This is the last of my Shaker chair exploratory. But 12 chairs in, I learned enough from this one to think that the exploring isn’t over. Except for the stretchers, this chair was made from a single piece of 8/4 tiger maple that I got from Irion Lumber in Pennsylvania.

One adventure was turning the stretchers. My normal practice is to bake stretcher blanks to shrink them before turning so that after glue-up they’ll expand for a super tight fit. But with figured wood, things are different. The wacky grain patterns of tiger maple dispel moisture in a random way. As a result each blank came out of the oven slightly bent. My spindle steady did its best to make turning possible, but sometimes its O-ring tires got so hot they practically melted. Next time I won’t bake figured wood.

Another issue was the knobs for topping the front leg posts. Normally I’ve turned them with grain running between lathe centers. That’s fine for stock that won’t be colored, but it leaves an end-grain upper suface that’s a sponge for dye. With nice tiger maple I wanted to avoid dark knob tops, so I turned the knobs across the grain. To make this easier I first rounded the blanks with my band saw before putting them on my screw chuck.

The chair was dyed using Moser’s golden amber maple. I did one coat with fairly intense dye, followed by another with diluted dye to pop the grain of the figured areas. This was followed by one coat of Minwax Antique Oil Finish, a good penetrator used to accent the figure a little more. That was followed by five coats of a tung oil/varnish/linseed oil mixture rubbed on with 0000 steel wool.

 

 

 

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