Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Get this Boulder Rolling

Ugh I've felt so distant from my own work let alone wood working as of late. Well I finally got a little time to heave-ho and see if I can get some momentum rolling. There are still a number of things to learn and look for that aren't wood working. I'll be thankful when my learning/sourcing curve is over and I can just get to work... Hmm seems kind of familiar heh.

Anyway, I got the rough milling the White Oak I picked up a bit ago. Here are the roughly cut out components for the easy chair. All that is missing in wood here are my back slats. I figure I'd wait on those just in case.

A couple days went by and the Oak is looking stable. I milled some pieces to final thickness and closer to final width.
It's time to start joinery for the chair sides. I cut the inside curves on my leg stock leaving the outside straight for referencing on my boring machine when cutting mortises.

Along the shaping way I check for edge squareness and check the curve against my shop drawing.

Cut my legs to length with "appropriate" angles... I assume I'm going to have to dial those in further when the right time comes. This is good enough for joinery though.

Before cutting mortises I wanted to do a bit of surface prep to try to get the closest I can to a flat planer side when joined together. As I've mentioned, Oak isn't the friendliest wood to work. Sometimes you can plane it just fine, sometimes not.
I'm finding this selection responds best to a higher angle smoother I have. I used this in my last project with the Kwila stands... I think it's about time to upgrade this style plane with a heavier, more dense plane blank I have.

I was debating between wide tenons for the back or splitting them. I ended up splitting them because of the angle this joint is at. I can utilize more depth this way and the split twin tenon will be more "mechanically" strong. Though this chair design doesn't quite fit the typical dinning chair style construction, the joint between the back leg/back and the seat stretcher is the most critical. I know I may be going above and beyond what may be commonly used but I certainly want this joint to last a long, long time!

Getting down to the business of figuring out my jigging. Here are a few blocks I'll be using as spacers in my mortise endeavors.

Here you can see one of my blocks acting as a spacer for the twin joinery. In this way I can leave all my horizontal settings as the are and prop the work piece up for another set making it "exactly" repeatable.

One pair of wide tenons for the front and a set of four for the rear.
One might say "what's up with your big old shoulders there (above and below the mortises)?" Well there is going to be a bit of rounded shaping in those areas, and I'm just concerned? I mean this is a chair, a lowish one at that. Most of the stress put on a chair is when a grown person sits down or gets up which probably happens a lot more and with much more force than a person opening a drawer in a tea cabinet. It makes sense to me to leave more material vertically above and below the main joints... alas, I'm not a real expert on chairs but I'm sure I've covered my bases here.

Alright, lets do it again, but sideways!
Uff-duh this is turning out to be a longish post. Well it's about time to cut this one... I'll be back with some tenon stock and such later!

3 comments:

Jeff Branch said...

Again nice joinery. Thanks for showing your boring machine - I have not see that before.

Nick Brygidyr said...

beats me why mortisers dont have adjustable fences on them!

im really liking the direction this chair is going to take my friend!

think of using router templates for repeatable curve cutting action?

Nicholas Nelson said...

Thank you sirs.
Ah yes, the old Davis and Wells DBM-64. I love that machine. Still wishing for a real x-y table someday.

Oh gosh that would have to be a pretty sophisticated fence for me to want one ha. So many variables on the table!

Yeah, I just haven't felt the need for template cutting yet... perhaps that day will come.