Over the past week I have cut out and sanded every piece I need to assemble my chair. I have refined my table saw techniques, as well as learning some basic sanding a planing techniques. I will outline the basic process required for each of these pieces:
- Get the raw lumber, often a plank, and make sure you have the dimensions for the piece. Make sure the plank is the correct thickness, anything else can be changed
- Measure it out, and mark it with pencil. Measure twice cut once, as the saying goes.
- Make a rough cut, in this case with a handsaw, to get the piece down to something you can work with easily on the table saw. I only make one cut here, to separate the peice from the rest of the plank
- Make a rip cut (cut with the grain) to get the piece to the correct width.
- Now use cross cuts (cuts with the grain). First one to shave off a little of one end to get a square angle, then another to get the piece to correct length. I use a cross cutting rig, which is pictured at the bottom.
- Erase any pencil marks on exposed sides, and sand, or plane, everything down. What you are left with is a rectangle (possibly) worthy of furniture.
After having gone through that process several t imes, I am left with this pile of wood:
What is pictured here are my chair legs (clamped in the table), angle supports, and several other support and chair back type things. To get the angle on those supports I turned the saw blade on the table saw sideways, to a 45 degree angle, which worked very well.
Pictured here is my dad's table saw. The gold device is the crosscutting rig. It provides a back which is square with the blade, and using the red thing attached, can be set to a certain width, which is most useful for making multiple cuts of the same length. You can see to the right my eye and ear protection, very important, and over the blade is the clear shield of sorts, which will prevent peices being thrown back at you.
And here is a dry assembly of my chair! This is done to make sure all the pieces fit satisfyingly. In this picture there is currently no seat or supports between the bottoms of the legs. This is held together solely by clamps, no glue or screws.
This week I decided to revisit some of the blogs I have commented on before:
The Bluegrass Blog by Ben
Organic Architecture: Changing the Landscape of Design by Dillon
and
iOS Programming: App Development by Mayank
See you in a couple days when assembly is (hopefully) complete!
Will this looks so good! I knew you were contemplating making a cushion are you still doing that? Even if your not, this is great. I can tell you put a lot of effort into it and it paid off! It was awesome following your posts and I hope you continue to construct!
ReplyDeleteWhoa... I have not been following your blog a lot, but I am really quite impressed. No just do you seem to have a grip on what you are saying, but the dry assembly looks really nice. If I were in your block, I would be very excited to see your talk, as this looks and sounds very cool.
ReplyDeleteYour chair looks awesome! I have always thought wooden furniture has been cool and I have always been dazzled by some of its perfection and I think that your chair is definitely something that is perfect and cool. The dry assembly look pretty solid and the effort you put into it is evident. Good work!
ReplyDeleteWill, this chair is awesome. When I read your post just now, I was sitting in a plastic chair. It sucked.
ReplyDeleteAside from that, it looks like you are making a lot of progress in your project and learning a valuable skill. You sit in your chair while you do your Ted Talk so that you can show it off AND have an excuse to relax while you do!
~~Max
Though I don't really know you, I have to say that your work is phenomenal! When I first heard about someone (which is you) was making a chair, I was expecting something extremely simple... just 2 planks for the seat and back and four legs. Instead you created something that I would expect to find at say... Ikea. The only difference between yours and Ikea kits was that you actually made this chair from scratch which is extremely impressive.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work!
Wow Will, just wow! THe work that you have been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time was amazing! It is really awesome to see the chair coming together and I can't wait until the chair itself is fully constructed! You have come so far during this project and I hope that you have enjoyed yourself every step of the way. Good Luck!
ReplyDelete