Adirondack Chair #8: Starting To Look Like A Chair
Seats slats have been attached with maple pegs, and everything dyed and given a coat of linseed oil. Compass stars from layout to inlay.
Adirondack Chair #7: Compass Rose; Seat Slats
Started off today by working on the two compass roses. I laid out the roses on the glued-up blanks and started cutting them out: This makes interesting sawdust—a mix of walnut and holly. After lots of cutting and fitting, it was ready to glue up the secondary points: My technique is to put blue tape on the back of the rose, glue in the points, and cover them with blue tape on the front. This is sufficient to get a tight joint, and since the rose isn’t structural t...
Adirondack Chair #6: Progress
I’ve made a lot of progress on the chair in the last few days, although I’m at one of those points in the project where the progress isn’t easily apparent. One thing I had to do was spend a few days re-bending or replacing a few of the seat and back slats because they either hadn’t bent well the first time around, or had cracked too much. Fortunately with steam bending the effective is somewhat cumulative, so a second bending cured those ills. I also cut and shape...
Adirondack Chair #5: Legs, Rose and Resawing
Made some good progress on the chair this weekend despite the usual competition for my time and attention. One task was to make the front leg supports and join them with the long runners. In a typical Adirondack chair these are just screwed together (and that’s how I made the practice chair) but I decided to do a half-lap joint which I’ll eventually decorate with some pegs. The layout of this isn’t straightforward, since the long runners are at about a 20 degree angle to ...
Compass Rose Inlay #2: Inlay the Compass Rose
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to take this part slowly. There are no shortcuts that leave you with a great inlay! Most commercial veneer is thin, 1/42nd or so. So you don’t have a lot of room to work with, once you’ve inlaid the compass rose. That means you need to make sure your inlay surface is ready to go. I used this maple panel with a little bit of curl to it. This has been pre-sanded to 320. You start by solidly taping down the inlay in i...
Compass Rose Inlay #1: Creating a Compass Rose Inlay
I decided to dress up one of the serving trays I’m making with a compass rose inlay. I used the excellent instructions of Mike Henderson. I used Walnut and figured (birdseye) Anigre veneer, and I’ll be inlaying the rose into a curly maple raised panel. I have most of the tools Mike mentioned, but I created some others, like a veneer cutting board, a cheap MDF 22.5 degree triangle. I also created a ‘veneer jointer’ out of some sandpaper and plywood. I...
Small Entertainment Cabinet #4: A little side tracked, again...
Well, I was out playing on the entertainment cabinet today, doing pretty well at actually getting something done for a change, and then I started looking at the Ebony tops. Kind of boring I think. So, I was thinking, how could I complicate this. I’ve already rebuilt the top 3 times, due to these brilliant ideas. LOL I may never actually finish. Anyway, I was thinking some sort of design in them would give it a little extra kick, or maybe a different veneer. I laid out a few dif...
