Back from vacation...

[kirkpoore1]

Well, guys, I'm glad to see the forum is still alive and kicking after I spent a week out camping with my medieval group and a thousand friends. I figure it would good to show you what I do when I'm not in the shop making stuff:

First, I was delivering orders totaling about $1500 worth of stock, including 4 Dantesca chairs, a six board chest, and a set of trestles with a table top:

Three of the chairs before the seats were finished.

I've just started putting a till in these.

One of a pair. No pictures of the top.

Here's the Instrument Of The Devil (IOTD), my 5'x10' flatbed trailer, loaded with most of my gear. The furniture listed about rode in my truck, but between the truck & trailer I had another chair, three stools, another set of trestles with boards for an 8' table, three tents, two shade flys, a bed, air mattress, bedding, cooler, clothes, armor, wheelbarrow, two cases of beer, 2 liters of gin and 8 liters of tonic water (I forgot the limes), 240 corn tortillas and six varieties of hot sauce, propane tank & stove, kerosene lanterns and fuel, woodworking tools, work bench, parts for a tool box to work on, a music stand, and a violin. And a 90 pound dog.

Here's the bed, finished a few days before leaving:

The head & footboard are fixed, but the rails have standard bed hooks. The platform is three sections of 1/2" OSB screwed to 1x4 slats. Surprisingly stiff, sort of like 2/3 of a torsion box.

OK, so why was I taking this immense pile of crap someplace? Well, to do things like this:

My dog sticking his head out of my tent:

I came back exhausted. And work was not fun today. Oh well...

Kirk

 

[justaskin]

Great looking chairs. Where did you get the plans from. Are they your own design?
Looking through other forums, plenty of answers but no one has work shop plans.

kind regards
Richard

 

[Rod]

Attacked by Vikings too - amazing set up!

Rod

 

[Robert]

And I thought my wife took a lot of stuff on holiday..

Looks like you had a great time

 

[kirkpoore1]

Great looking chairs. Where did you get the plans from. Are they your own design?
Looking through other forums, plenty of answers but no one has work shop plans.

kind regards
Richard

Richard:
I started with an on-line plan, but quickly found that design to be defective in several respects. I then studied photos of extant surviving medieval chairs and did a complete redesign. From there I evolved the design to fix problems, make them more comfortable, and make them easier to build.

The main issue is that the center pivoting section is only half as thick as the main leg, and that the S-shape on the legs is vulnerable to short grain failure at the top and bottom. As a result these have to be built with wood with strongly cross-linked grain like American sycamore (Platanus occidentalis). I suppose elm could be used if I could get some in large sizes. The S-shape also makes it hard to get a decent yield out of a board. I typically cut leg sections from a 38"-40" length of 2 x 16, which usually gives me 3-4 legs depending on defects.

Kirk

 

[justaskin]

Thankyou Kirk for the reply.
Yes I too discovered the weakness on the cross over. I got around that by using some very old oak from a farmers barn that was being renovated. That posed a problem as it was case hardened with age and wrecked
a carbon toothed saw blade. I chose oak for the lighter colour.
Richard

 

[Wizard9999]

...OK, so why was I taking this immense pile of crap someplace? Well, to do things like this:...

...I came back exhausted.

Kirk

Sorry Kirk, it's the schoolboy in me - no, wait, that sounds dreadful :lol: .

More seriously, the chairs look great. It looks like the design on the circular piece at the front (bet it has a proper name) is different on each one, is there a significance to this?

Terry.

 

[kirkpoore1]

Terry, I wish. She is very pretty, very nice, and very someone else's girlfriend.

The bosses on the front of the chairs are carved for the client on pre-ordered chairs. Otherwise I use a rose design cut first with a rosette cutter in my drill press and then carved. The back boss is plain. Each boss has a dowel on the inside face which serves as a pivot for the front and back overlap sections of the chairs.

Kirk