Finally got the seats back from the upholstery guy, put them on, and I'm finally finished with the chairs. It'll be a while before I tackle chairs again. At least a couple of months - gotta use what I learned before I forget it!
chairs.jpg chair.jpg back.jpg

The inspiration came from this Macintosh chair, and without any plans I tried to stay within these standards.
Mc.jpg standards.jpg

I wasn't real fond of the flat top rail, hence the dog ears on the tops of the back legs. And in retrospect I would shorten the angle of the back - they are a bit tippy. Something I might need to address. We'll see. And I thought the curved side stretchers would soften up the otherwise pretty hard lines of the chair. Didn't care for the curve on the back side.
sides.jpg

I had 2 major problems during the build. (other than having never built any chairs!) The first was that I made an error cutting the tenons on the side stretchers - they were slightly off angle because of the dumb ass way I cut them, so I had to glue pads on all of them and recut them.
tenon repair.jpg

The other was preparing the flat landing area on the back legs for the bottom stretchers. I planed them to a pattern which allowed very slight errors to creep in, changing the angle slightly and making fitup a nightmare. Every shoulder needed to be fit to the leg. But at least I got a nice LN shoulder plane out of the deal. Next time I'll line them all up, clamped together and plane the flat landing area on all of them at once. At least I think that'll work better.
joint prep.jpg

All in all a fun build, and a real learning experience. And for my first chairs, I'm pretty pleased.