Chippendale chairs: Finished!!!!

Wow, after 4 months, the 6 Chippendale chairs are finished and on their way to their final destination in England. Here are a few photos of them in my dollhouse, sometime next year I want to make a set of chairs for my dining room and a table, but not the same as these ones.

The six chairs.

Around the table.

This was the first time that I put the Stokesay dinnerware on the table since I bought them earlier this year, I need a few more wine glasses and a few other things.

The bottom of one of the chairs, showing the little brass plates with my name that my husband makes for me to sign my work with.

And a few photos of my Spring Garden, although summer has definitely started these last few days with very hot temperatures.

You can see my workroom's window on the right side of the tree, on the left of the tree is a huge outdoor room that we call a "stoep" in South Africa. We eat many suppers here on hot summer days and all festive days like Christmas and so on are celebrated on the "stoep".

We had an unusual amount of rain this spring and my iceberg roses rewarded me with an amazing display of roses.

Have a wonderful week.
Elga

Gluing a chair together

Well, here is the promised step by step photo tutorial on how to glue a chair together, for more information on how I made the parts, go to my side bar and click on Gothic Chippendale chair under the labels heading.

 I always start with the back leg assembly, I made a jig by cutting a piece of scrap wood to the inside shape between the back legs to help keep the angle of the legs correct while gluing. I then cut two pieces of wood and glued them in place horizontally to help keep the back seat rail and the stretcher 90 degrees with the legs.

A side view.

Once the glue was dry, I moved the back leg assembly over to another jig, here I am gluing the crest rail to the back splat. There are pieces of scrap wood under the bottom part of the back splat to lift it up to the same level as the seat rail. Next to the jig you can see one finished. Now was the time to do all the carving on the back splat and crest rail.

I then put the back legs back into the first jig and glued in the shoe where the back splat fits into.

After all the carving were finished I glued the back splat into the shoe and the crest rail to the top of the legs, a few rubber bands are keeping it together while the glue dries, remember these joints are all mortise and tenon joints.

Next I moved on to the front leg assembly and here are the only two straight forward 90 degree joints in the whole chair. I cut a scrap piece of wood to keep the front legs at a proper 90 degrees while the glue dried.

Here I am gluing the side seat rails into the front legs at an angle, the legs are butting up to the front of the jig to keep it square in relation to the seat rails.

I then put the front legs in place on the back legs and glued in the support piece where the upholstery fits in. This is the bottom view.

Because the sides of the chair is very thin and there is no place for the clamps to really hold, I cut another piece of scrap wood to fill in the space where the cushion will eventually go in to give the clamps a firm hold. This piece of scrap was used in the rest of the gluing process.

The next step was to glue in all the stretchers, in order to ensure that the stretchers were glued in exactly the same distance from both the floor and the seat rails I once again (yes, you guessed right) cut another piece of scrap wood to keep the spacing correct.

View from the bottom, I glued this in two steps, first just one of the sides stretchers and once that was dry the middle stretcher and the second side stretcher. At this stage I am only gluing the stretchers into the front legs as I still wanted to be able to have the back legs free for cutting the slots for the arm rests.

A set of arm stumps and arm rests pinned into place on the pattern while the glue dries.

And finally the front leg assembly and back legs are glued together. The same spacer woods are used again, here you can see there is a thinner piece just under the seat rails, this is to keep the back and side seat rails at the same level all around, if it goes slightly out in this step, your whole chair will be sloping over to one side.

Lastly the arm rests were glued onto the two carver chairs, here a few Lego blocks with a piece of scrap wood keeps the arm rests leaning out at the correct angle. And how do I keep the bottom of the arm stumps in place against the seat rail, holding it with my fingers for a few minutes, there is just no place for any clamps.

Now the arm rests just need a nice bit of shaping and all the chairs a finish. Stay tuned for the last post on these chairs sometime early next week.

Have a great weekend.
Elga

Arm Rests for the Chippendale Chair

When I made the first batch of chairs I never showed you how I made the arm rests, I am almost finished with an order of six of them and thought I would show you how I made the arm rests.

First of all 5 of the chairs, at this stage the front leg assembly is still not glued into the back legs.

Here you can see the jig for the arm stumps, the tricky part was cutting away the wood on the blank where it  joins onto the side of the chair rail, it needed to be at an angle and cut away before I pin-routed the final shape. I marked the line on the jig with a permanent marker and then worked out the angle.

I then cut a scrap piece of wood with that angle and placed it in the back of my drill press, I positioned the cutter for the final length of the cut out and then cut away little slivers at a time until the wood hit the stop in the groove on the drill press table. In the photo you can see the blackwood piece is still being cut while the mopane one in the front has been cut all the way.

Of course half of the arms needed to be a mirror image, so after I cut half of my blanks I flipped the angled piece of wood over and positioned it in the left corner of the drill press.

Next I pin-routed out the shapes, forgetting to take photos, oh well, here is one finished and glued to the arm rest just to show you how the line I drew on the jig lines up with the cutout on the arm stump. One thing I had to remember to do, was to cut half of the blanks with the cutout facing up and the other half with the cutout facing down in order to get a left and a right arm stump.

And in this photo you can see why I kept those funny little ears on the crest rail of the chair, I needed them so that I could put the chair back squarely onto the table of the drill press while cutting the slot in the back legs where the arm rest fits in.

The funny little ears are gone now! I am planning on scrutinizing my carving on the back again, sanding the back where needed, then gluing in the front leg assembly and then do the final fitting of the arm rest, it needs a bit of fine-tuning. Sometime next week I will do a step by step post on gluing this chair together which needed careful thinking out because of all the angles, there are only two 90 degree joints in this chair.

Enjoy the weekend.
Elga

Lots of Updates

Real life has been quite hectic these last few weeks, but I finally have a few things to show you.

First of all I bought this lovely antique chest of drawers and shelves for my workroom, I am really enjoying my new room and working in there. The shelves are typical of antique country furniture from the Cape Province in South Africa and made from indigenous Yellowwood.

This is the table that I taught at our Johannesburg club two weeks ago. It is a Sheraton style tilt-top table.

The original table that I copied is in the Metropolitan museum in New York, the table is made from Mopane wood and to give you an idea of size the top is 47mm by 33mm (1 7/8" by 1 5/16") big.

This table was the first piece of furniture that I made at our club when I joined in January of last year and the first time ever that I made cabriole legs. I never had time in class to do the molding for the table edge and I wasn't too sure how I wanted it to look either, so this week I took out my new cutters that I bought in NY and played a bit, I am quite pleased with the final result.

And then, I am still busy making Chippendale chairs, when I came back from Castine I found a big order from England for a set of six chairs that will grace a dining room in my inbox. With another six chairs still outstanding as well, I had to re-think about how I made the first few, as there was quite a few steps that caused me troubles first time round. The first thing that I did was to build two jigs for hollowing out the back splats, last time round I did it with a homemade attachment to my Dremel, although the results were fine, I just didn't enjoy the process at all.. My cutter isn't deep enough to do it in one cut, here you can see the front face of the splat being shaped only half way down, after this I lower the cutter a bit until I have gone the whole depth, something that I didn't think of doing first time round and the reason that I didn't build a jig then. This time round the brain cells worked a bit better ;-)

And here are six back splats with all the shaping done and all the holes have been sawed out by hand with a jewelers saw, all six the crest rails has also been shaped, when making sets of chairs it is important to do all the steps together while the machines are set up, you just never get the set-ups exactly the same again.

I refined the gluing jig as most of the joints are at an angle making accurate gluing difficult and last time round I had to unglue some joints and do them over as they slightly moved out of square.. I first cut out a raised piece to fit in between the back legs and glued pieces of wood on top of the insert to correctly position the back seat rail and stretcher. While I wait for glue to dry I always do some of the next steps, in this case shaping the back of the legs at the top where it is supposed to be nice and round, the left upper leg on the glued back on the left already has this done.

Showing the jig from the side.

Enjoy what is left of the week and hope you all have a fantastic weekend.
Elga

The Adventure Begins!

In less than four hours I will go to the airport for my trip to Amsterdam and Castine, Josje will meet me at the airport, what fun! I hope I see some of you at the Rheda show on Sunday. Here are a few photos of the last ten months work, what a learning curve this was. Enjoy!

The Sewing Tables

The Gothic Chippendale Chairs

Tilt and Turn Tables

Rhode island Easy Chairs

Have a great weekend
Elga

Making Bird Cages....of a different kind

I started making the bird cages for the tilt and turn tables. The Mopane wood one is glued together and one can easily see why they called them bird cages back in the 18th century. The bird cage is made up of a bottom with a hole drilled right through to enable it to turn, 4 tiny spindles and a top with an inverted ball shaped hole. The table tops that I will make this week will rest on top of the cage and tilt forward.

I use a duplicator when I have to turn so many parts that needs to look the same, on the left you can see the brass template with the follower touching it. The follower guides the cutter, with things this small you have to prepare twice the amount of wood you need as they sometimes just suddenly snap off with the grain.

With two of the chairs to show the size of the table.

Have a great week
Elga

American Tilt and Turn Table

I have started to put the legs into the turned table post, I am using a dovetailed mortise and tenon for the joinery. You have to cut the dovetail into the post sideways with an inverted cone burr, if you come from the top you will just end up with a straight channel. But the Proxxon can't cut that in hardwood in one go, so I first cut a channel in the normal way little bits at a time with a slightly narrower cutter.

The leg is shaped at the ankle and it is hard to cut these very hard woods with a knife, so once again I made a jig to shape the leg, in the jig is one that still needs to be cut, next to it is a leg that has been cut. On the third leg the hard edges has been rounded with sandpaper wrapped around a dowel. And a fourth leg has been glued in to the table post. After I have cut the 3 grooves as explained above, I file the area where the leg is going to touch the turned post flat, only then do I cut the dovetail in the post with the burr. The dovetail on the leg starts of as a normal tenon cut too big and then hand filed to get the right angle to fit into the dovetail on the post. The slot that you see on the top of the post is for a key made of a flat piece of wood that will fit in the slot and prevent the bird cage from falling of when you turn the table-top, it works like a modern day lazy Susan.

And here is a finished African Blackwood table post with a chair that is finally glued together, the chair still needs arm rests.

Have a wonderful weekend
Elga

Lots of progress and some news

First off all I want to apologize for being so quiet on all your blogs, since 23 April my phone line has been crossed with someone else's and my number is not working at all including internet access. At the moment I am reliant on the bit of mobile data available to me which is rather expensive in SA, so I am really just using it for e-mails etc, but today I just decided I have to do a post. I have made so many phone calls to the two companies involved (I can phone, from the person that I am crossed with number, most of the fault reporting numbers are fortunately toll free) that I am really sick and tired of the whole thing, apparently the turn around time in fixing faults are 7 working days and we had two public holidays over the last two weeks as well, so I just hope that it will all be fixed early next week. Well, enough of that, now on to miniatures.

I am busy making the knee brackets for the wing chairs, the chair on the right already has them in place.

The Chippendale chairs still need the front stretcher, the chair on the left has it's side stretchers in place but not glued, I need to take the measurement for the front stretcher directly off the chair, so the rubber band is just there to hold everything together for now.

I have started work on my last commission for now, a tilt and turn table. The central posts have been turned and I am busy with the three legs for each table, as you can see I am using jigs and pin-routing to make the little legs, you can see the original table that I am copying here.

I only have 4 weeks left to finish all my current commissions, today in exactly 4 weeks I will arrive in Amsterdam for 3 days of fun before I go on to the USA to attend Guild School at Castine. On Sunday 3 June I will go to the 1zu12 fair in Rheda, Germany with my friend and host Elly, I am really looking forward to it, as it will be my first international fair ever. And on Monday Elly will take me to visit Josje and see all her wonderful miniatures. Now don't you think I am in for a real treat?!?! And from Amsterdam I am going to New York where I will meet up with one of  IGMA's scholarship students, Mavis from New Zealand that I met on the Yahoo Petitpoimter group for 3 days of fun exploring NY before we go to Castine, so much to look forward too :-)

Have a wonderful weekend
Elga

Update: Good news, my phone line has just been fixed, now I have a lot of catching up to do on reading all your blog posts of the last 2 weeks.

Gothic Chippendale chair: Assembling the back legs

I have started to glue the chair backs together, here you can see all the parts, this back splat still needs to be carved.

Here you can see the jig I use for gluing the chairs together, most chair sides are not square, so I asked my husband to make this one which is just a right angle without any sides, that way it is easy to use a rubber band while the glue dries. I taped my pattern on the back and line the magnets up with the  sides of the drawn back legs, these chairs have a tendency to want to pull out of shape. The back splat is just loose in place in this photo, only the seat rail and bottom stretcher has glue on it.

Next I had to make the shoe where the back splat fits in, here it is in it's jig ready to be hollowed out on the sides, the front profile has already been routed.

The first back glued together.

For all the tool and bead junkies, a friend sent me this link for a shop in New York, quite close to the hotel where I will be for 3 days in June, so I will go check them out :-)

Have a great weekend
Elga