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Coming up for air after lots of milling and mortising and it seems like a good time to share my progress. You will also see some adirondack parts in the background. I got started on that as a warm up project in April and I am trying to keep it moving along with the Morris.

 

I'm fairly new to woodworking. Long time DIY type, but had some projects during the holiday season that required some woodworking. I started out bringing an old table saw back to life, but since then I have gone fully down the rabbit hole. I got my lumber home and as I was laying things out I realized that I had nearly enough 8/4 lumber to make 2 sets of legs and arms. I decided to double down and make 2 chairs and stools. 

 

Getting the legs milled and glued up, this is when I started to understand what I was getting myself in to.

 

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With the legs at dimension, things got fun again. When laying out the mortises you get to put parts in place and really imagine things coming together. Once I had mortises laid out on all 16 legs, it was clear that my plans to cut mortises on the router table was going to be problematic. I lucked out and a family friend had a great router setup I was able to borrow. I will probably keep my eye out for this same Freud model on the used market. Very impressed with the dust collection and edge guide, and I breezed through the mortises once I was setup.

 

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Next up was the rails. At this point I'm flowing pretty good with the actual woodworking operations but trying to plan ahead on ways to keep the growing inventory of parts safe and organized.

 

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Making the forms was fun. I know that it's important to build a quality form but it was nice to work with not-so-precious plywood...can relax a little bit and not worry about messing up real parts.

 

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Setting this off-cut in place over the chair base went a long way in visualizing the project. Looking at this in position with the general shape of the curve lets my minds eye also see the curves on the side rails. The tapers come out of hiding a little bit and it comes to life. Pretty exciting for me!

 

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Looking great. I have learned that doing multiples can be easier, until you make a mistake on a stack of parts!

Thanks for posting your progress!

Definable know this pain on this project. My 16yo sone and I are building two of them. Made great progress until we realized we made a number of bad mistakes when laying out the mortises on all 8 of the legs after they were all done. Back to the lumber yard. Luck would have it that I found a great 16/4 piece of cherry so I didn't have to laminate. I will say this- after 16 legs and 48 mortises we are now like a factory cranking them out :)

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Hey, I had the pleasure of a trip to the lumber yard for additional leg stock too! Lucky for me, it was only a one-off mistake and didn't effect a whole batch. When I was cutting the legs to length I cut 5 back legs and 3 front legs.

 

Upside was that having an extra rear leg gave me something to use while setting up and getting comfortable with the router. That extra rear leg looks like swiss cheese now.

 

I see that you are in the SF bay area. I'm curious where you are buying lumber and who had 16/4 cherry.

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macbeths has a ton of 5/4, 6/4, 8/4, 12/4 and 16/4.   most of the 16/4 was huge but i found a great piece that was 8 feet long and and 7 in wide which was just enough to get all 8 legs.  The SF branch had more and better quality than berkeley.  the only downside is it wasn't cheap.  

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  • 3 weeks later...

Kev

 

macbeths has a ton of 5/4, 6/4, 8/4, 12/4 and 16/4.   most of the 16/4 was huge but i found a great piece that was 8 feet long and and 7 in wide which was just enough to get all 8 legs.  The SF branch had more and better quality than berkeley.  the only downside is it wasn't cheap.  

 

I live in the East Bay and another option is The Woodbank in Berkeley. Not as big as McBeaths, but they carry some excellent wood. When I get around to the Morris chair project, I'll go there for some 1/4 sawn white oak. 

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I also appreciate the info. I have a client who is moving their office much closer to Berkeley, so both of those locations will eventually be convenient for me to drop in. Based on all the work I have, it should be a while before I need wood anyway!

 

Finally got rolling again on my Morris. It was slow going for a few weeks. Seeing the base of the chair in a dry fit felt like a big milestone and good chance to take a breather. I had some issues getting the band saw tuned up for the resaw work but starting over from square one on setup got me taken care of. Before I could do the lamination I needed some time to accumulate the glue, clamps, and especially the nerve. I got the first arm glued up and under pressure yesterday morning so I'm pretty excited about opening up the form after a couple cups of coffee. I'm looking at one arm per day with just enough time to finish all 4 before leaving for a short anniversary trip.

 

More pics to share later today.

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Nice progress. I am building two chairs too. Definitely a very challenging project. I have the arms installed on two of the sides and just need to cut the mortises on the two other arms then on to installing the slats. I have definitely improved my hand tool skills already with a few hand cut tenons as well as a lot of chisel work. I made a pretty bonehead move by installing an arm on backwards which required me to make a new arm, back leg and two Side rails.

I am thinking about a few design changes. I think I will make the side slats out of walnut for some contrast. I am also thinking about draw boring all the mortise and tenons with walnut as well. that should make the chair bomb proof although I suppose the round pins are not in keeping with the mission style all that much.

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  • 2 weeks later...

It took a few more days to get through the arms than I expected, but slow and steady progress got me there. Only a few pics to show the progress since it was fairly repetitive.

 

 

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I mentioned on another post that I had concerns about the thickness of my stock allowing me to get all 6 laminates for the 1 inch final thickness. My band saw was cutting nicely and things went fairly well so this was only a problem with one stack. 

 

My planer is the Jet JJP-12, the stationary combo planer & jointer. Since I had so many laminates to do I looked into alternative sled approaches, including the one from FWW mentioned in the video comments. I found that people were reporting lots of success planing thin materials with this model. After thinking about the stationary sled platform and looking at the planer design I didn't see it giving much advantage. After testing on some scrap, and applying slight bending pressure while feeding I found that it did a great job planing to the appropriate thickness without any sled or bed. I think this ended up saving me a little bit of shop time.

 

On the one problem stack, I had made a bad cut that took some extra cleanup. I was half way through the stack and knew I had plenty material to get the 1" thickness if I did that arm with 5 layers instead of 6. Since there was discussion about glue types and the number of layers, I thought I would share what I got as far as spring back. The 5 ply arm has noticeably more springback. Won't be a problem for the chair, but it can be seen when compared to the other arms.

 

It's just my own experience with the materials and process I used, but here are some pics to illustrate. This is before cleaning up the ends, each arm clamped into the form at the back end and letting the front float free. 

 

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