Progress with the Trestle legs and the Maple seats

Having completed the table top and the initial frames for the chairs, we now have better dimensions to work with in designing the unique X trestle legs for the table and the maple seats.

But first I took a bit of time away from the production work to repair a captain’s chair from one of my Aldergrove neighbors that contacted me through our Instagram account.  The arm had broken off so I drilled a hole into the base and placed a dowel in for strength.  I also whipped up some filler using wood glue and sawdust from the sander.  It won’t be as strong as the original but hopefully it will fill the gaps left when the pieces broke off of the arm and the dowel will provide the strength.  Glued and clamped, we’ll see tomorrow if it was successful or not.

Next the trestle legs…

Next I tackled the X shaped Trestle legs by first creating a template for it with some scrap cut offs we get from trimming our table tops.  From the template I determined the proper length for the height we needed, I miter cut the ends and then cross cut the notches to fit the two pieces of legs together.  After test fitting it a few times I found the perfect snug fit and they now make a perfect 90 degrees X that will be the part of the leg.  Coming soon is the vertical piece and the tenon through the center.

Gluing the maple seats…

Finally we finished another one of the most challenging parts of the chairs, the maple seats. We picked up some maple boards last week and finally were able to fit them together.  We thickness planed the ones that were too thick and then ripped the rough edges off.  We then fit them together using dowels and clamped them in our clamping jig.  We’ll see tomorrow how they turned out.

And the building continues…