Chinese Chairs Ver 2.0

Stu, such an amazing project. What is the liability to you in building these chairs and one fails? Are these chairs protected and shipped carefully each and every time or are they "banged" around a lot?

Oh, do you have someone willing to take and use your sawdust or do your trash men take it?
 
Stu, such an amazing project. What is the liability to you in building these chairs and one fails? Are these chairs protected and shipped carefully each and every time or are they "banged" around a lot?

Oh, do you have someone willing to take and use your sawdust or do your trash men take it?

No liability at all part of the contract, same as last time.

Each chair has it's own wheeled travel case, when they are in use one person, and only one (the coach) is allowed to touch the chairs, they are treated very well, they are NOT knocked around in any way.

I have six 45L(12 US gallon) bags of sawdust etc to hit the curb tomorrow. I pay about $2.50 a bag to put them on the curb.
 
Sixteen front and back legs cut to final dimensions, and six each spare or set up legs as well.

IMG_9559.JPG


Should be good to go.

Now I have to process the wood for the rails and such.

Cheers!
 
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Great job, Stu!

This reminds me.... Back in June I was in Colorado on family vacation and my wife and I (and her brother + sister-in-law) went to see Cirque du Soleil in Denver where they were showing "Kurios". Truly an amazing show.

I thought of you, Stu, as they had a chair act in the show. It was stunning. If you google "Kurios upside down world" you can see photos, and maybe some video. But seeing it without any warning as to what it was about was breathtaking.

UpsideDown_CM23132.jpg
 
It will be the same as the last set, mortise and tenon, but this time they will fit right and not need copious amounts of liquefied epoxy poured into each joint to make them solid. :D

I'll be using the WoodRat to make the joints.
 
A bunch of technical/logistical stuff today, no cyclone to empty :D

I have a question for the brain trust, I want to change the way these chairs are constructed, the joints for the aprons and the legs.

Right now they are using a wedged through tenon on the side aprons, and just a stub tenon on the front and rear aprons. I think they used a wedge tenon partly to take up the slack of their very poor fitting mortise and tenons (M&T). The problem I have with the wedged M&Ts in this case is that the wood is not the strongest of wood, it is certainly NOT maple or oak, so relying on wedges is not good.

I would rather do a M&T that the ends of the tenons meet in a 45 and then the tenon is pinned into the mortise, something like this...

M%26T_45_Cutaway_pinned.jpg


Now I do not think this is a radical departure from the old build, but an upgrade in the construction technique.

You can sort of see what I was dealing with on the repair 4 years ago....

chair_1_fr_left_leg_1.jpg


What do you think?

Please pick apart my thinking on this if you can, I'm not going to get them to move on M&T joints but I hope to upgrade to this pinned joint, I think it will be a lot stronger.

Cheers!
 
I'm with you, Stu. That pinned joint has got to be more resistant to pulling loose than the wedged joint, although I have no empirical data to back that up. You could draw bore it too.
 
I'm with you on the concept, although I'd skip the 45 and lap the tennons where they intersect instead. Should be similar or better strength and easier to layout/build.
 
I'm with you on the concept, although I'd skip the 45 and lap the tenons where they intersect instead. Should be similar or better strength and easier to layout/build.

Remember I have 8 chairs to build, each chair has 4 aprons, if I make them all with the 45 on the end, I can make all 32 parts exactly the same. If I lap them, then there will be long and short parts...?

Thanks for the input.
 
Double pinned or sliding dovetails?

The sliding dovetail is maybe a bridge too far for them to accept as a new method, they want to keep things very much the same, as it works, and they don't want to experiment. Fair enough as the artist is 14 meters up in the air balancing on these chairs.
Double pinned M&T for sure.
 
I'm with you, Stu. That pinned joint has got to be more resistant to pulling loose than the wedged joint, although I have no empirical data to back that up. You could draw bore it too.

Yeah, I don't really have any hard evidence either, but I think it will be stronger.

Drawboring relies on the wood being able to resist the pin drawing in the tenon, this wood is not strong enough for that, I fear it would fail if I drawbore it, but simple pinning with nice tight M&Ts and glue should work.

Cheers!
 
Remember I have 8 chairs to build, each chair has 4 aprons, if I make them all with the 45 on the end, I can make all 32 parts exactly the same. If I lap them, then there will be long and short parts...?

True having them all the same is a pretty big abstract... If the tennon was perfectly centered and the same top to bottom you could just flip them over, but I suspect one or both of those things won't be true?
 
I've got 90% of the parts cut, and realize I am going to be just a bit short on wood, typical, I thought I had ordered enough, but there were a lot of checks and knots in the larger thicker pieces that you could not see from the outside. I figured how much I needed and then added 10%, I guess it should have been 20% LOL :)

IMG_9574.JPG


The pieces on the left will be the seats, they need to be ripped in half before they are jointed and planed and then glued back together.

Part of my problem is that this wood comes in two thicknesses, 65mm (2-9/16") or 35mm (1-3/8") some of the parts are 40mm (1-91/6") and some are 25mm (1") so there is a lot of waste, oh well, I'll just order some more wood.

Cheers!
 
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