Dining Chair Build Part 1

The chair build has begun and I’m so happy to be back in the shop!

As I mentioned in my previous post, this build has been a long time coming. It has gone well so far, although I can tell I’m a bit rusty. My shop-awareness is not quite up to par, although the more time I spend out there, the better it feels. My biggest mistake so far is cutting the back legs too short. I cut them once, then realized the angles on the ends were reversed. It turns out the mistake was only on one of the legs, but of course I didn’t realize that until I had “corrected” all of them, which meant that I miscut the three that were initially correct. I then had to cut all of them AGAIN… Yikes! So now they are all 1/4″ short, which fortunately won’t make any difference in the end. That’s the kind of error I make when I’m a little rusty, a “measure once, cut once” kind of mistake.

The pattern routing I demonstrate in the video, using the 1-1/4″ end mill, is an amazing process. When those cutters are new they cut through wood like a knife through butter, and the finish is awesome. It’s a little intimidating, however, no matter how many times I’ve done it before. But the process is so satisfying!

One concern with the chair design is the lack of corner blocks at the legs. I built my first chair around 2000 while taking a class from John Nyquist at Cerritos College (where I ended up teaching for about 20 years). He really stressed the importance of the corner blocks; they add a significant amount of strength to the chair. But you can’t use them with a Danish-cord seat. Chairs with these seats typically have two rails on the sides of the chair, so the side-rail/back-leg joint, which gets the most stress, should be okay. I was primarily concerned with the front-rail/front-leg structure. I therefore have added a second rail below the primary rail. It’s not very big, but I think it will help a lot.

I’ve run the design by David Johnson of Sidecar Furniture, from whom I took a Danish cord stool class way back in 2012. He says it looks fine, although I’m waiting for a little more feedback from him before fully committing to the design.

Watch the first video in the series here.