This is the first time I ever built a set of dining chairs. I now understand why chairs are so expensive - it's like building a more complicated table, but having to do many exactly the same.
Recap of this journey:
- Customer asked me to build them a table with painted base
- Since base was to be painted, I selected poplar
- When I prepared the lumber, I found a bunch of mineral staining that I (and my wife) found beautiful
- So I kept that batch of poplar for myself and built a new dining table for our sunroom
- Since that was poplar, we decided to build a new bench and chairs too... this post is mainly about the chairs
- All the chairs, bench, and table were somewhat designed on the fly, with some scratch ideas in a notebook along the way
A few callouts about building these chairs:
- The large 'condor tails' connecting front to back legs were entirely unnecessary, but I wanted to try it out
- I used an old delta tenon jig at the table saw to cut the tail in the stretcher, and then the shoulder cut using table saw sled
- For the sockets, I set up stop blocks so I could nibble away at the table saw.
- Since my blade is not a dovetail blade, I cut just shy of the desired depth and finished with a chisel
- After shape cutting all parts, I clamp them all together to sand and fine tune so that they're all identical
- For contouring the back rest, I made some curved guide blocks that I could follow with angle grinder and then sanders
As with other recent projects, my son helps me more and more. He's 16 now and getting quite strong. Smart kid too. He worked the router, the band saw, table saw, helped me glue up, and did a lot of sanding during this project.
Anyways, my wife gets home from a weekend away tomorrow and I think she'll be happy with how the sunroom looks now.
Edit: I tried to up my photo game a bit this time around, but please forgive the wrinkles in the white sheet
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