Rocking Chair Build - WIP

[Ruffnek]

What sort of shape have you planned for the seat bottom?

TJ, it's amazing how much we are alike. I like a well contoured bottom, too!

To answer your question, the seat will be contoured and scooped out. It looks good and it is very comfortable. One of my 18 yr old daughter's 18 yr old girlfriends commented that "it just caresses your butt." I witheld comment.

His site is thingsofwood.com if you want to check them out.

Hey, thanks for the link, Mike.

I guess it helps to have done it a few times...

Joe, this one will make two that I've built.


U mite want to keep a 5 gallon bucket in ur shop for back up!

Thanks for the tip, Boodrow!

Thanks, everyone for following along.

[sawduster]

Hope Cody doesn't mind me jumping in here with a couple of things. Hal recommends a number of tools/bits and stuff for building his chairs. Of the stuff he recommends, the router bits he specifies for the leg to seat joints are a necessity, or at least bits of the dimensions he specifies and they do IMO need to come from the same manufacturer so that the pieces come together seamlessly.

The other thing is that you need to have a router that accepts the Porter Cable specific guide bushing set, and the set of guide bushings if you purchase the layout template for the back slat holes. I had a set of Vermont American guide bushings I used on my rocker and ended up with holes for the ends of the seat slats being a bit smaller than intended, so had to shrink down the ends of the slats and have one that sorta spins in place. I had ordered the PC bushings but got impatient and used the ones I had.

[Leo Voisine]

This is WAY better than The New Yankee Workshop.

GREAT thread - GREAT work Cody.

MAN do you work FAST.

I work in spurts - mostly slow.

I liked the part about laminating the rockers.

When you take the rockers out of the glue up form - is thare some spring back? Like in a steam bending jig.

[Ruffnek]

Jan 7, 2010 11:23:37 GMT -6 Leo Voisine said:

This is WAY better than The New Yankee Workshop.

GREAT thread - GREAT work Cody.

MAN do you work FAST.

I work in spurts - mostly slow.

I liked the part about laminating the rockers.

When you take the rockers out of the glue up form - is thare some spring back? Like in a steam bending jig.

Thanks for the comments, Leo.

There is a wee bit of springback when the clamps are removed but I haven't tried to measure it yet. I've got the second laminated rocker clamped up now and if I remember, I'll measure the springback when I take it off the form tomorrow morning. However much it is, it's very small. The laminations slide into a staggered position at the ends and that in itself helps to retain the form. For the lams to return to shape, they would have to slide back even on the ends but since they are glued together, they can't...thus a curved rocker.

[Ruffnek]

Jan 7, 2010 9:48:13 GMT -6 sawduster said:

Hope Cody doesn't mind me jumping in here with a couple of things.

Absolutely not, Jerry. By all means add anything that you learned from your chair build. Hopefully, if we combine our widdle bwains, we might help somebody on a future build. ;D

Hal does include a list of tools to complete the project and even recommends specific mfg's and models. I think I had everything except the angle grinder and I got a DeWalt instead of the one Hal recommended simply because most all of my hand-held power tools are DeWalt...routers excepted which are PC.

I gotta get back to shaping the seat and flinging yellow sawdust everywhere.

[brburns]

Looking good. I too wish I was as effcient with my shop time. The beer breaks tase good, but they do hurt productivity.

[dburkhart]

Cody it is coming together you work fast.I keep stoping to figure things out.The six degree on the back legs i have drawed three times i called Hal he didnt return i am going to cut them tomorrow if i have to make a new set of legs it wont kill me .i bought alot of extra wood ;

[Ruffnek]

Day 3

I got in another 5 1/2 hours of woodworking today along with a trip to HD and some shop cleaning. That's a total of 17 hrs, 15 minutes on the build.

I got out to the shop at 09:00 this morning and the first item was to remove the laminated rocker from the form and glue up the second one.





Next, I cut out the shape on the seat front and also removed the clamps from the headrest glue-up.





Going back to the seat, I marked a line to designate the area on the seat to be scooped out, contoured, and labeled the depth and location of the various depth control holes to be drilled. I used a 3/8" bit in my cordless drill and used a piece of tape for depth control. The 3 back holes are drilled to 3/4", the next two to 5/8" and the front four to 1/2".





The trip to HD was to get a 4 1/2", 40 grit flap disc to go on the angle grinder. On the first chair I used a couple of 36 grit, single discs but I think the flap disc works better. I also took a hacksaw and cut off about 3/4" on each side of the disc guard on the angle grinder. That keeps it from contacting the seat while I'm removing stock.



When I scooped the seat on the first chair, I did it outside the shop and just let the dust fly. Today, however, it was too cold to work outside so I had to improvise. I got a big cardboard box left over from Christmas (actually, I retrieved it from my burn pile) opened the top and cut a hole in one corner for the lathe DC hose...a jerry-rigged dust collection box.

It actually helped with the dust...a little bit. If I'd had a 6" flex hose, it would have worked pretty well. The 4" hose just didn't move enough air although there was a steady stream of sanding dust being pulled into it.



Here's a pic of the back after scooping it out almost to the 3/4" depth. I circled the indentations which are the bottoms of the 3/4" depth control holes I drilled.



This was after finishing with the 40 grit flap sander and going over it with 60 grit in the ROS. I sanded probably two hours more after this pic. My hands were really tingling for a while after. Did I mention I hate sanding?



I'll have to sand a bunch more after assembly but for now I set the seat aside and return to the back legs. Those blocks that I added to the seat joint area need to be cut at a six degree angle so that the legs are splayed at the top...of course there is a jig for doing that.



The jig goes against the rip fence and the leg clamps to the jig. The key here is to make sure the top of the leg is angled away from the blade. It would be easy to cut the angle backwards here.



And the completed angled cut.



I also milled the front leg blanks to the correct width for the seat notches and started the layout for the notches on the back legs. That's where I will take up tomorrow and I'll get pics then.

I spent about 1 1/2 hours cleaning some of that yellow sawdust out of the shop...that stuff sure seems pervasive. I guess cause it shows up so well being bright yellow.

Thanks for following along.

[jim@jlazy3]

I'm liking it Cody....thanks!

[Joe Lyddon]

Looking good...

ur doing a great job of documenting your steps...

I got the impression from earlier comments like "I'm going to make another rocker..." that it was more than your second one... WOW, the second time around really IS better! ;D ;D

Thanks again...

[Doug B]

This sure is fun to tag along with you on your rocker build Cody. Great job on the documentation.

For the record, I hate sanding too. And I've experienced that tingling feeling in the fingers from it too.

[Ruffnek]

Day 4

Got in 6:45 today for a total of 24 hours on the build.

I took the clamps off the second laminated rocker, set it aside and then glued up ther first two backslats...they stack on the single form with a dry lamination in the middle. No pic of that since it looks just like the rocker glue-up.

I also decided not to use the "floating" backslat design Hal uses. Instead, i just drilled straight 10mm backslat holes in the seat bottom and will do the same in the headrest later.



Yesterday, I had also trimmed the front leg blanks to fit snugly in the rabbeted notches in the seat.



Now I returned to setting up for notching the back legs. The tenon on the seat measured .87 so I set the calipers to that dimension and marked layout lines on the leg. With the blade raised 1/2" above the surface of my TS sled, I clamped a piece of scrap to the leg hold up the long end, set the blade on the inside of the pencil mark and made the cut. I then moved the other line to the blade and made that cut. I purposely cut just a hair narrow and using my calipers, snuck up on the width until it was dead nuts 0.87". I then just nibbled out the middle between the cuts for a notch.



I had to cut a notch on two sides of each leg to fit over the tenon in the 90 degree, 3" cut-outs on the seat back. After completing the notching, I tested the fit, fine tuning it with some 80 grit glued to a flat stick.





After confirming the notches were the right dimension, I now put a 3/4" roundover bit in the router table and rounded over the inside corner of the back leg-to-seat joint.



With the sled still set up, I notched the front legs 7 1/4" down from the top. These were simple since they are still rectangular blanks. When I got those notches cut I also rounded over the front legs and test fit them on the seat.



The front legs also have an adder piece to them and with the notches cut and the face rounded over, I now glued that piece in between the two leg blanks. It will later be cut in two for an extra 1" to each front leg.



Coving the armrests was next. Hal gives dimensions for making an 8 degree jig that holds the 5" x 22" armrest blanks. I use a couple of 1/4" x 3" lag screws with the points ground flat tohold the blank in place while coving.

The jig is two-sided, depending on which armrest is being coved. The blank always registers against the wide end of the jig.





The auxiliary fence is set 5 1/2" in front of the blade's top dead center and is angled at 8 degrees from perpendicular. All that is necessary is to mark the 5 1/2" mark and place the jigs wide end against the rip fence. The auxiliary fence is at 8 degrees when it's set against the jig. I screwed mine down at one end and used a stop clamped to the TS fence at the other. Works great, although it's messy. I take out the ZCI and put in the dado blade insert so that more of the sawdust can be captured.



I made 11 passes per blank, raising the blade 1/4 turn at a time. After tracing the pattern and cutting out the armrests, this is what they looked like.



And after some sanding and shaping with a block plane and the ROS.



The armrests, like everything else, will be sanded much more after assembly but for now, I go back to the back legs. The portion from the top to just above the armrest joint has to be trimmed at a 20 degree angle. When done, the portion that attaches to the headrest is a 1 3/8" wide parallelogram. It's difficult to explain and one of the hardest portions of the plan to decipher, even with pictures but here are the legs after trimming.



I did some sanding to straighten out my bandsaw curvy line and the marked and drilled the countersink holes in the leg tops for the headrest attachment.



The last thing today was to mark the transition curves around the back leg-to-seat joint, cut them on the BS and clean up at the OSS.





The next step infolves setting up an auxiliary router table to further round over and shape the legs. Hopefully that will happen tomorrow. Thanks for following along and for the comments.

[admin]

Wow! The contour work on all realms is quite stunning. I've always wondered how to do the scooping process, now I know.

It's coming right along aint it? I'd have figured it'd take weeks.

[imahic]

This is a really neat thread, Cody. Thanks for taking the time to share with us.

Mike

[sawduster]

The only thing I don't like about the first chair I did was the coving on the arm rests. Next time I plan on basically running the cove down the center of each arm rest instead of to the outside like in the original. That way it'll cradle your arms better in the coves. I think it can be done with a lot simpler jig, as well.

[Ruffnek]

Jan 9, 2010 12:25:38 GMT -6 sawduster said:

The only thing I don't like about the first chair I did was the coving on the arm rests. Next time I plan on basically running the cove down the center of each arm rest instead of to the outside like in the original. That way it'll cradle your arms better in the coves. I think it can be done with a lot simpler jig, as well.

I think it could be done without a jig at all, the same way I cove everything else. But, I used it and showed it here for the ones that are using Hal's original plans. I think the arm shape is completely different on his new plans.

[Leo Voisine]

Wow this is quite an amasing undertaking.

Nice project.

Very interesting and very informative.

I consider this thread to be a very valuable information source from a talented friend.

Thank you - and looking forward to the next steps.

The only time I have seen anything that rivals this - is CJR's house build.

[Ruffnek]

Thanks, Leo.

No updates today as I didn't even get out to the shop. I had the grandson all day and that's even better than woodworking.

[imahic]

I bet your watching the Boys right now too....lol

Mike

[Ruffnek]

Jan 9, 2010 21:44:56 GMT -6 imahic said:

I bet your watching the Boys right now too....lol

Mike

Yep. I watched "Little Man" (Grandson) all day and watching Da 'Boys tonight put another beatdown on the Iggles. It doesn't get much better than beating the Eagles three times in one season. ;D