Day Four- Have a Seat!

The weather today was something close to perfection.  I am hearing that we will have rain tomorrow and also Friday.  For some reason the mosquitoes have come out and are swarming (they do not taste very good).

So, today we started with a 2 and 1/8″ thick pine board for our chair seats.  We traced a pattern for the shape of the seat, and carefully laid down some lines on our blanks for drilling and carving.  Once we had the template, we cut out the chair seat pattern on the band saw.  We had a fairly complicated set up for drilling the back of the chair seat for legs, and the top for the arm rest spindles.  All in all we drilled 18 total holes, 4 for legs and 14 spindle holes, angles for the holes gets complicated, but the legs were 19 degrees on the front, and 21 degrees on the back.  The spindle holes ranged from 11 degrees to 25 degrees.

After we drilled the holes for the chair seat, we did a little decorative carving around the seat perimeter.  This is a design element for the version of the seat we are making.  Once the decorative part was complete, the shaping of the actual seat took place.  I learned to use a scorp today.  I am again sure that this tool was designed in the middle ages as a torture device.  My forearms feel like they are on fire!  My body is beginning to really feel the toll on all of this physical labor!  Once we had the rough shape of the seat, we used travishers and chair scrapers to finish off the more detailed design components.  The seat is designed to have a feel that “welcomes you to sit” from the design of the chair.

Back to the turning pieces that I did not completed yesterday.  I finished those up as well.  The word is tomorrow we are going to take the bent steamed pieces out of the drying room, and the students that had stuff locked up will be able to see what the pieces are going to look like.  We will have some final fittings for pieces, and perhaps the pieces that do not need much adjustment will be glued up and clamped to be used tomorrow night in the final assembly!

Here are some pictures from the work flow for today-

This is the chair seat top with the layout lines for drilling, already drilled and ready to carve!-

The seat markup from the bottom-

The seat ready to be carved into shape (the tool laying on top is a scorp)-

The seat carved and ready for final sanding-