Shaping the seat

Happy New Year!

Over the past few days, I’ve only been doing some minor work on my chair.  I used the Miller 1X drill bit to drill all of the seat, arm, and headrest holes.  It’s nice being able to screw the chair together without requiring clamps.  I used my router with the 3/4" roundover bit to shape the bottom of the seat, but was careful to stay away from the legs.  Those transitions will be shaped by hand.  I did some work on the left front leg joint, but there is much more to do.

I also made some mods to my rocker lamination jig.  After reading the Sawmill Creek forum, and looking at pictures of others jigs, the consensus seems to be clamping should be perpendicular to the curves.  I re-cut my cauls so they are parallel with the curves.  Then I drilled some holes to accommodate the c-clamps.  I started with a 1-3/8” forstner bit and chiseled one side flat to give the clamp more surface area.  The body of the clamp sticks out a bit, so I had to drill a second hole using a 3/4" forstner bit to prevent it from hitting the jig.  Here’s a picture of what it looks like now.

With the legs screwed into place, I marked the curve on the back of the seat using the headrest pattern.  I drew the curves on the sides of the seat freehand. Then, I used the band saw to cut out those curves.  Small curves were cut on the seat just forward of the front legs because I like that look.  The spindle holes were already marked, so I drilled those using a 1/2" bit to 1-1/4” depth.

Today it was a cold, but sunny day here in Seattle, so once again I moved my seat outside to do more shaping using the Holey Galahad wheel in the angle grinder.  I’m still very impressed with this tool. It’s aggressive, but also easy to control.  With a light touch, you can take off a thin layer exactly where you want it.  The seat had been roughed out before, but I wanted to make it deeper.  I also needed to shape the front of the seat.  It took very little time to get it where I wanted it.  I ground it down close, and then used rasps to get the shape detailed.  I sanded the whole thing using 60 grit disks in my random orbital sander.  I’m very happy with the shape now and the grain pattern.

There is just no short-cut for the shaping by rasp or file (I wish there was).  It goes pretty fast, but it takes some muscle.  If you are planning to make a chair like this, be prepared to spend a significant amount of time and effort in hand shaping and hand sanding.  I have only one day of vacation left before returning to my day job.  My goal is to get the front legs smoothed into the seat tomorrow.