I wasn't completely happy with a few things on my last chair. I knew I was going to build another before I even had the first parts roughed out. It is comfortable, it looks pretty good, and it's super solid, but it's definitely missing something.
My latest chair was built with the same process as my previous chair, but many small things were changed. The new chair flows better. The lines and curves follow around the chair. The proportions are better. The front legs are tapered and the seat thickness fits the style better. It is also made of walnut. This is my favorite wood to work with. It cuts very nicely and takes finish perfectly. The grain patterns are always interesting and with just the right amount of sapwood left on, the highlights can be amazing. This one is finished with 2 coats of boiled linseed oil followed by two coats of a BLO, mineral spirit and beeswax mixture. The finish is light and soft to the touch but should protect it for years to come.
0 Comments
A while back I came across a old man on the internet who had a peculiar way of woodworking. His pieces were gorgeous. All black walnut, interesting curves and perfect shape. They were mostly chairs. This old man was Sam Maloof and he is probably the most well known American woodworker. Sam's chairs are famous. So famous, some of his pieces have ended up in museums and two others spent time in the Whitehouse with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I fell in love with his design style and the construction and decided to make one. You may have been following me on here for a while and noticed I skipped from chair number one to chair number 3. Chair 2 was an improvement over my first but I didn't really try a whole lot of new things in it so I didn't make post for it. Since my last post, I met another person on Craigslist. He had a garage full of various chunks of wood. The previous owner was a lifelong woodworker and left it there. After some haggling we settled on a price and I hauled two truck loads of wood home. In the pile, were two 12' long 2x6s of hard maple. I hadn't worked with maple much so I didn't really know any better. It is always an experience working with a new wood. They are all so different in so many ways. Hard Maple, happens to be (you guessed it) REALLY HARD. I start by cutting the boards to length, jointing one side and then cutting 3 degree angles on the boards. The angles are cut in a way that creates a natural cup in the entire seat. This adds a ton of organic shape to the chair right off the bat and will making shaping it with the grinder much easier later in the process. Next I cut notches out for the legs on the tables saw and then route out 1/2" rabbit around the edges 1/2" deep on each side. This will provide a huge amount of surface area for glueing the legs on. I cut out the majority of the seat waste on the band saw. The top right picture is when my blade got stuck. My bandsaw wasn't tough enough to handle cutting through 4.5" of maple. Outside I grab the grinder with a very rough flappy sanding disc and go to town. It makes quick work but it sure is dusty. This was actually pretty fun. This is best to do outdoors on a windy day so it blows into your neighbor's yard. The front and rear legs start out as 2x3s and 2s6s. They all get dados cut in them to receive the seat and then progressively get shaped until they are mostly round. I don't own a lathe so I cut them on the table saw and band saw and then rounded the edges with the router. Final shaping was done with the belt sander and random orbit sander. In the mean time, I drilled holes for dowels. This was tricky because of the 3 degree angle on all the seat boards until I realized the holes just needed to be perpendicular to the mating faces. Then I just slapped a shim behind the boards on the drill press and drilled away. Top right: If anything is worth glueing, it's worth over-glueing! After some shaping on the band saw and a few more hours of sanding, the seat is closer to being complete. This was a fit up on the chair legs. I drilled two 3/8" holes in each leg where I will put 3" screws through later. The holes will be plugged before finishing. The arm rests get doweled on between the front and rear legs. I needed a way to mark the front leg holes so I came up with putting a nail into a center hole and tapping a center onto the arm rest piece. This worked out really well. More grinding on the back rest modifying the seat a little more. By this point I came up with a system for shaping the parts. Put some lines on the part, cut it off on the band saw, check the fit, sand till smooth, more lines, more bandsaw, sand, sand sand. Plugs for the holes were cut from a piece of black walnut. The contrast gives an extra little pop to the design. The entire chair was sanded out to 220 grit. The grinder leaves some pretty nasty marks so sanding took a very long time. The finish is just boiled linseed oil applied thick, let sit for 5 minutes and wipe dry. It leaves it silky smooth without the plastic feel of poly. The BLO tends to really bring out the grain. I got a new camera for these pictures so I tried out some artsy shots. When asked what his favorite project was, Sam replied, "The one I'm working on right now". This was my experience exactly on this piece.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, or want to know more about how I did something, let me know. Thanks for viewing! Some woodworkers say chairs are one of the most difficult pieces to build. There are many mortise and tenon joints and compound angles that must be assembled in a way that stands up to high loads for years. This isn't what makes them difficult. People do. Other pieces of furniture may be touched but none interact with the user like a chair. Theres the obvious interaction between the chair and the person's backside, but then there are all of the other interactions. The height of the seat from the floor, the angle of the seat back and the height of the back rest. Does it have arm rests? How are the surfaces? Soft? Sharp? Hard? No other piece of furniture experiences human interactions like chairs. I had to build one. Considering this was to be my first chair, I didn't want to use anything really special. My dad had given me a few Red Pine rough sawn 2x4s and some old pine boards. They weren't pretty but I thought they would do just fine for this project. Altogether this chair would cost about $6 to make if I had to buy the material. I started by cutting out some legs from the 2x4s on the band saw. I was limited on the angle of the rear legs and back rest by the width of the 2x4 material. I left them 1-3/4" square but they looked blocky. What do I know though? I've never done this before. I decided to glue the front legs to the front apron. This was a mistake because I hadn't cut any of the other mortises or apron tenons. Live and learn I guess. This one is about learning! If it is not obvious yet, I had no plan for how I was going to make any of this. I basically put together the parts I had done, held up a board and marked where I thought it should go. One by one I made all of the pieces. The rear is about an inch narrower than the front making some very shallow angles. I ended up cutting all of the tenons by hand to accommodate for these angles. It went quickly in the soft pine. I glued up 4 pieces of 4/4 for the seat, cut out some notches for the rear legs and marked about 1/2" overhang. The seat was cut out on the band saw, cleaned up with a hand plane and screwed to the chair through the corner braces. I'm not sure what kind of pine the seat was but it was a slightly different color than the rest. I like how the contrast turned out. Finished chair - I put two coats of polyurethane / boiled linseed oil mix on it. Overall I am very happy with how this turned out. The chair feels great to sit in. The backrest seems a bit upright and the rear legs could be kicked backwards slightly, but it would make a great kitchen table chair. I learned so much from this project.
This will not be my last chair. Thanks for checking it out. Questions, comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated. This is a chest of drawers I designed and built for our first child. It had many challenges but I was able to get through all of them and I love the way it turned out. It is mostly shaker style and matches the nightstand I built previously. It weighs about 1000 lbs and is built to last. It contains 26 mortise and tenon joints and 88" of dovetails. Finished product first. This is the inspiration for the build. I drew this in Sketchup. It was the first time I had a complete plan before starting a project. Due to the scale of this I really wanted to know where I was going to minimize mess-ups. This should be enough cherry for a dresser. Roughed out the top and bottom rails for the side panels on the band saw. The first 10 mortises we drilled on the drill press and finished with chisels. With 16 to go I bought a mortiser and saved tons of time. It will get a lot use in the future. Dry fitting the side panels and the front frame rails. 16 more mortise and tenons. This went way better with the mortiser. I used my tenoning jig to cut all of the tenons all at once on the table saw. Fit up and panel glued in. There is a 1/2" rabbet cut all the way around the frame to house some really nice 1/2" maple plywood. Anything worth doing is worth doing twice? I totally botched the first attempt at dovetails. If anyone is wondering what it looks like to cut off a whole bunch of dovetails here is a video here. That looks a lot more like dovetails... These are semi-hand cut. The tails are roughed out on the table saw to ensure uniformity and are finished by hand chiseling out the waste. The pins are are all hand sawn and finished with a chisel. All in all, I spent about 9 hours doing and re-doing the dovetails on this project. Glued the frame together. Its important to plane the drawer slides for smooth drawer movement. Glamour shot of the trusty '29 Stanley No 4. Each drawer height was planed do to fit perfectly. My small clamps were only big enough to do the two small drawers. The big drawers were glued in and weighed down with buckets full of chain. "Bacon wood" drawer fronts. It took me almost a week to decide on the drawer front wood. I looked at birdseye, curley maple, veneer, and plain maple with walnut accents. I wasn't very fond of this maple the first several times I looked at it but it has steadily grown on me and I really love the different grain patterns on it now. I spaced the drawer fronts out with 1/4" plywood spacers and clamped them to the drawers. Pilot holes were drilled and screws were put in for locaters for the glue up. This ensured perfect placement but adds no structural value. I was only able to glue up one drawer at a time. NEED MORE CLAMPS! Two coats of boiled linseed oil for the finish. The top has boiled linseed oil with beeswax for added protection. It has a subtle and soft look and feel.
I just love the way this project turned out. I hope it something that will be in the family for years. As always, thanks for viewing! This was a request from a guy at work. He has a tiny kitchen drawer that he wanted a silverware organizer for. The box was to be 7" wide and 9" long with 3 slots. I wanted to finish this in one night so there aren't many build pics. I started by re-sawing some birch down to about 3/8" and planing it smooth. Next, mitered the corners so the outside dimensions were 7"x9" and cut a rabbet in bottom for the 1/4" birch plywood. Here is the handy strap clamp I used for the glue-up. I tried standard clamps but that was almost impossible. I confirmed that his knives would fit better than this. I wanted to add some strength and flare to the simple box so I went with some splines for the miters. I had never used this in a build before so I had to build a attachment for my table saw sled first. Here it is in action: Next I trimmed some black walnut scraps down to the correct thickness and glued them in place. After trimming the splines and sanding the outside, it was time for the dividers. I cut some more scraps for spacers during the glue-up and set them into place. Two coats of butcher block oil for a non-toxic durable finish and it's ready to go! Thanks for viewing and as always if you have any questions or comments please let me know.
I purchased this slab last fall. At the time of purchase, I didn't really know what I wanted to build out of it but I couldn't pass it up. It was so dusty from years in storage and had a pretty significant twist in. I couldn't really tell what was hiding in it. I tried hand planing the slab for 3 nights.. The twist ended up being much worse than I had thought it was, but the piece had a beautiful grain pattern. Finally I gave up on hand planing and built this router sled. In 20 minutes I did more work than the previous 3 days. This made a huge mess in the shop. There were a few minor cosmetic repairs to do. A little bit of epoxy filled them right in. I don't have any build pics from the base except glueing it up. I used the sapwood cutoff for legs and made mortise and tenon joints for the table skirt. I didn't clean the live edge up very much to keep it as natural as possible. Here is the completed base, ready for the finish. After several hours of sanding, the top was ready as well. After one coat of boiled linseed oil, the grain just pops out. This was from the base of a tree a crotch creating some beautiful grain pattern. Tabletop buttons hold the base to the top. This will allow for wood movement and prevent the top from destroying the base as it expands and contracts with the seasons. Finished coffee table. Two coats of boiled linseed oil on the whole thing. Six or seven coats of General Finishes semi gloss poly on the table top for long lasting durability. Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or suggestions for my next project please let me know in the comments or email me at [email protected].
These are just some of the projects I have done in the last year. Most of the small projects are gifts for people. All of the furniture is for our home.
Spring is here and with it comes outdoor activities and the return of grilling season. Inevitably this results in dusting off the bags, lawn darts and golf-balls on a string ladder game. This spring and summer you can bring the fun to the part with GIANT STACKABLE BLOCK GAME! It has all of the fun of the standard indoor version but will make your mother happy because you'll be playing outside finally. Finished product first Try to pick decent material. Straight, very few knots, no chips or splits Set up a stop block at 10.5" to make cutting go quickly This is the waste I had left over from making 54 blocks. I like to work efficiently. Sand each edge, repeat 53 times Finished product ready for the party! How high can you build it? Remember - only one hand can be used to remove the blocks. Happy building!
Well, it really isn't day one. I have been woodworking for a short time now, but I thought it would be good to have a place to share my passion. I will be posting projects here for people to view. Let me know what you think. I love hearing peoples thoughts on things. I'll be starting off with my latest project, a Shaker Style Cherry Nightstand.
The Shakers believed in a minimalist design where every part has a purpose. They used fantastic construction techniques that produced incredibly durable furniture with elegant simplicity. This is my take on a shaker night stand. I looked at some pictures of nightstands on google to get started, but the dimensions, angles and overall look all materialized out in the shop. I don't generally like being tied down to a set of plans and I tend to change my mind on things as I go along. |
Aaron Whalen:A blog about woodworking in Southwest Wisconsin Previous ProjectsArchives
February 2024
|