Planning

In the movie "Red October", Admiral Painter (played by former Senator Fred Thompson) says to Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin), "Russians don't take a dump, son, without a plan."  

I'm not Russian, but I am an engineer and program manager.  So, like the movie Russians, I tend to plan everything.  This rocking chair project is no exception.  Before I start making sawdust, I want to look at my options, create some requirements, and then develop a plan to achieve the end goal. 

My first decision seems rather simple...what do I want the chair to look like?  A Sam Maloof style rocking chair, duh!  But the problem is that he made several versions.  Some had different style backs, some used different colored wood in the laminated rockers, and of course there is the choice of wood.  I thought long and hard about these choices.  Since this will be my first chair, I would like to keep things simple, and also pick a wood that may hide some of my errors.  I love the chairs made with tiger striped maple or cocobolo, but those woods are more expensive and better suited to chairs #2 and #3.  Instead, I decided to go with a basic walnut.  I like to look of the dark wood and I believe (hope) it will help to hide any imperfections.  I plan to use some maple laminations in the rockers for contrast.  I like the racing stripe effect!  I will use ebony for the screw plugs to stay consistent with the Maloof style.  Finally, I want to stick with the most "traditional" style - like that shown on the cover of the book "Sam Maloof: Woodworker". 

I'll list out my requirements here, but like most projects, I expect there to be modifications along the way.

Project: Build a Sam Maloof style rocking chair

1.       The chair shall be the "traditional" style

2.       Composition

a.       The chair body shall be made of walnut

b.      The rockers shall contain maple in the laminate (alternating with walnut)

c.       The screw plugs shall be ebony

      3.   Functional

a.       The chair shall rock (obviously)

b.      The chair shall be statically stable (i.e., when sitting still the chair will not pitch forward or backward)

c.       The chair shall be sculpted to be comfortable for my body size

For many of you, this process probably seems like overkill.  It's true that if I weren't blogging, I would do all this in my head, but for the sake of the blog I want to be thorough and write it out.  In the next post, I'll start to define the resources I'll need to get started.