Reproduciton Campaign Chair

[Steve Clardy]

Very nice chair Don.
Looks like it ought to be comfortable.



Old Missouri Town. Its been many years since we have been there.

Aound 1993 we sold a Morgan Gelding to the state of Missouri, which ended up at Missouri Town, pulling a buggy.

[Bill Wyko]

Beautiful job. Bent lamination always lends to unique results. perfect execution.

[Jeffrey Makiel]

I somehow missed this post. That looks neat. It also looks very difficult to build.

Nice job...Jeff

[Mike Henderson]

An excellent reference book on Campaign Furniture is British Campaign Furniture: Elegance Under Canvas, 1740-1914 by Nicholas A Brawer. This is a book that you would want to try to find in a library, as it is running around $300-500 on ABE.com. I have had it for a number of years and read it several times. It covers the evolution of portable furniture from camp chairs to portable showers and vanities. Of course for some of this stuff you need a pile of bearers and servants.

Lots of good period pictures and modern photographs of many different pieces.

Attached is a fairly low quality scan on the cover.

Roman

Wow! $300-$500 for that book. Amazing. I bought it back when it was cheap. For that price, I may put it up for sale.

Don- that's a great job on the chair. I'm going to keep a pointer to this thread so I can build one some day. What weight did it come out to be?

Mike

[Don C Peterson]

Well, After I spent some time noodling on the problem of geometry, I've got this thing figured out. I cut down the height of the back and moved the pivot point of the back where it intersects the leg and voila, the seat can be lowered, the back tilts backward just a bit more and the chair is really comfortable.

Based on those findings I took the time to draw up plans in Sketchup. I'm starting to make several more chairs based on these plans because I've made a few more tweaks to make it a bit more comfortable and functional. For instance the rear seat rung is now just a bit lower than the front and the back slats are arranged so that when the chair is folded the bottom rungs fit between them instead of hitting them. This allows the chair to fold up just a bit more compactly. I would post the plans but the file exceeds the size limitation for SMC...

I'll post some pics after I get the next chair(s) finished.

Mike, I don't know exactly how heavy the chair is since I don't have a working scale at my house. However, it is lighter than several other beach chairs that we have. It's not quite as light as a Coleman camp chair I have though.

[julie Graf]

that is very nice, don.

nice job figuring it out from the picture.

[Don C Peterson]

Even after zipping the file, the plans are too large to post...

Anyway, here are some exported JPG images of the model.

Chair.jpg Back.jpg Arm.jpg InsideLegAssemblyJPG.jpg OutsideLegAssembly.jpg

[Tim Thomas]

Don, I think it is incredibly generous of you to share these detailed images. These are some of the best plans I've seen and it is obvious that you put a lot of effort into figuring out the dimensions and doing a bunch of work both on the computer and in prototypes. Superbly done, and again, very selfless of you to post this up publicly for all to see and learn from. I think I'm going to have to learn how to make some bent laminations ...

[Mike Henderson]

Yes, thank you for posting those plans. I've downloaded them so that when I get around to building one, I'll have your plans to start from.

Thanks for sharing.

Mike

[Don C Peterson]

You are welcome, but since I would never have attempted, much less completed this project without help and enouragement from folks here at SMC, sharing these plans is not such a major act of generosity compared to what I've recieved.

Maybe in a few years I'll get to the point were I'll attempt to put some of Mike's tutorials on carving or inlays to use...

I'm still kind of muddling through the in's and out's of SU, so the plans are far from perfect, but I hope they are good enough to get the point across. For some reason I couldn't get the compound curve at the top of the arms, but it should look like the bottom of the arm. I tried the same technique that I used for the bottom but it just wouldn't work, go figure...

[Jerry Olexa]

VERY nice work.....EXCELLENT!!!!

[Don C Peterson]

Now I've got a bit of a problem. I've recieved several requests to sell these chairs. The problem is I have no idea what I should charge for them. I'm not looking to make a living making chairs, but I also want to make it worth my time...

Once the waste is taken into account, these chairs probably have about $35 - $40 worth of materials in them. But that doesn't count any amortization of tools and the initial setup costs of the steamer and forms etc...

To complicate matters, I can't even estimate my hours of work since to this point, a great deal of time I've spent building the chair was in setting up the infrastructure items and building prototypes.

I also can't find any comparable chairs for sale.

Basically, I just pulled a figure of about $250 out of my posterior, and sometimes that seems low to me but then another part of me says "that's WAY too much for a folding chair."

Any advice?

[Michael Sobik]

Too cool. I really like that design. Have any pictures of the completed chair with fabric and maybe someone sitting it it?

[Tim Thomas]

Basically, I just pulled a figure of about $250 out of my posterior, and sometimes that seems low to me but then another part of me says "that's WAY too much for a folding chair."

Any advice?

I've never sold a piece of furniture, or anything else I have ever made for that matter, but that price is LOOOOOOOOW! Way low. I mean if you really want to sell it just to get rid of it, then OK, but otherwise I think the effort you put into it would command a premium price.

This one is $630 and I don't think it is nearly as graceful or interesting as the one you built:
http://www.nauticalhome.com/product-...Chair-3218.htm

I'm just sitting here thinking to myself, if I had gone through all that work to research the piece, make prototypes to work out the dimensions, and then take on some bent laminations to boot, I would have no qualms whatsoever in pricing that chair for at least $500. Plus, I can't find any similar item for sale anywhere. There are other "campaign" chairs out there, but most of them just look like standard "director's" chairs made out of nice wood with leather seats. I think what you have made is unique, graceful and a superb combination of woodworking, mechanical engineering and art. Don't sell yourself short on that.

I don't know if you can ever really get people to pay what a handmade item like this is truely "worth", but that doesn't mean you can't try.

(By the way, if you wind up putting a leather seat on that bad boy, you should increase the price by at least 4 times the cost of the leather.)

[Roman Hruska]

Mike: The price shocked the h*** out of me also. I thought about scanning the book and then selling it, but decided that I would rather hang on to it.

Don: What are you using for your hardware? Having made things for the reenactor/Living History market before I know that this is frequently the hardest part.

Nice piece of work.

Roman