Thread: A little chair for a little bloke..

Very Nice Ian. I like it.

I was rather slack by not keeping some WIP pics for the little chair, so to make amends I thought I would step through the process of how I set out & drill the seat for legs & king spindles on a Windsor or 'stick' chair. I've met lots of woodies over the years who shy away from chairs, thinking them too complex, so maybe this will help to break the ice & encourage those thinking about it to have a go..

Once you reconcile all those angles for legs & back spindles, & after you've made a couple, you realise it's far more straightforward than it first appears. AWR has just posted an article by Peter Young, showing his method for laying out and drilling the leg holes for a stool. This is essentially the same method I devised for doing Windsor chairs. However, a chair has different angles for front & back legs and back spindles, so Peter's method needs a bit of expansion to apply it to a chair.

To begin, you need a hinged ramp to hold the seat at a fixed angle on the drill press table while you drill. Make it from something sturdy that won't flex under the pressure of drilling. I used some scrap floor board for mine: Seat drilling jig red.jpg Peter used a couple of fixed wedges to get his angle, which makes sense for a small production run where the same angle is required repeatedly, but you need to vary the angles for each set of holes on a chair, so I just use a large chunk of scrap wood which I can slide back & forth.

Laying out for the angles is the bit that requires some head-scratching. The best way is by trial & error, using some scrap mdf or similar, to find the angles that are appropriate for your particular chair. The points to remember are that the back legs usually splay more, and also splay fairly symmetrically to back & sides, so the ramp angle is steeper and the angle at which you set the blank on the ramp is usually corner-to-corner, or close to it. The front legs splay more to the sides than the front, so the guide lines in this case point to somewhere near the middle of the seat (These were laid out before the blank was shaped, of course). The front leg angles are less than the backs, so the ramp angle needs to be lowered for these as well: Drilling seat 1.jpg

Set the blank on the ramp with the guide line pointing squarely down, & drill away: Drilling seat 2.jpg

To keep it from moving, either clamp the seat to the ramp, or use a bit of non-slip mat, as I do (but be careful to keep it out of the line of fire when drilling through-holes!)

Once you've figured out what ramp angles work for a particular style & size of chair, you can preserve them for future reference by using a sliding bevel & drawing the angles on a straight edge of your seat template: Drilling seat 3.jpg

Next time you wish to make the same chair, just set the angle on your SB again & slide the chunk of wood up till it matches. I put a couple of spring clamps behind the chock, to make sure it doesn't move when I'm drilling.

Easy-peasy......