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Rocking Chair- Part 2 |
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One of the first things to be done was to to buy some wood. The instructions suggested I would need some 3 cubic feet (30 board feet, in Hal's American parlance) not less than 2 inches thick after planing and at least 8 inches wide.
I had decided early on that I wanted to make this chair out of English walnut which is unfortunately expensive and hard to find in decent quantities/qualities. After searching around I found some at Associated Timber Services near Grantham and because I wanted to make a three chairs in time and expecting a lot of wastage, I bought some 14 cubic feet of walnut 63mm thick. I had picked out the wood myself but had it delivered as it was far to big for my car!
Leftmost picture shows some of the wood in my garage - the workshop was already full when this picture was taken - as seen in rightmost picture with a ten foot long plank of walnut amongst some ash.
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To see what was going on with the timber which I bought sawn, I planed off enough to see the grain and figure using an electric handheld plane as soon as it was delivered. As you can see from this picture, there is rather a lot of sapwood. I wish I had done a better job of picking out my boards.
The trouble was that it had been a miserable snowy day, freezing cold when I went up to Grantham and the wood, although in large covered sheds was not easy to see properly. In fact the lights had failed in the shed where this walnut was located and even though I had taken a torch and an old plane to shave the surface, I had not really seen what I was buying.
Caveat emptor! |
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I spent ages laying out my templates on the different boards to try and find attractive grain and matching figure for the various parts of the chair. Having made the best job of this I could, I used a jigsaw to rough cut the various parts of the chair - in some cases these are left as simple billets at this stage rather than shaped pieces.
The back legs however are partially shaped at this point and having cut them out on the bandsaw, I am here template routing to clean up the leg. I have stuck the ply template to the underside of the leg with double sided tape and am using a 2 inch long bearing guided bit. It worked perfectly leaving me with no sanding to do at all. |
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Here we have two back legs roughly shaped in one dimension at this stage
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