Concordia-ish Chair

[onocoffee]

After the recent discussions about George Nakashima, I was curious to see and learn more about his work. And while most people seem to be captivated by the Conoid Chair, I found the Concordia Chair, designed by Mira Nakashima, to be more intriguing to my tastes.

The chair was originally designed in 2003 for the Concordia Chamber Players. It's meant to be flat-seated and open to allow for the expressiveness of the stringed musician (like celloists). I just loved the design and wanted to mimic it.

Luckily, the website provides some basic measurements (seat height 17.5", depth 19.5", width 19.5"), so working with images from the Nakashima website, as well as The Concordia Players and American Music Furniture, and a ruler pressed to my screen, I tried to figure out the different measurements and then created templates for each of the five pieces.

Made the chair from an 8/4 walnut slab from a tree that was felled about 2 miles from my house and milled and kiln dried by my local sawyer. This was also the slab I had trouble rough cutting with the ATF 55 E.

It's not an exact replica of Mira Nakashima's chair but it's fairly close. The seat has a split that I tied using "bowties" in the shape of characters from the Filipino Baybayin script. The other two tenons are also characters from that script hiding the pocket holes that I drilled into the top when my clamps weren't holding the two pieces of the seat together. I figured the opposing pocket hole screws would pull the glue up tight and it worked brilliantly - except in my panic, I drilled the pockets into the top instead of the bottom. C'est la vie.

The seat and the rear leg are assembled in a kind of half-lap (I guess that's what it's called). The legs and back attach using 10mm Dominos. I'm pretty sure Nakashima Woodworkers cut integrated mortises and tenons for all these parts, but they're true Woodworkers, as opposed to me: "woodworker".

The chair was sanded from P40 to P240 using a variety of Rubin 2, Granat and Cubitron Xtract. I just finished it this morning with a coat of pure tung oil - which I'm really liking.

In the pic, the chair is with the cherry side table I made previously, as well as a Ficus on a white oak bonsai stand.

[attachimg=1][attachimg=2]

 

[ear3]

[member=82312]onocoffee[/member] Congrats on this impressive piece! Is the chair back stable/sturdy enough? It's hard to imagine someone hefty leaning back in that thing.

 

[luvmytoolz]

Very nice work! I'm also impressed by the beautiful Ficus, my bonsai always died a lingering death despite my best efforts!

 

[onocoffee]

[member=37411]ear3[/member]  Thank you. It is quite sturdy. And I am a bit in heft and it doesn't wobble when I sit in it!

[member=75933]luvmytoolz[/member] Thank you, as well. I just got the ficus last summer and started working with it. Forgot to pull the wire until a week ago - that's why you can see the removed wire reaching out of the pot. By the time summer returns, it will be time to retrim.

 

[peter halle]

Beautiful chair!

Peter

 

[onocoffee]

Thank you, [member=1674]Peter Halle[/member]!

 

[Crazyraceguy]

That's a great looking chair.....about as minimal as you get, except for a milking stool. 
I can't tell from the pics, where does the leg fit, in relation to the crack?

 

[onocoffee]

That's a great looking chair.....about as minimal as you get, except for a milking stool.
I can't tell from the pics, where does the leg fit, in relation to the crack?

Thanks!

One of the legs runs across the crack. If you look closely into the crack, you can see the tenon. Maybe it would be more hidden if I used Sipo Dominos but my dealer doesn't have those on hand.

I don't know if the average person sitting in the chair will notice but it now does seem rather glaring to me!

 

[onocoffee]

Over the weekend, I got a 12' length of Carbon Smart Thermal Oak. This is urban lumber that has been fired in a kiln to drive the moisture content down to 2-3% - something akin to yakisugi but it sounds more like coffee roasting to me. I was planning to make a table with it but today I thought to make another version of the Concordia-ish chair. My cellist niece came by the other day to try out the first chair and give me her notes and I tried to incorporate some of those changes today - mainly wider and angled legs for greater stability, less delta in the seat shape and a lower backrest. I also tried to simplify the joinery for the rear spine.

The Thermal Oak is an interesting wood but it seems a bit brittle as edges seemed too ready to chip - whether end grain or long grain. I also get that the intent of this product isn't for furniture but rather for exterior use. However, I'm intending to keep this chair outside. Which is the heart of this post.

What would be a good finish to apply to the Thermal Oak wood? They say that even though the lumber is as brown as walnut, it will grey over time. I'd like to preserve the color as much as possible and was thinking about using WaterLox. I've had good results using WaterLox to build coffee shop countertops. I'm actually shocked at how well it repels water and doesn't fog or get wonky - even after years of use.

I understand a lot of people use spar varnish for these kinds of applications but I'd prefer not to have epoxy level coatings on the piece. I'd like it to be as natural feeling as possible. The original chair I did with tung oil but I'm presuming that won't last very well in the elements.

Thanks!

 

[Rangifer]

After the recent discussions about George Nakashima, I was curious to see and learn more about his work. And while most people seem to be captivated by the Conoid Chair, I found the Concordia Chair, designed by Mira Nakashima, to be more intriguing to my tastes.

The chair was originally designed in 2003 for the Concordia Chamber Players. It's meant to be flat-seated and open to allow for the expressiveness of the stringed musician (like celloists). I just loved the design and wanted to mimic it.

Luckily, the website provides some basic measurements (seat height 17.5", depth 19.5", width 19.5"), so working with images from the Nakashima website, as well as The Concordia Players and American Music Furniture, and a ruler pressed to my screen, I tried to figure out the different measurements and then created templates for each of the five pieces.

Made the chair from an 8/4 walnut slab from a tree that was felled about 2 miles from my house and milled and kiln dried by my local sawyer. This was also the slab I had trouble rough cutting with the ATF 55 E.

It's not an exact replica of Mira Nakashima's chair but it's fairly close. The seat has a split that I tied using "bowties" in the shape of characters from the Filipino Baybayin script. The other two tenons are also characters from that script hiding the pocket holes that I drilled into the top when my clamps weren't holding the two pieces of the seat together. I figured the opposing pocket hole screws would pull the glue up tight and it worked brilliantly - except in my panic, I drilled the pockets into the top instead of the bottom. C'est la vie.

The seat and the rear leg are assembled in a kind of half-lap (I guess that's what it's called). The legs and back attach using 10mm Dominos. I'm pretty sure Nakashima Woodworkers cut integrated mortises and tenons for all these parts, but they're true Woodworkers, as opposed to me: "woodworker".

The chair was sanded from P40 to P240 using a variety of Rubin 2, Granat and Cubitron Xtract. I just finished it this morning with a coat of pure tung oil - which I'm really liking.

In the pic, the chair is with the cherry side table I made previously, as well as a Ficus on a white oak bonsai stand.

[attachimg=1][attachimg=2]

Hi Onocoffee, very nice rendering of the Concordia Players chair. Would you be willing to share the templates for each of the pieces? But rather than the templates per se what I'm interested in is the measurements you settled on say for the legs etc. Many thanks for the consideration!

 

[onocoffee]

Hi Onocoffee, very nice rendering of the Concordia Players chair. Would you be willing to share the templates for each of the pieces? But rather than the templates per se what I'm interested in is the measurements you settled on say for the legs etc. Many thanks for the consideration!

Rangifer - So far, I've made three variations on the chair but only made templates for the first one. The other two were sorta kinda freehand drawn on the wood. To make the first chair, I basically held a ruler to the screen and rough measured the dimensions - basing it on the measurements provided on the Nakashima website, like 17.5" for the seat height. The subsequent attempts were adapted based on the wood dimensions I had available to me.

Tomorrow, I'll snap some pics and give a bit more insight.

 

[Rangifer]

Rangifer - So far, I've made three variations on the chair but only made templates for the first one. The other two were sorta kinda freehand drawn on the wood. To make the first chair, I basically held a ruler to the screen and rough measured the dimensions - basing it on the measurements provided on the Nakashima website, like 17.5" for the seat height. The subsequent attempts were adapted based on the wood dimensions I had available to me.

Tomorrow, I'll snap some pics and give a bit more insight.

Onocoffee, first thanks very much for the quick reply. I'm particularly interested in the dimensions of the legs. I look forward to anything you can share. Thanks again!

 

[onocoffee]

Rangifer -
Like I said, I'm slowly refining the way I'd like to make this chair and once it's done, I plan on making one for my niece who is a cellist. I've been using her feedback on fit and some refinements.

As you'll see from the templates in the pics, some are more recent than others. To make the templates, I used photos from the web and made some presumptions based on the known specs from Nakashima's website. The seat has undergone some refinement as the first version I thought had too deep a delta and I wanted it a little shallower. I've also been playing around with the width and shape of the back and the height of the rear leg and back. Generally speaking, I like it in the mid back which is comfortable for sitting and the back stretcher is also lower so it doesn't get in the way of expressive playing.

 

[onocoffee]

These two chairs are the most recent (3rd) and second. The v3 is in walnut and v2 is Thermal Oak - which I'm not terribly enamored with for furniture. It's brittle and cracks relatively easily and refuses to absorb tung oil and does not like PVA glues so the joints have all failed. Scraped as much of the tung oil off as possible - because after weeks it still felt oily and used Gorilla Glue to re-assemble the joints - and it has held up well.

The back leg is half-lapped onto the seat. In v2/v3, it was a simple half-lap. I was feeling particularly adventurous in v1 and made the half-lap more complex, routing out part of the let to seat the seat in deeper and with multiple surfaces for gluing. Actually, I don't really recall how it was done but the half-lap is simpler and seems just as robust.

You can also kinda see that the back is lower on v3 than v2 with a very narrow stretcher on v3 - which I think I'm starting to hate. It concentrates pressure too much in a small area instead of spreading it across the back.

The third pic is v4 which I'm running the grain across the seat rather than back to front - and you might notice it's smaller than the template. I've been cutting seats almost freehand, using the templates as guides rather than strict patterns. I'm also playing with different seat depths - the deepest is 23" on v2 (I think).

 

[onocoffee]

While subsequent versions have gone in different directions, v1 was as close to the templates as possible. In this post, you can see v1 - with 90deg vertical legs and v2 with 10 degree angled legs.



This one shows the differences from an alternate angle. They both have pure tung oil finishes - which turned the Thermal Oak on v2 black. And oily.



As I'm putting this together, I forgot this detail. The Thermal Oak came in a 12' length of 5/4 x 5.5" - dimensioned it down and used this new (to me) Bossdog glue, but like I said - the joints failed. Hopefully, this seat glue up doesn't. However, it shows no signs of distress. I did use 10mm Dominos to assemble the parts.



This is direct image of v1. You can see the vertical legs, which I thought were great but if you lean a bit farther on either side, it can get tippy. Starting wih v2, I used 10 degree angles on the legs and that stabilizes the chair tremendously. But it has made gluing tight a bit more difficult as there's a slight gap because of the angle. I've been thinking about using a screw to pull it tight during glue up. The cherry side table is a design from a YouTuber Blackwood Decor. I thought it looked cool and made one. And the ficus is sitting on a white oak stand.



Here's a little detail from the v1 seat. I included a crack and used my friends Shaper Origin to cut these custom bowties. They are a character from the ancient Filipino Baybayin script. It doesn't have a full meaning since it sounds out as only one syllable - you'd need a few to spell a word. A friend of mine kept telling me that I shouldn't keep the crack, or fill it with epoxy. I like voids and strange oddities of wood and I feel a certain resistance to epoxy-ing everything, like I see on YouTube.



Dimensionally, I'm not too specific. I've been buying 6/4 walnut slabs from my local sawyer and dimensioning from that. The v3 seat was 33mm thick with similar thickness for the back vertical with 25mm thick legs. The raw pieces in the pics from v4 are also 33mm for the seat and 28mm for the legs (I haven't cut out the back yet since I haven't currently decided on a height).

I did get to tour Nakashima Woodworkers in April and saw/sat in a real Concordia chair - as well as pretty much every chair in their catalog. That was awesome. But to see the real thing was a treat. Their seat, legs and back are much thicker than I've done here. Where my current direction differs is in seat shape, back height and the curvatures of the legs. Not sure what they use for joinery but I'm using double 10mm Dominos for the legs to the seat and one 10mm Domino to attach the back stretcher. Finishing for v1 and v2 was to P180 with pure tung oil, and v3 was to P220 and Sutherland Wells Botanical Polymerized Tung Oil.

Hope that helps. Let me know if I can provide any other details!