The Chair – The Fingers (Part 1)

This is the joint that I have been fiddle-faddling about. I have not been in the workshop for nearly two weeks but managed a few hours off this weekend and decided to make a start.

A blank canvas below …

Time was initially spent truing the ends. They need to be perfectly square and parallel so that the fingers can be accurately traced to the arm sections.

Below: checking the ends are parallel …

Once the ends were completed, the placement of the fingers was drawn in … and checked … and checked …

Finally I was satisfied that there was no error (famous last words!), and the drill guide was positioned …

… and the holes drilled …

As with the lay out of dovetails, the outlines were drawn on both sides of the board. We were off to a good start as the holes split the line on the backside indicating that they were perpendicular (and that my efforts to plane the opposing sides parallel were successful).

Time to saw out the fingers. The saw guide was clamped on …

… and the deep-plate Wenzloff tenon saw went to work.

Four fingers …

I would rate these 99% great on this side …

And about 90% on this side …

All the shoulders were perpendicular …

Some tuning was necessary to clean up the shoulders. This was done with a plane-making float. Care was taken to ensure that the shoulders remained perfectly square. I was less concerned about the final width of the fingers and more concerned that they were square. Any differences in size would be reduced when carving the backrest at a curve.

The final result looked good.

Now to transfer the fingers to the arm boards. Again, this is similar to transferring dovetails, except that one brings faces together rather than a face and an end.

Transferring the marks was not easy as the shoulders are deep – too deep for a marking knife. I resorted to using a sharp scratch awl and a chisel.

It occurred to me that my blue tape method could aid here, not only in marking the finger outline, but also in making it possible to check the accuracy of the transfer by aligning the parts.

Below: prior to marking out …

The fingers marked out …

One last context picture for now – how the parts will come together.

Lots still to do before the parts come together …. next weekend.

Regards from Perth

Derek

February 2014