Dining Chairs

[treeslayer]

i love to see heirlooms come to life, well done Drew you're really knocking this one out of the park.

[Chet]

1 hour ago, Chestnut said:

I'm quite glad I built my workbench ... It has been an invaluable tool.

I can't believe how many years I worked with out a good bench and now I think it is the first thing you should build in the way of shop furniture.

The chairs are looking good.

[Ronn W]

Very pleasing to the eye.  Your attnetion to detail is really paying off.  I like it.

[Chestnut]

Finally got the joinery cut for all the back rest parts. After batching out the joinery I used the smoothing planes to clean up all the parts. There was a bit of hand sanding required on the curved profiles but nothing major. All the little details on the back rest are quite tedious and i probably had 20 hours just in smoothing the legs, and other parts. I also made a LARGE pile of plane shavings.

Glueup went smoothly for all of the chair backs. The last one gave me the most troubles but it wasn't anything major.

I have 3 sweeping left and 3 sweeping right. I figure this will tie the asymetrical chairbacks together well when they are set around the table.

I must have done a decent job at making the parts uniform. They next together quite well.

Next up I have to figure out the joinery for the angled side rails and then figure out a good way to streamline the joinery for the side rails front legs, and front rail. I also need to decide if i want to do a lower rail between the front and rear legs or not.

[Mark J]

I am impressed with the nesting fit, but it always surprises me when somone says something like:  

On 2/2/2020 at 9:10 PM, Chestnut said:

Next up I have to figure out the joinery for the angled side rails and then figure out a good way to streamline the joinery for the side rails front legs, and front rail.

I'd be concerned that I'd build myself into a corner, but I'm guessing you have a couple of methods up your sleeve.  

[Chet]

On 2/2/2020 at 7:10 PM, Chestnut said:

I have 3 sweeping left and 3 sweeping right. I figure this will tie the asymetrical chairbacks together well when they are set around the table.

This should keep the fiancé happy also.

[Chestnut]

All the chair backs are done and stacked in a safe place. The nested backs are oddly satisfying to look at so I thought I'd share another picture.

The next main hurdle I have is trying to complete the joinery from the back legs to the front legs. I want the seat to taper slightly from the front to the back adding some visual depth to the chair. This means that the joinery for those parts would be on an angle. The angle ends up being around 5 degrees. I have my table saw blade set and won't change the angle untill all the parts are cut. Just in case something gets bumped I cut an angle in to a piece of hardwood.

I will also use this piece of hardwood to set the fence on the domino consistently to 5 degrees. Now that I have the angles figured out I needed to figure out floating M&T placement so that the rear legs will join to the side rails in the best way possible. Beings that the main rear rail has a single tenon in the middle I figured I'd do 2 tenons spaced apart. The other trick is setting the fence depth so I get the reveal I want. This just took a bit of fiddling and some measuring. I wrote the values down so I can reference them quickly. Now it's posted here in case my board gets erased.

The reveal ends up being around 3mm. The difference in values between the fron and the rear stem from the location of the tenon on the side rail. I now just realized that if my side rails are the same thickness as my trial pine the front leg reveal won't work out. I'll have to remeasure that once I get to it. The picture below shows the center of the floating tenons as well as the subtle setback on the side rails.

The floating tenons are red oak and will be around 56mm long. I'll have 2 28mm mortises on each end of each rail. With each floating tenon 1/4" in from the edge of the side rail this should provide a LOT of strength on this joint in the chair. I have Prototype #3 in use for the last month or so and have been balancing on the chair on it's rear legs. So far it hasn't broken, I'm not the heaviest person that will sit in the chair but I'm probably the heaviest person that will put it on 2 legs and balance like that. The joiner on the prototype is not as stout as the joinery on the final chair so it should last the test of time but we'll see.

One final material prep step was prep the front legs that I cut out of the rear leg scraps. I figured out how many additional legs I'd need and cut those out of some scrap stock. I call it scrap stock but honestly it was perfect for the job. It was 18" long and was 9" wide. I could get 2 legs from each edge of the stock and the blanks are perfectly rift sawn. I found another board to grab 2 more rift sawn blanks. Then I spent a good 30 min dong some grain matching to get the right 2 legs paired together.

I'll be out of town for the weekend so I did the initial milling on the side rails and have the legs and side rails set out to hopefully relieave any stress in the boards and to preferably maintain EMC.

Next week will be milling the rest of these parts to final, cutting joinery, then measuring and milling out the front rail. At that point I'll be ready to assemble 6 chairs. At that point I anticipate my shop getting really small feeling.

[treeslayer]

Great progress Drew, this is one if my favorite builds on here, oh and congratulations are in order, she’s a keeper for sure,  many, many happy years to you both 

[Bmac]

10 hours ago, Chestnut said:

All the chair backs are done and stacked in a safe place. The nested backs are oddly satisfying to look at so I thought I'd share another picture.

 

I can understand your sense of satisfaction, you have a neat design that you envisioned years ago and you are building chairs. As a self proclaimed chair junkie by @Mark J, nothing is more satisfying than building chairs. Maybe I'm reading to much into your comment or maybe you are feeling the first symptoms of chair addiction. 

Things are looking great with the chairs and congrats!

 

 

[Chestnut]

3 hours ago, Bmac said:

I can understand your sense of satisfaction, you have a neat design that you envisioned years ago and you are building chairs. As a self proclaimed chair junkie by @Mark J, nothing is more satisfying than building chairs. Maybe I'm reading to much into your comment or maybe you are feeling the first symptoms of chair addiction. 

Things are looking great will the chairs and congrats!

I'm really excited to be done with the chairs but not because I'm not enjoying building them. The build is satisfying, maybe it's because there have been breaks in the middle maybe it's because it's been a plan and idea I've had for so long. What ever the reason I don't feel myself rushing through aspects like I sometimes do. I am nervous to get into sculpting seats. I do think that having a template started will help make that easier. I'm tempted to make a profile template for pee-sculpting the first center board of the seat as well.

I have a LOT of projects on the to do list that I'm excited to get started on.

[JohnG]

Wow, they are looking great! Can’t wait to see the finish go on them.

[Chestnut]

Last weekend i had a fishing outing with some friends. This past week was completely occupied by wedding planning and meetings with people that want a lot of my money no new band saw this year well maybe  . Megan has probably gotten sick of me saying "Bah! I'm never going to get those chairs done." So she let me have all weekend in the shop Starting Saturday.

The last two days have meant a good amount of progress on the chairs. I started off getting all the side rails cut to length. The side rails have a 5 degree angle cut on them which gives the seat a taper from 17" at the front to 14" at the rear. This really helps the look of the chair but makes planning the side rails a bit more difficult. After I had them all cut to length I cut joinery in the side rails.

Above the side rails aren't ripped to final width. I didn't bother getting the exact width as I knew i'd have to route out the shape on my side rail routing sled. This is the same method that I used for the back legs so I didn't bother taking pictures of it. It's as simple as rough cutting at the band saw and then clamping the piece in place and running it across a template bit.

The joiner has space in the center for a reason. I wanted the back rail joinery to squeeze between the joinery for the side rails. The joint of the side rails to both the front and rear leg are the most important to get right on a chair. These are the joints that get stressed the most when a person puts the chair on 2 legs. Now i'm one of those awful people so i have to design these chairs to at least withstand me. This picture shows some of that joiner interference.

The floating tenons that are going into the front and rear legs from the sides are 1.25" wide and 2" long. This is a smaller tenon than what I used in my prototype #3 and I've been balancing that thing on it's rear legs every day for the last month. I really want to see how well the joinery is going to last. In the last month we've also had some cold snaps that have fluctuated the relative humidity in the house 15% so I'm pretty confidant this joinery will last. If it doesn't my shop isn't far away.

After cutting joinery on the side rails and the rear legs it is time to mill the front legs and get joinery cut in them. While doing this i managed to $#)@ up one of the legs multiple times. Not once or twice, THREE times I put the mortise in the wrong location.... Luckily it was all in a position where the side rail would cover it up so I just filled the mortise with some floating tenon stock and tried again. The integrity of the joint should be good enough. I'm not really too concerned about this location on the front leg.

After getting the side joinery cut it was time to dry fit the sides and measure for the front rail. I wasn't sure how well I built the chairs so I made sure to dry assemble each chair to check the front rail spacing. Turns out I was pretty dang good. 4 Chairs were 14_7/8" 1 chair was 14_3/4" the final chair was 15". With the complexity of the back I'm glad i built the chair from the back forward opposed to from the front back like Marc did in the guild series. I also have ZERO idea why he used screws on the head rest... it was very easy to assemble the chair in this manner and avoid using screws and plugs.

After I got the front rails milled and cut to length it was time to template route them. This was done the same was as all the other template routing operations. Rough cut band saw and then router table. With the front rails done I'm officially done with template routing on this project!!!! Making the sleds with the toggle clamps was the best thing I ever did. The template routing went FAST and easy. There was a lot of alternating grain which lead to a few tricky situations. The sleds gave me the confidence to do a LOT of climb cutting. I'd say 50% of my time at the router table I was doing a climb cut so I didn't blow out grain. Some may think that it's dangerous and I was doing it wrong but I never once had an issue with it. I also had zero grain blow out. Here is a picture of all my template sleds.

Ok so front rail joinery is going to be difficult. I don't want the side rail joinery to interfere with the front rail joinery. This leaves me little space so To make the joint hopefully strong enough I opted to go for a wide floating tenon. The tenon is about 2.5" wide but only 10mm deep. I think a picture will help this make the most sense. Here is the side rail joinery.

The floating tenons for the side will go in first and then the front tenon will go in next.

Yep i use metric and imperial on the same project many times. All of my rails are inset 3mm. I could give a leap what the unit is I just use what is in front of me and honestly despite what everyone argues both systems work and have their place though I MUCH prefer fractions as half of 7/13 is really easy to compute (I'm using  prime numbers to give a good example as 7/13 is not an even decimal but 7/26 is exactly half and is fast and easy to compute). Also rulers with 64's are easy to read but half decimals of mm doesn't really make sense and they are hard to read. Even MM get hard to read on a ruler as the ticks are kinda small but it's difficult to differentiate between 2 and 3 as well as 7 and 8 mm, well at least it is for me.

Ok now that I've lost everyone, I've got the joinery all figured out. So now it's just to throw a round over on all the parts. I did the 1/16" that I did on the rear legs. After the round over was complete I took out my sanding blocks. We've gout #4 (50 degree) and #4 (45 degree).

I typically only use the 45 degree grit but sometimes there is a nasty bit here and there and the 50 degree git cleans things up a bit nicer. It's easier to have 2 smoothing plains .... eerrrr sanding blocks, than adjusting the depth of cut on one. The extra 5 degrees on the LN frog does help a LOT. Running the 2 side by side it's painfully obvious. So having 2 i set the Stanley to a bit heavier of a cut to make things go a bit faster and then follow behind it with the LN. It's 2 swipes to finish ready maybe 3. Also BD planes are far superior in every way to BU planes (this is just trolling).

I got the first chair in the clamps. Glue up took a bit longer than I wanted it to but was uneventful.

[Coop]

Haunched tenons come to mind on the jointery . I sure like the chair back design! 

[duckkisser]

im loving the cat tail cut outs feel like there needs to be one easter egg on one of the chairs of a frog climbing up a leg inlayed into the wood.  but that's just me like doing inlays

[wtnhighlander]

Dang, Duck - that is a splendid idea! Let's all nag Drew until he does the inlay, I'd really love to see it! Maybe a dragonfly on the cattail for head of the table? A different 'easter egg' on each chair would be awesome, but I doubt Drew needs anything else to slow him down right now! 

[Chestnut]

 

10 hours ago, duckkisser said:

im loving the cat tail cut outs feel like there needs to be one easter egg on one of the chairs of a frog climbing up a leg inlayed into the wood.  but that's just me like doing inlays

Thanks. That is an awesome idea. I've never done inlay before and I have no idea how I'd do a frog. I don't know that I'll get to it now but there is nothing stopping me from trying to do that in the future. My honest thought would be to make the frog from veneer and then attach it onto the leg or some where.

9 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

Dang, Duck - that is a splendid idea! Let's all nag Drew until he does the inlay, I'd really love to see it! Maybe a dragonfly on the cattail for head of the table? A different 'easter egg' on each chair would be awesome, but I doubt Drew needs anything else to slow him down right now! 

I just got another mass of furniture thrown on my to do list. One of these days I'm going to get around to some of the fun projects i have ideas for. Dragonfly idea is spot on though. I see them and damsel flies on cattails often.

[Chestnut]

10 hours ago, Coop said:

Haunched tenons come to mind on the jointery . I sure like the chair back design! 

Yes I did think about haunched tenons and my thought was I wanted 1 joint stronger than the other so I was ok with the front rail connection being short and wide. Also the haunched tenon would add a bit of complexity that I was unsure how it would impact the glue up. Right now i can get the chair together using just regular wood glue.

[duckkisser]

8 hours ago, Chestnut said:

 

Thanks. That is an awesome idea. I've never done inlay before and I have no idea how I'd do a frog. 

believe there is a old video on the woodwisperer main page on how to do inlays 

[Chestnut]

2 hours ago, duckkisser said:

believe there is a old video on the woodwisperer main page on how to do inlays 

There is I've watched it quite a few times. I've also watched some from other creators. Some day I will do inlay that's one of those fun projects I want to undertake but just don't have the leeway to do so. I want to inlay the logo for my favorite athletic team into something. Either a table top or like the back panel of a gun rack or finishing rod rack or something.

[duckkisser]

inlay it in something that has nothing to do with sports like a chess board 

[wtnhighlander]

Try some silhouette inlays of black veneer, and use black tinted epoxy to glue them in.  Hides any gaps really well.

[Chip Sawdust]

@Chestnut I love the cattail design! I may want to steal it.... I wish I was that creative.

You're doing excellent work, as usual. I’ve been following and figured I better post here so I don’t lose track! 

[Ronn W]

Well thought out joinery.  NIcely done.

[Chestnut]

10 hours ago, Chip Sawdust said:

@Chestnut I love the cattail design! I may want to steal it.... I wish I was that creative.

You're doing excellent work, as usual. I’ve been following and figured I better post here so I don’t lose track! 

Steal away. I got the idea from a commercial furniture piece but improved on it. Their idea was too simple and could have been missed easily.

I was planning on having all 6 chairs glued together last night but ended up having to work a 15 hour day...

[wtnhighlander]

13 hours ago, Chestnut said:

I was planning on having all 6 chairs glued together last night but ended up having to work a 15 hour day...

What, you couldn't do the glue-up in the remaining 9 hours of "free time"????