Wood furniture making is one of the most exciting topics in the household industry. On the other hand, it is a fascinating hobby that is invaluable in matters of home improvement. For example, making chairs on your own will not take much time, but it will make the atmosphere in the house original and unique.
To make a chair with your own hands, you do not need an equipped workshop. A simple set of carpentry tools is enough: an electric jigsaw, a planer, a hammer, a set of chisels, abrasive skins of various sizes. All work can be done even in a small apartment in a fairly short time.
Chair mockup
A ready-made set of drawings can be found on special sites without any problems. Such a set usually includes detailing with exact dimensions, a set of patterns, an assembly diagram and other specifications. If you have initial design skills, you can build a chair according to your own layout. Usually a chair consists of the following elements: two short front legs, two long back legs, which also act as side posts of the backrest, jumpers between them, a set of backrest slats and seat details. First, a sketch of the finished product should be sketched, which will subsequently be divided into a number of simpler parts.
Manufacturing and processing of parts
Almost all chair parts can be made from solid wood. To do this, at the design stage, it is necessary to take into account that the legs and strips should be bent in only one plane and have a constant thickness. It is on the basis of the thickness of the parts that a planed dried board should be purchased. Usually, one chair requires two boards of 25x200x1500 millimeters, one board of 20x200x1000 millimeters and three boards of 14x250-1000 millimeters. The contours of future details should be drawn on the boards. In order for all the parts to be the same, their templates should be made from plastic or thick cardboard. The details must be carefully cut out with an electric jigsaw, then processed with emery cloth of different densities. As a result, all parts should be perfectly smooth, without scoring, chips and cracks. A very interesting visual effect can be achieved if you choose for cutting those sections of the board on which there are natural elements of wood texture that do not violate the integrity of the array. Examples of such are knots, large fibers of irregular shape, and others.
Assembling the chair
The type of connection of parts must be thought out even at the stage of drawing up drawings. Usually, a tenon joint with PVA glue is used, but it requires a lot of time and additional skills. You can also connect with furniture screws, sinking them deeper than the surface of the tree and sealing the attachment point with a special putty in the color of the tree. The assembly of the chair should be started from the legs, connecting them together with side jumpers or seat elements. The next step will be the assembly of the backrest, then you can start installing the seat. It can be soft, but more often wooden chairs are equipped with a seat made of laminated chipboard or plywood with processed ends.
Decoration and finishing of the product
For the best effect, the chair can be decorated with wood carvings or artwork. Also, very often, the tree is artificially aged, processing it along the fibers with a coarse metal brush. When the decoration is finished, a protective coating must be applied to the wooden product. The best option would be not to use paint, but to varnish the chair, showing and emphasizing the beautiful wood texture. Before applying the varnish, the chair can be covered with a tinting primer or stain.
