Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Leg leveling

More dust and scraps today. I think I have all my leg blanks done now and three of the chairs have their legs cut to sit flat at the right seat angle. At the far end of the room here there is a board on the floor to give me a flat surface to rest the rough cut legs on. Then I shim the leg bottoms up to make the front of the seat level left to right and the back of the seat 3/4" (19mm) lower than the front. Once shimmed up I run a pen resting on a block around the leg to give the cut line. You can see such a line on the foot of the leg held in the vice here. This is one cut that is simplest done with a hand saw, it is a compound angle in all directions and the leg is curved. Actually there are two lines as I realized I could take off a bit more and added another cassette case to the stack I was using to rest the pen on.
I just rest the seat blank on the floor and whack the legs in down there using the heavy mallet on the bench. I have foam mats on the floor all around the bench as that is where I spend most time and for some reason the concrete floor used to give me a back ache before I bought these interlocking foam thingys. I put a little mark on the tenon at the depth of the hole it is going into so that I don't try to poke it right through the seat when it is already as far as it wants to go.
You can see two of the seat and leg sets down the end, too. Also the plywood seat mock up I mentioned yesterday for the back rest is more visible here. One more item is the plywood template for the curved leg blank profile with the tenon cut resting on a stack of four more legs poking in from the far left.