Replies

1. 
   Napie | Oct 28, 2007 01:33am | #1

   My question would be why not laminate?  The curve is very subtle and five 3/16” laminates would be just fine. That also eliminates the funky grain pattern you’d get from sawing a curve in stock that thick.

1. 
   flairwoodworks | Oct 29, 2007 01:55am | #3

   Napie,

   Your suggestion reminds me of the Morris chair I made back in high school.  The school had neither thick enough cherry to cut the armrests nor the equipment for steambending.  So my method, by default, was to laminate the armrests.  I had planned to resaw solid cherry into 1/4" thick pieces, but the shop teacher argued that I might as well use cheaper cherry plywood, the argument being that the separate plies would show regardless.  So I did.  Bad idea.  We realized the problem after a finish had been applied to the chair.  The end grain of the plywood had turned much darker than the edge grain, making a striped armrest.  That's the kind of mistake you only make once.Chris @ flairwoodworks

1. 
   Napie | Oct 29, 2007 02:50am | #4

   First I would never use plywood for an application like this.  What possible savings could there be?  Second when I built a bow armed Morris chair, I cut the laminations from the same board and matched the grain.  The glue lines were not even visible. 

1. 
   flairwoodworks | Oct 29, 2007 02:54am | #5

   Napie,

   That's what I learned... the hard way.  I does, however, create an interesting effect which I may use somewhere else.Chris @ flairwoodworks

1. 
   Napie | Oct 29, 2007 03:05am | #6

   I have turned some bowls from laminated Baltic birch like Rudy Osolink did.  It makes for some interesting patterns.  It is hard on tools though, I was grinding the gouges and scrapers constantly.  It would be better now with the M2 steels I think. There was almost no waste from a sheet of ply if you are careful with your layouts.  

2. 
   flairwoodworks | Oct 29, 2007 01:49am | #2

   Gene,

   My first choice of methods to create the curve in the armrest would be steambending.  The only other way I can think of is to cut the curve, probably on a bandsaw.  Kind of wasteful, I think.

   Chris @ flairwoodworks

3. 
   doorboy | Oct 29, 2007 04:59pm | #7

   As for me, I'm planning to make a bow-armed Morris for my daughter's college graduation, and I'm going to steam bend all the back slats as well as the arms. The reason is that I have done it in the past and have had good success (luck?) in doing so.
   Laminating would be my second option, and it's a good one at that.
   I would not, however, use a thick piece and bandsaw it.

   "She wrote a long letter, on a short piece of paper." Traveling Wilburys
1. 
   [email protected] | Oct 31, 2007 04:19am | #8

   "It is only through suffering that we gain wisdom"

4. 
   chairmannz | Nov 02, 2007 01:58am | #9

   Hi Gene,

   I made several of these chair and used solid timber, for me it looks better and also as a selling point.

   But when you can not get the right size timber use lamination, I would make the layers as thin as possible and colour the glue when staining, the thin layers give less change for the shape to spring back.

   I use 5% over bending with laminations.

   Cheerio Bernhard.

5. 
   yotonyb | Nov 03, 2007 01:45am | #10

   Gene, I'll endorse what Napie said about laminating by using pieces cut sequentially from the same piece of material.  I did this operation for a set of arched rails on an A&C style chair and even without tinting the glue, you can't see the glue line and the material still exhibits a natural looking pattern in the grain.  It was tedious to re-saw, face-joint, edge-joint, re-saw, face-joint, edge-joint and maintain the correct order, but I was glad I did it this way.  Steam-bending would have been the only other method of work that I would have tried, but that wasn't an option at the time.

   You're probably looking at an arm with a finished thickness around 1-1/8" to 1-1/4".  That means you might have to start with a piece of oak (presumably quarter-sawn?) thicker than 8/4 to get the yield you'll need so the each piece is thin enough to flex without much force.

   Good luck and good skill!

   tony b.