Day Five- Spindles, Spindles Everywhere

Posted November 6, 2015

The rain is back! It has been a gentle and soothing background noise while sitting on the woodworking porch while working on the seat spindles. At least the mosquitoes are fewer because of the weather. It looks like the rain will be here through tomorrow. Beautiful weather though!

So today was day 5. It was a whirlwind of activity, focused mainly around getting the underside of the chair laid out, finish leg turnings and drilling the stretcher holes. We made sure the legs all would be installed at specific depths, the stretchers would all fit and made sure that the tenons for all of the parts fit the drilled holes. We glued up all the parts, and wedged the legs through the chair seat. We also sanded the seat to the final contour, along with some shaping of the underside of the seat.

Once we got the underside glued up and the glue dried, we cut off about 1 and 1/2 inches of the legs to level the seat. We then addressed the level of the chair on firm ground. Once we knew the underside had the glue set up, we set the seat and legs aside.

Back to our spindles. We have to final shape the rough spindles to some very exact measurements! This means we are sitting back at the shaving horse with the draw knives and the spokeshave. I have a new buddy, and it is an orange pillow. I tried using a pillow earlier that a good friend gave me, but the padding in the loaner pillow was not enough to help.

We took the continuous loop out of the drying box, and it looks fantastic.

Tomorrow is a make it or break it day. We have to get the spindles finished, the continuous arm chair back complete and lastly but not least will be the final construction. This means the final fitting of the seat, continuous arm and the spindles to form the complete chair!

Some progress from today-

FINALLY finished the turnings for the chair!