There are 4 bracket details under the seat rails. After building this chair I realize now that some things should have been done before the primary glue-up. Fortunately, I did fit the bracket details before glue-up. They were roughly shaped and fitted into a mortise in the front legs and fitted with 2 screws into the seat rail. Consequently, the exercise going forward consists primarily of final shaping. The hard part, namely the joinery, is done. The pictures below show what has already been done. If I build this chair again I may try using a floating round tenon to join the bracket to the leg rather than the square mortise as shown below.
Here we go with the final shaping...
Below I am using a very fine Japanese crosscut saw which I purchased from the Japan Woodworker years ago. Works great for small and precise cuts.
Note the curved and rounded over lip - a subtle but important detail I think.
I had sanded the entire chair up to 220 grit before installing the plugs. I only had to do some spot sanding at this time. The chair is sanded and ready for finishing!
Below is the original for comparison.
The first thing I notice is that my brackets are a bit heavy. I know that my front splines are heavy (due to a tool malfunction described in an earlier post). I think my square negative spaces in the main center splat can be a bit larger. However, I'm pretty satisfied with the results. This is a tough chair to build! The fact that much of the chair was shaped by hand will definitely lend it a unique quality which isn't necessarily bad.
I'll bet it was tough to build! Beautiful! I'm working on a simple Stickley style armchair. I showed a picture to a coworker and she thought it looked like an electric chair.
ReplyDeleteI arrived here after learning that there was a Blacker house table in the Detroit Institute of Arts collection. The website doesn't even mention Green & Green - weird. It sounds like after the Blackers passed, there was quite a yard sale!
I would have loved to have been at that yard sale! Thanks for the compliment. I think I spent as much time on the details (splines, inlay, plugs, etc) as I did building the basic chair itself. I will post one more photo once it is upholstered. I will show it in the Portland Craft Show coming first weekend May (Oregon). Herb
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