I completed milling the seat boards so that the seat width is now at 20”. The next step is to mark and drill the aliment dowels. There are many possible ways to do this joinery. Brock uses the Festool Domino. It can also be done using a biscuit joiner, but be sure to use big ones. Maloof used 1/2”x3” dowels and this seems like the right choice for me (since I don’t own a Domino, or a biscuit joiner).
I followed the Maloof video for the layout which is: one dowel near the back of the seat and in the middle of the board, then two dowels 3” and 5” from the front and 1/2” from the bottom. The dowels are staggered slightly on each joint. Maloof said that this arrangement adds strength because the dowels “fight” one another. I’m not sure I follow the reasoning, but hey, he built these chairs for decades and they never fell apart, so why argue with success? Here is a picture of the locations.
In the Maloof video, he uses a huge horizontal boring machine to create the dowel holes. I’ll have to make due with a small benchtop drill press. Boards 2 and 4 are beveled such that the faces are still parallel, so they can be drilled with no special setup. Due to the angle of the bevels on the other boards, I had to create a jig. After doing some calculations, I found that I needed 3/32” to set the correct angle across the thickness of the board. I decided to do this the quick and dirty way, so my “jig” consisted of just taping two 3/32” drill bits to the bottom corner. I still need to get some dowels before I can see how well this technique worked. Here is a picture of the hole layout.
The next step was to cut the leg slots in the seat. The seat is still not assembled or glued yet. This allows me to cut the slots in the end boards (1 & 5) individually. The rear legs slots are made with just two cuts on the table saw. The front leg slots could be done with a dado blade, but I decided to follow Brock’s method and use my crosscut sled to cut the slot in multiple passes one kerf (blade width) at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment