Finally my chair for the ‘Chairs of the Alumni’ exhibition is finished. You will have noticed the lack of the promised progress reports. Just too much on I’m afraid but I have the photos and will publish some ‘making’ posts in weeks to come.
'Spare' chair - decent photos coming soon!
The exhibition which runs in parallel with the George Ingham Retrospective opens this Friday. Details are here. I’ve put up a skeleton website about George, the book about his work which has just been published and the two exhibitions here. I will be adding lots of material from the book and exhibitions over the next month or two.
Woven with dyed nylon mono-filament
Stay tuned.
September 29th, 2009
My design for a chair for the Chairs of the Alumni exhibition has ’sculpted’ joints where the stretchers intersect the legs and where the middle cross stretcher intersects the two side stretchers.
3d render showing the location of the joints
I’ve just completed the two joints where the stretchers meet. This progress post shows how these were made. However, as always seems to be the case, the most interesting stages are when you forget to pick up the camera - so you might have to join the dots yourselves.
1. Mortices are cut in the middle of the two side stretchers to receive the tenons from the cross stretcher.
2. The elements are rounded in a modified router lathe leaving ample blocks of material for making the joints. (I will describe the router lathe and the process in a later post.)
This pic shows the two side stretchers in the middle and the cross stretcher that joins them at the front of the picture.
leave stock for making the joints
3. The tenons cannot be cut before this stage because the router lather requires mounting holes to be centred at each end. The tenons are cut to fit the mortices and then tested and tuned.
The joints can then be fitted and glued. I have no pic of the gluing setup I’m afraid but effort was made to ensure the whole structure was flat and the elements were square.
the orientation of the elements to be joined
Cramping pressure was applied across the whole structure using custom-made clamping blocks that fitted the curve of the elements. Additional clamps were used to ensure the flange on each side of the joint was firmly pressed against the side stretcher.
the excess is roughly removed on the bandsaw
4. The excess material is carved, filed and sanded away leaving a smooth transition between the elements.
the shaped joint
the stretcher assembly
In the next installment I will show how the legs are shaped and then glued to this stretcher assembly.
August 16th, 2009
