Small Democratic Chair, Part 1: Scaling and Making Parts

 A couple months ago I bought the plans for Curtis Buchanan's democratic chair.  I like the simplicity of the design and easy-going nature of the chair.  But to start, I thought I'd make a 2/3rds scale chair.  This will be similar in size to the child's Sunday school chair I made a couple months ago.

The finished chair with new occupant

I don't have access to the kind of green wood Curtis uses for his chairs, so I'm making do with what I have.  And right now I have a bunch of red alder.  I'm also using cherry for the seat and beech for the crest rail.

The first thing to do was to determine the sizes of all parts for a two-thirds scale chair.  I made a (rough) Sketchup model of the full-sized chair and used the "scale" feature to get the size I was looking for.  Then I could simply take measurements from the model.  But I didn't go straight from the scale model.  There were parts I thought should be a little beefier and tenons that I thought were too small in the scaled-down model.

I started by squaring up parts, ready to shape.  Any parts thicker than 3/4" (such as the legs) are glued up from two pieces of wood.

The legs

From left: two seat posts, two stretchers, five spindles, two legs

Removing wood with planes to get square tapered cross sections on a side stretcher

Then it's on to the drawknife.  Lacking a shaving horse, the bench vise is used with a V-block and some leather to hold the part while shaving.

My view of the work holding setup

Using the drawknife

It's slower doing this in the bench vise, but you get used to it and after a while it goes reasonably quickly.  The wood not being rived and straight-grained presents problems.  On some parts the drawknife is cutting against the grain, even as the part is tapering to a thinner dimension.  I was careful not to pull off large chunks of the workpieces and at times had to push the drawknife or use a spokeshave.  But all-in-all, it went well.  Having a sharp drawknife is key here.

After getting the legs and stretchers to shape, I got to the seat.  As it happened, I had a cherry off-cut that was just the right size.

One problem though - a sizable crack

It didn't go all through the thickness, so I glued in a patch

Before I get into boring the holes for the legs, I wanted to write a little about scale drawings.  I couldn't just use the purchased plans to lay out the locations for boring.  I had to scale down the seat layout drawing first.  To do this, I copied the half-seat layout onto some easel pad paper that has 1" grid lines.  Then I drew a grid at 2/3 scale, where three grid squares is equal to two inches.  A pair of dividers helped, walking off three equal divisions in a 2" distance.  With the smaller grid drawn, I transferred enough points to draw my smaller half-seat.

Making the scaled-down half-seat drawing

If I could copy that onto transparency paper, that would make it easy to mark the seat blank.  But I had to draw the smaller grid onto the seat blank to make all the layout marks.

This pic is out of order, but you can see the grid drawn on the seat

All for now.  I'll talk about boring the holes and putting together the undercarriage next time.