Sunday, July 25, 2010

After weeks of sulking...

...because I was told that my projects were too messy to be worked on out in the garden because it made it too embarrassing to have freinds over, I finally went in to the woodshop and began a project. I have been using a chair piled with pillows and folded up blankets to sit on while weaving. It's time to actually build a taller chair. This chair will be based more on the welsh stick chair, images, instructions for the adventurous, than a windsor chair, the style just suits me, personally better.
Several weeks ago I went to the log yard and picked up some elm that Joolz had set aside for me.
He harvests trees in Portland, mills them and resells them to be used for building projects. Yet another Portland "green" company, and totally to my liking.
He also had a nice piece of oak cut off that I also took thinking it might be nice for making crest rails. I unloaded it off the top of the car and split it out on the sidewalk.
Today I used the draw knife and shaving horse to rough out the legs. It's definitely not as nice as working on the shaving horse out in the garden, but it's an age old tradition to suffer for one's art;-D
The seat will be some 26"/66cm above the floor, a good 9"/23cm higher than most chairs. I've already determined that I would like the leg tenons to be a full inch/3cm in diameter where they pierce the seat instead of the 5/8" /1.6cm of the previous 2 chairs, chair 1, chair 2. This means that I will need a new tenon shaver as well. Based on my Elia Bizzarri tenon rounder and using a scrap of maple from building the face plate for my bench vise,( for some reason I never did translate that particular entry into english, if you don't do german, just enjoy the pictures). The blade will be a Kunz spokeshave blade. I'll let you know how it turns out. Using a taper reamer in maple is a bit of a task, but didn't take as long as I feared.
More later as progress warrants.

1 comment:

Lars said...

I have yet to take the opportunity to attend one of Brian Boggs's workshops, but really want to. I did buy one of his spokeshaves, and love it. I like the idea that this chair tilts the sitter forward and plan on incorporating it into my weaver's chair.