This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
So I think I last posted about my chairs in depth 2 months ago?
The last 2 months were the most tedious, least exciting part of the project. Sanding. Also a heat wave to kept me out of my shop for a nearly a month. And then my wife wanted me to make some shelves since I was taking a break from my chairs anyways. I had 68 individual parts to sand though a progression of three different grits, many of which were small or narrow enough that I didn't trust my orbital sander to not just round the whole damn thing over and ruin the edge profiles. So lots and lots of hand sanding.
I'm actually still in the middle of shellacing, waxing and assembling them. But I rushed ahead on my wife's advice to get one chair done to keep me motivated. The dry fit went fantastic, so onto the clamps. So many clamps. I didn't exactly trust my joinery to be perfect without some assistance, so I put my 24 kg kettlebell on top to motivate the legs to make full contact with the floor while the glue was drying. It's been a trick that has worked well in the past with shop furniture for my heavier tools. A piece of plywood to protect the finished seat seemed prudent though.
24 hours later, out of the clamps, and I attach the seat more permanently with some hardware that slots into a seam I cut out of the front and back skirt pieces. This allows for some wood movement in the large seat panels. All in all, I couldn't be happier with the final result, although the clamps did slightly mar the finish.
I had adjusted the dimensions from the initial plans I found to more closely match other chairs I had in my house already. This chair making guide helped with the dimensions a lot too. The original plans had it several inches larger in almost every dimension. It was just excessive, and intuitively seemed uncomfortable as hell. This is a perfect fit, and in fact is far more comfortable at the table I built than the folding chairs I was using. My elbows feel like they are at a more natural height, and the back being straighter makes it easier to sit up straight and reach across the table, versus the slouch other chairs have given me at it. A very happy accident, as I was I afraid I hadn't given the chairs enough backward tilt to be comfortable.
I have 27 more pieces to go with finishing, and 3 more chairs to glue up. It's a risky trade off finishing the pieces before assembly. But I've found it to be worth it, since my glue ups are always a messy disaster, and trying to finish the work afterwards always shows huge blotches in the finish where the glue got away from me and refused to sand out or wipe off cleanly. In fact, on the chair I did glue up, I used way too much accidentally and it squelched out of all the mortises and dripped absolutely fucking everywhere. Thankfully because the work was already completely waxed, it wiped off easily, and what didn't wipe off flaked off when it dried. That said, I think on the next chairs I won't leave it in clamps as long, and hopefully that spares the finish some of the damage it took. This chair was actually made using all the jankiest most warped pieces, and it needed to stay in clamps for the full 24 hours so that it didn't pry itself apart. All the other chairs fit together much more naturally so I can probably take them out of clamps after only an hour.
Also, my daughter keeps talking about how I'm the best carpenter she's ever met. My pointing out that I'm the only carpenter she's ever met doesn't dent her enthusiasm one iota. It's very cute. She likes to show off to her friends everything around the house I've made.
So now that I'm a chairmaker, if anyone has any political enemies they need taking care of, I suppose I'm open for business. You supply the next of kin though.
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