks that life throws at you from day to day and you begin to realize that you're going to be at this little chair building project for a while. Plenty of time to think it all through and plenty of time to write about it.
Such are the luxuries, I suppose, of being - all at once - an introspective, meticulous and ploddingly lethargic woodworker. OK . . . enough bragging on my part for now. Back to the grimmer and more immediate cleaning the carport and dealing with that leaky shed roof . . .
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