Rocking Chair – Curly Walnut & Birdseye Maple
This sculpted custom rocking chair is built from 2’’ Canadian Black Walnut with a good amount of curl that really popped with our hand rubbed oil finish. The back braces are highlighted with a special piece of Birdseye Maple. This is a Medium version ( 5’ 5’’ – 6’ 1’’ ).
Features
– Beautiful Curly Canadian Black Walnut form fitting flexible back braces
– Beautiful Birdseye Maple form fitting flexible back braces
– Coopered headrest
– Exposed Maloof joinery
– Hand carved seat, arms, and joints
– Truly a unique and beautiful custom rocking chair that is about as comfortable as they come, it may seem like we say this for every chair but we always mean it!
The Walnut used was milled by us this summer and kiln dried I have a blog post on my site about getting it all cut up on a wood-mizer band saw. From logs to lumber blog post
The Birdseye maple has heavy eyes as well as a good amount of figure, we are able to slice 8 pieces from a 1’’ thick board to get the lamination’s to keep the grain match as close as possible, but this maple had black streaks through it which kinda throws off the grain match because there random.
Thanks all for having a look, you can view more detailed pictures of this chair and many more on my Custom rocking chairs and tables site.
Paul & Joel
Comments
While I like the overall design very much - as an interpretation of the Maloof style - I wonder about the grain orientation of the crest rail. Considering that the crest rail is an important structural element that ties the chair together, why did you choose to orient the grain vertically? It would seem that cross-grain in this area would result in a weaker chair. It looks better, visually, but is it strong?
The headrest or "crest rail" is built from 6 pieces of 1 3/8'' think pieces of solid walnut that have been coopered then edge glued.
By doing this we are able to keep the grain in the entire chair running in the same direction, this also give us a much stronger long grain to long grain joint where the headrest attaches to the leg.
Because of the coopering I achieve a much deeper curve then on a typical Maloof style rocking chair, which = comfort!
I have built several double rocking chairs with the same design in the headrest but a span twice the length and years later they are exactly the same as when I built them.
Paul
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