Democratic Armchair, Part 1

A couple years ago I bought the plans for this chair from Curtis Buchanan.  That year, I built a small, 2/3 scale chair (without arms) and it was great fun.  But I used kiln-dried red alder, without any attempt to follow the grain of the wood.  This time I'm using kiln-dried oak that I'll soak in water to soften it and make it workable with a drawknife - a technique I recently wrote about and learned from a Pete Galbert video.  Hopefully I can get the parts to follow the grain to make a very stong chair.

About 6-7 board-feet: that'll be $80 please ...
The grain on this face looked reasonable - not too heavy on the "cathedrals"

The edge grain looked fairly straight,
though Galbert warns not to trust a sawn edge

Cut off a 20" section to make the legs, but I
saw that the grain was in the direction of the ruler

So I started a split to the right of center ...

... and sure enough it split along the slanted grain.
At least the split was straight.

Here's the exposed edges of the split - fairly straight grain

I referenced off the split edges to mark where to saw out the leg blanks.  I might have split them off, but didn't want to risk the grain running away and getting parts that were too thin.

I split a second length of the board for two more legs and the split had a slight curve to it.  I ended up planing it flattish and dealt with the consequences later.  Spoiler: there was some tearout when shaping the legs.  With stright grained wood, there's little chance of tearout (except at the bottom of a cove cut).

The initial split for the other two leg blanks

Got quite a curve!

The newly exposed edge also showed suboptimal grain runout.  A sane person might scrap the piece and split another, but this wood ain't cheap, so I'll deal with it.

Pointing to a line I drew showing the edge grain runout

After the leg blanks were ready I soaked the first one for three days.  I only had room in the 3" ID PVC tube for one part at a time.  (I did something about that later because not only could I only put one leg blank in at a time, but it also wasn't long enough for the posts!)

Three leg blanks next to the tube

Look at that color right out of the water

And look how much it expanded - these were the same size before soaking.
The 1 1/2" wide blank grew about 3/32" - didn't expect so much.

Surprisingly, it gained almost as much in the radial plane

Shaving the soaked wood was unbelievable!  The wood peeled off nicely, especially in the radial plane.  The tangental plane (face of the original board) was a bit tougher.  But the trick is to shave the radial plane first so that you have less bulk to take off on the tangental plane.

The first peel - sweet!

What the floor looks like midway through shaping the leg

A shaped leg next to a leg blank

Still not sure what to do about drying the legs.  I don't have a makeshift kiln.  Curtis shows how to make a simple one in one of his videos.  I just need to get a couple things - box, heat source, etc.  But I'll need it to be disposable/recyclable because I just don't have room for more stuff.  Speaking of which, I could use a steam box to bend the crest rail.  But again, I don't have room to store it.  Arrgh!

Next tiem I'l get into the posts.  An interesting challenge for sure!