Gene Davis
Member
- Joined
- Jan 19, 2008
- Messages
- 95
I just finished making a pair of the classic Stickley design bow arm Morris chair, all in quartersawn white oak, heavy, blocky, rock-solid, a 125-year-old design with mortises and tenons everwhere. I will sell them and put the proceeds into my first Festool tool purchase, a Domino 500 and mini extractor, and maybe the little RO 90 DX sander.
Stickley has a new chair model out that brings the Morris bow arm recliner into the 21st century, and they call it the Metro Morris Chair. It did not take American Furniture Design's Brian Murphy long to do a riff on that design and come out with his plan for woodworkers called California West Bow Arm Chair, which has small design tweaks. I took my AFD drawing for the old classic, used it to build a 3D Sketchup model, then bent and curved and tilted surfaces to take the good features of Stickley's Metro and AFD's California West, ending up with a hybrid design.
Having sweated out a whole lot of mortise and tenon joints in my recent build, I designed in the use of Festool dominos in every joint. Two sizes are used in my model, the 10 and 5mm chicklets, and you can see how things look in the attached pics.
The joints for fixing the curved backrest rungs to their stiles require the thick blanks to be cut with beveled ends to accommodate the bit plunge for the mortise, after which the ends are square cut, and the blanks bandsawn. The corresponding mortises in the stiles require the stile blanks to be overcut with a skew-ripped edge, the mortises plunged, and then the stiles are ripped square.
The little 5x19x30mm dominos used to fix the top and bottom of the side pickets to the curved surfaces of the top and bottom stretchers will require first-degree oversized mortises at top, but zero-clearance at bottom. This, so the parts can rock together in assembly.
I like to use Sketchup to work through a design and figure all the fixturing and patterns. I've a plug-in for the program and an auxiliary program that allows printing of full-sized patterns that can be glued to stock for pattern cutting. The poor man's CNC.
[attachimg=1]
Stickley has a new chair model out that brings the Morris bow arm recliner into the 21st century, and they call it the Metro Morris Chair. It did not take American Furniture Design's Brian Murphy long to do a riff on that design and come out with his plan for woodworkers called California West Bow Arm Chair, which has small design tweaks. I took my AFD drawing for the old classic, used it to build a 3D Sketchup model, then bent and curved and tilted surfaces to take the good features of Stickley's Metro and AFD's California West, ending up with a hybrid design.
Having sweated out a whole lot of mortise and tenon joints in my recent build, I designed in the use of Festool dominos in every joint. Two sizes are used in my model, the 10 and 5mm chicklets, and you can see how things look in the attached pics.
The joints for fixing the curved backrest rungs to their stiles require the thick blanks to be cut with beveled ends to accommodate the bit plunge for the mortise, after which the ends are square cut, and the blanks bandsawn. The corresponding mortises in the stiles require the stile blanks to be overcut with a skew-ripped edge, the mortises plunged, and then the stiles are ripped square.
The little 5x19x30mm dominos used to fix the top and bottom of the side pickets to the curved surfaces of the top and bottom stretchers will require first-degree oversized mortises at top, but zero-clearance at bottom. This, so the parts can rock together in assembly.
I like to use Sketchup to work through a design and figure all the fixturing and patterns. I've a plug-in for the program and an auxiliary program that allows printing of full-sized patterns that can be glued to stock for pattern cutting. The poor man's CNC.
[attachimg=1]
