Planing a bevel into the underside of each shelf, hopefully, this will make each shelf appear lighter than it actually is.

Drilling the pin-holes into the console-blocks. Each console (pictured above as small cubes) will be held in place with a small brass pin.

Carving the consoles to final shape.

Shelf with consoles in place.

Gluing the back of the cabinet in. This, like every other glue-up I have ever been a part of, turned out to be a little more exciting than I would have liked.

Finishing the door. I ended up using Teak Oil (”Why not?”.) I think it is basically thinned-down linseed oil, meaning the drying time is measured on a geologic scale. Frankly, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Door frame, finished, with stops, mullions, and glass. Some assembly required.

Laying the glass into the rabbets in the door frame. The glass panes sit on three flats which have been milled into the top and bottom of the frame.

The stops holding the glass in have to be carefully shaped to fit around each mullion, while maintaining some pressure on the glass itself. The idea is to have everything tight enough that the glass won’t rattle in the frame, but not so tight that either the frame distorts or the glass cracks.

Inserting the pins to hold the stops in place. Lesson learned: glass scratches very, very easily.

Completed door, with everything in its right place.

These chairs are reproductions of ones originally designed by Swedish furnituremaker Vidar Malmsten. They are light, strong, and comfortable, and quietly proud of their Scandanavian roots. In other words, just about everything you could ask for in a chair. A challenge to build, but (in my opinion, anyway) well worth the effort.

Dimensions: 17″ (Seat Height) x 33″ T x 18″ W x 18″ D
Materials: White Oak, Danish Cord
Finish: Wiping Varnish

Photos by David Welter, CRFW

The following are photos taken of the chairs while under construction. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to document this project as well as I would have liked, but I did manage to take a few pictures along the way…

Glue-up of one of the lumbar rails. The lumbar rail for each chairs consists of 5 - 1/8″ laminates, sawn from a single piece, then glued back together in the correct sequence. After clamping, the piece will “spring back” a little, but will still be remarkably strong.

Back-Assemblies of each chair, after glue-up. The lumbar rail (from the above picture) is the top-most horizontal member of each chair. At this point all glued-up pieces have been completely shaped and final-sanded.

Dry-fitting the front leg-assembly to the back leg-assembly. The front legs and front rails are glued together, but the upper- and lower-side rails need to be adjusted to give the chair the proper “stance.”

Test-fitting the crest-rails to the chairs. Each rail was sawn and shaped from a 3″-square block, mortised, doweled, then final-shaped before fit-up.

Gluing up one of the back assemblies. This was by far the hardest part of the entire project. Each back-splat had to be sawn and shaped before they could be joined to the lumbar and crest rails, and all six joints (two each for the back splats, one for each leg) had to “land” at the same time. It took a week to get the first back-assembly glued up. Now on to the next chair, and after that…maybe a beer or two.

Chair with glued-up back assembly. Now on to the arms…

Both chairs with arms dry-fitted to the back legs. The arms are left oversize until now because I wasn’t sure how much shorter they would get while fitting those joints (answer: much, much shorter…)

Arms being glued in to the second chair. The arms themselves will still require some shaping after glue-up.

Shown here is the original Vidar chair, built by none other than Vidar Malmsten himself. The chair belongs to Mr. Krenov, who insisted I take it back to the shop (from his kitchen!) to have a look at it and take notes. Take notes on Krenov’s kitchen chair! WHAT? To an unabashed wood-nerd like myself, this is just about the coolest thing possible, under any circumstance. The best I can do is try to catch some of the excellent vibes radiating from it, and for for God’s sake, not scratch it.

One of the chairs, glued up, shaped, sanded, and (almost) finished. The Liberon Oil seems to go on pretty easy - the good news is that it is thin, and therefor easy to wipe on and wipe off, and flows into corners well. The bad news is that it will end up taking five or six coats to get any kind of “build” to the finish.

Starting to weave the Danish cord seat. The front part of the weave must be “packed out” to account for the trapezoidal shape of the seat.
Almost finished packing out the front of the seat. The next stage will be the “Figure-Eight,” which will loop around all four sides of the seat. After that, the “Bridge” (the crease you see towards the back of woven seats), which is woven in a figure-eight from front to back.
The last wrap. Almost there…
The very, very last step: Masking off the entire chair with paper, and Scotch-Guarding the Danish cord. This should protect the seat from dirt and dust, at least for a little while.

Finished! Total working time: 700 hours.

For my next (and, unfortunately, final) piece while here at College of the Redwoods, I wanted to make a small-ish wall cabinet using both veneer and glass. I had a rough idea of the size I wanted to make it, but I first needed to figure out what sort of curve (either concave or convex) the front of the cabinet would have. Shown here is a plan view drawing of the door, with lines for the glass panes and mullions drawn in.

Once I had a good idea of the way the door was going to curve, I was able to make a full-scale mockup. This would (hopefully) tell me two things: 1) How the various dimensions relate to the overall volume and scale of the piece (Taller? Wider?); and 2) How the curve of the door relates to the rest of the cabinet (Should it flatten more in the middle, or should it curve more?)

Once overall dimensions have been firmed up, full-scale templates are made from the mockup. Shown in the foreground are the three templates used to make the bending form (shown behind): one template that is an exact copy of the curve from the mockup, one template with an 1/8″ more curve on one side to account for the springback of the laminates (more on that later), and the final, “master” template, which was made by mirroring the springback template across the its centerline.

Closeup shot of the old-growth plank of teak I bought/begged (mostly begged) from my friend Andrew. The plan is to slice it up to make the door frame and exterior veneers. This is the sort of board that you go to sleep thinking about, and wake up excited about…

One thing I have learned here at school is that when making a cabinet, you always build the door first, then the case. The idea is that it is easier to correct for any errors in the door by fixing the case, rather than the other way around. Although it seems counterintuitive, constructing a piece this way actually gives you much more control over the final product.

Anyway, because the door is the first thing to get built, the laminates of the curved stiles of the door are the first parts to get sawn out. In this case, one small block will be resawn into six thin strips, then glued back together over a bending form to make one curved, 5/8″-thick part.

The laminates being glued up over the form. I used urea-formaldehyde glue, which is apparently very stiff, and and has very little “creep” over time. One down, two to go…

One of the things the C/R is known for is making its own hardware. With that in mind, I set out to make my offset-knife hinges from flat brass and steel rod stock. I should mention that the set shown here is not my first set (that set now rightfully residing in the scrap bin.) Blanks are cut from 1/8″ brass sheet stock, then filed to exact length.

Next, a small hold-down jig is used to drill out the pin- and screw-holes. Exact placement of these holes is critical, as four leaves (two for each pair, and two pairs to a door) will all have to line up if the door is to swing properly.

After drilling, each leaf is flattened, polished, and labeled (top right door, bottom left cabinet, etc.)

After the parts are labeled, each leaf is paired with its “mate” (one leaf to be installed in the cabinet, one leaf to be installed in the door). The pin holes are reamed to accept the steel hinge pin, then each pair is super-glued together for shaping.

Each rectangular pair is then filed into an “L” shape to offset the swinging action of the doors.

Once the hinges are shaped to final dimensions, they are pulled apart, and laid out to scribe the mortise each one will fit into.

After the mortise has been routed and chopped out, screw holes are located and carefullydrilled. Drilling through the piece would mean a bad day at the shop.

The hinge is pressed and screwed into place before glue-up, making installation significantly easier.

Shown here is the cabinet with the sides cut to size, but the top and bottom still oversize. Knowing exactly where the front edge of each side is located will help in determining the final “footprint” of the cabinet.

The final shape is laid out on the top and bottom pieces, which are now ready for basic shaping on the bandsaw. Because the hemlock is so soft, great care must be taken not to scratch or dent the surfaces - in this case, taping butcher paper to the undersides of each piece.

Shown above is the cabinet after rough shaping on the bandsaw. A small, false drawerfront is placed to the right of the doors to give a better sense (at least to me) of how the door will relate to the rest of the piece.

Despite its somewhat dubious reputation (thanks wholly to the low-end commercial furniture industry), the technique of doweling, if executed properly, can be a strong and secure way of joining two pieces of wood together. Accuracy is key, or else the joint will either fail or not come together at all. Shown here are two (out of three, one for each side of the cabinet) of the doweling jigs, which essentially serve as drilling guides.

The cabinet top and bottom, with dowel holes drilled. Each “guide” (basically a scrap of wood with a small “heel” glued onto one end) is used to drill holes in both the sides of the cabinet, and into their corresponding locations on the top and bottom pieces.

Once all the dowel holes are drilled, a few dowels can be inserted to check for alignment. (And , of course, to have a look at the way things are shaping up…)