Furniture Project

A little update on the furniture project...

This week we have been focusing on the side supports for the chair - it's crucial that we get these right as this is what is going to make the chair stable. Using butt joints to connect them to the main frame, the outer skin is made more solid. The image below shows the process that was undertook while creating these.


The side supports are made from Birch Plywood and are cut so that the outside edge is flush with the outer edge of the oak base (See above exploded view). The angle at which the Birch Ply intersects the oak made it slightly difficult when cutting so great care had to be taken to insure that the angle was not altered.

A certain amount of thought has been taken when making these side supports as any discrepancy could make the chair unstable when a load was applied.

While cutting the oak for the length of the seat, we made a slight mistake and cut the wood too short (see below).
With the width of the oak being 24mm short we had to think of something to make it wider so that the oak would be sitting on the Birch Ply (the whole point of the supports). A solution that we came up with was to cut two bits of oak, both 12mm wide, that mimicked the shape of the backrest. These were not simply a square shape and were set at 75º.

The angle at which the chair sits against the support.

Template used to mark angle onto wood.

Cutting these parts could have been hard but we made a template that could be drawn around. This was such a time saver and there was no fiddling about with protractors!

We have yet to attach these pieces to the final chair so I cannot really comment on the effectiveness of these yet. Hopefully tomorrow, we will test these and see whether we have solved the problem. If not it's back to the drawing boards as they say.

I thought in this post I should include what our final design should look like seeing as in the last one I just talked about what we hoped for. Also below, is an annotated page from my sketchbook showing the thinking process that had to be undertook for parts of the chair.