03-05-2011, 11:35 PM
Saturday, March 5, 2011 (~8 hours)
Had a really good day in the shop today and made some progress on the rocking chair. Started the day by working on the seat, first up was to work on the front and rear leg joint to create something similar to what is shown below (which was made by Marc Adams at a seminar I attended at Woodcraft several years ago and I got to take it home):
To start, I set up my router with the 1 ½” diameter rabbeting bit to take slightly more than a 7/16” deep cut. This will leave me with a tongue approximately 1” in thickness. Hal prefers to perform this operation with the seat vertical, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this, so I chose to rout the notches with the seat flat on the workbench. I clamped the seat down and routed the top side, then flipped it over and routed the bottom. Below are the pictures of the router bit and the seat with the front and rear leg notches rabbeted:
Whiteside Rabbeting Bit
Top of the seat with just the top side of the notches routed
Bottom of the seat with both sides of the notch routed…here you can see the tongue that was created
Next up was to rout the back brace holes using the BBHT (back brace hole template) that was purchased from Hal. This template has holes for the small, medium, and large rocking chairs. The holes are routed using a ¼” bit with a ½” collar. To keep from routing the wrong hole, I drew a line between the holes I needed to rout, as seen in the pictures.
Here is the BBHT aligned and clamped to the seat blank.
And with the holes routed and the template still attached…
And now without the template:
The next couple of pictures show the front of the seat cut on the band saw and the depth holes drilled in the “field of the seat”. These holes will be used to help guide me when I start the grinding process.
I set the seat aside after getting to this point and continued my work on the back brace and rocker forms. I added the aluminum angle and drilled the holes to complete both of the forms, as shown below:
Rocker Form
Back brace form with rocker form in background
Once the forms were finished, I moved onto the front legs. Shown below are the front leg blanks and the “adder” piece and a couple of close-up shots.
Following this I moved onto the back brace billets (spalted maple and ash). I had to cut to rough size, joint, and rip to width and I had to dig the ash out from under a stack of red oak, so this took a little bit of time.
Spalted maple back brace billets…
Ash back brace billets with some ripped to just over 0.100”, they will get drum sanded to 0.090” thick…
I cut more ash back brace billets than I need so I would have plenty for the rocking chair and so I could glue up one to use as a clamping block/pad on top of the real rocker back braces to distribute the clamping pressure and to keep the clamps from damaging the ones to be used in the rocker.
Below are a few pictures of four strips of ash being glued up in the form, this one will be used when gluing up and clamping the real back braces.
This is where I left off for the day; I am hoping to get a little bit of time in the morning to take the brace out of the clamp, but probably won’t have time to do much more than that. If you’ve made it through all of this, thank you for reading and following along, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them here!
Thanks,
-jason
Had a really good day in the shop today and made some progress on the rocking chair. Started the day by working on the seat, first up was to work on the front and rear leg joint to create something similar to what is shown below (which was made by Marc Adams at a seminar I attended at Woodcraft several years ago and I got to take it home):
To start, I set up my router with the 1 ½” diameter rabbeting bit to take slightly more than a 7/16” deep cut. This will leave me with a tongue approximately 1” in thickness. Hal prefers to perform this operation with the seat vertical, but I didn’t feel comfortable with this, so I chose to rout the notches with the seat flat on the workbench. I clamped the seat down and routed the top side, then flipped it over and routed the bottom. Below are the pictures of the router bit and the seat with the front and rear leg notches rabbeted:
Whiteside Rabbeting Bit
Top of the seat with just the top side of the notches routed
Bottom of the seat with both sides of the notch routed…here you can see the tongue that was created
Next up was to rout the back brace holes using the BBHT (back brace hole template) that was purchased from Hal. This template has holes for the small, medium, and large rocking chairs. The holes are routed using a ¼” bit with a ½” collar. To keep from routing the wrong hole, I drew a line between the holes I needed to rout, as seen in the pictures.
Here is the BBHT aligned and clamped to the seat blank.
And with the holes routed and the template still attached…
And now without the template:
The next couple of pictures show the front of the seat cut on the band saw and the depth holes drilled in the “field of the seat”. These holes will be used to help guide me when I start the grinding process.
I set the seat aside after getting to this point and continued my work on the back brace and rocker forms. I added the aluminum angle and drilled the holes to complete both of the forms, as shown below:
Rocker Form
Back brace form with rocker form in background
Once the forms were finished, I moved onto the front legs. Shown below are the front leg blanks and the “adder” piece and a couple of close-up shots.
Following this I moved onto the back brace billets (spalted maple and ash). I had to cut to rough size, joint, and rip to width and I had to dig the ash out from under a stack of red oak, so this took a little bit of time.
Spalted maple back brace billets…
Ash back brace billets with some ripped to just over 0.100”, they will get drum sanded to 0.090” thick…
I cut more ash back brace billets than I need so I would have plenty for the rocking chair and so I could glue up one to use as a clamping block/pad on top of the real rocker back braces to distribute the clamping pressure and to keep the clamps from damaging the ones to be used in the rocker.
Below are a few pictures of four strips of ash being glued up in the form, this one will be used when gluing up and clamping the real back braces.
This is where I left off for the day; I am hoping to get a little bit of time in the morning to take the brace out of the clamp, but probably won’t have time to do much more than that. If you’ve made it through all of this, thank you for reading and following along, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them here!
Thanks,
-jason