Starting to Wrap Up

While we still have a few good weeks of hard work ahead of us, the title of this entry has more to do with the fact that my little chairs are nearly ready to receive their danish cord wrap.  This has been the last couple weeks.  The joinery for the chairs went really well.  I was pleased to learn that compound angled joints are really not terribly difficult.  I tackled one angle, then the second and once combined you have your joint!

 

We've gone down to the beach and had a fire for elephants a couple times in the last few weeks.

But now back to work.

The seat rails were cut to shape on the bandsaw and then refined, corners rounded over and a slight scallop put in the seat so that when you sit on it and the cord flexes, you don't feel the frame beneath you.  It's hard to see but below, where the tape is is sort of the low spot.

You can begin to see it looks like a chair even though the shaping that will make it a nice chair has yet to be done.

I spent a couple days with a spoke shave and file, making all of the edges nice, pillowing some faces and giving it the attention that sets something hand-made apart from mass produced stuff.

Don and I have had an ongoing battle of wits (or dimwits if you ask anyone else) on the chalkboards throughout the school this year.  Don got me with a doozy as seen above.  This chalkboard is in the bathroom and having neither written, nor said what you see I was surprised when people began asking me how I could say something like that to Don.  For the record, Don's workmanship is excellent and he gets it done at his own thoughtful pace.

As promised in the beginning, the chairs are ready to be wrapped, almost.  First is the pre-wrap. which as you can see below come pre-glue-up.  The method I'm using to wrap my chair involves L shaped nails and it allows me to wrap the front and back seat rails before I assemble the chair.  This makes the process much simpler.

 

There are more wraps on the front (the longer pieces) than on the back ones, in order to make up the difference in length between the two.  Once the other pieces are shellacked and waxed they are all organized, ready to begin glu-ups.

The fronts come out of the clamp looking good, next the backs and then join the two together.  That's up on Monday.  Tomorrow we're going to the Skookumchuck rapids for a nice walk and a spectacle of nature.