Ta da...

And then finally, there it was, curved and shaped to perfection (well, nearly)....

Seat Box. Done.

Comfy, are we?

And while all this was going on, who was fast asleep in his 'new bed'?.....answers on a postcard, please!

God, that's heavy...

Now for the really hard bit.

The plan is to upholster the chair and seat back but not over the frame so i had to build a seat box to sit within the frame around which the upholstery will fit. Building the side pieces wasn't difficult as I already had a template from the frame so it was just a case of cutting it 1mm smaller all round. The front piece, however, was a different story. The initial starting block had to be HUGE to accommodate the depth of the curve in the front leg. In fact, I had to glue up six pieces of 25mm birch ply to get sufficient depth. And that made it REALLY HEAVY too.





And then I had to shape it. Some of this could be done on the jointer but finishing the outside shape had to be done by hand. I could feel my plane dying a little more with each stroke as it tried to fight it's way through the myriad of glue lines that make up a piece of ply. In the end it caved as the blade chipped and I headed off to try and revive it. And then I planed some more. And then it chipped again. And again. And again. And then my arm fell off!

Getting round the bend...

Finally, I made it back. What with a house move, and Christmas, and snow... and more snow... and more snow. And did I mention the house move - and the lack of broadband ever since. But don't get me started on BT. So, here I am writing this from the pub, which has the fantastic service of offering free broadband to its customers. Genius.

But back to the chairs - I'm back progress at what can only be described as a 'slow 'n' steady pace! Having cut all the components for the external chair frames, the next job was to glue them together. Not easy with so many curves around. The only solution was to build another jig to hold the pieces in place while they were glued, and then clamped. It took a while but I got there in the end!



And here you have it, one chair frame....


And here's the one with arms....

Having made the templates for all the main components for the full scale model (which took bloomin' ages, BTW), the next job was making the real thing. Easy, right!

As all the frame components are cut from solid maple, the first step was to make a series of jigs to cut them out using the spindle moulder. This was no mean feat, given the length of the back leg - and quite a job manouevering it around the machine without banging into either the wall(!) or one of the many piles of wood stacked up in the machine room.



It turned out I've enough Maple to make two chairs - one with arms and a second without. A bit more work in the finishing but at this stage, once the jigs are made, cuttung the components for both chairs at the same time takes no more time.

As it turned out, making the full size prototype wasn't half as complex as I'd imagined. As I headed off to TP's to buy some pine, Daren armed me with a sword to cut the wood down so as to fit it in the car. 'I'm sure the guys down there will help me out with that,' I said. 'No they won't,' came the swift reply. THing is, they did. And why? Because at no point did it even enter the heads of those guys down there that a woman would a) know what a saw is or b) be able to use one. So, of course they offered to cut it up for me - and load it into the car! Result!

The concern in making this has long been the seat shape but thankfully a piece of 3mm MDF nailed into position was easier than I'd thought, instantly creating the effect I was after - and making one helluva comfy chair (even if I do say so myself!)

Just the real thing to do now...

Size and scale

So, here we have the chair model - definitely not the easiest thing in the world to build but it's pretty much there now. Just one thing... as it's quite a complex design, the next step is to make a full size prototype. (sigh). Oh, well, onwards and upwards