Adirondack Chair

I decided to make my husband an Adirondack Chair for Christmas.  I had a purchased plan, plus 3 or 4 others from magazines and the internet.  From my online research, many people said the "typical" Adirondack chair, or Muskoka chair, as it's known as around here, was hard to get out of.  They do sit quite low to the ground with a steep back slant to the seat.  Since I wanted my husband to be able to get back out of the chair (for obvious reasons), I decided on the "improved design" Norm Abram Adirondack Chair in Popular Woodworking Magazine, and also at their website.

The article, with parts list and step-by step directions is here:    Popular Woodworking article: Norm Abrams Adirondack Chair

 I used rough pine for the chair, which meant I needed to pick out pieces without loose knots, and with areas that looked clear as possible for the parts I had to make, and then joint and plane them to size. The thickness of all the parts is 3/4", the legs, front crosspiece and seat slats are rectangular, with no need to make fancy cuts on.  The tops of the back slats, the arms, arm brackets, side members and rear crosspieces need to be cut to shape.  I used my jigsaw but a bandsaw would be easier (I don't have one yet).

Jigsaw cutting the side member:

 

All the pieces laid out:

 

Closer photo of just the back slats:

 

The chair is put together with screws as well as some carriage bolts.  For the screws I plug them afterward, so each place a screw goes needs a hole for the screw as well as a larger hole for the plug.

**This "how-to" will be a blog post in the near future**

These next two photos show the arm with it's three large holes and the front crosspiece, lower rear crosspiece and leg with two large holes (on each side), waiting for the plugs to go in:

 

 

Now you can see the upper rear crosspiece is bolted on and the holes are all plugged in the arms, legs and front crosspiece:

Side view:

While the chair was at this stage I painted it with 3 coats of exterior house paint.  After making similar child size chairs ( here ) I realized it would be much easier to paint the slats before they were attached to the chair. It's hard to get the paint in between the slats, so the chair base was painted and just the backs and sides of the back slats and seat slats.  I couldn't paint the fronts yet because the screws still had to be attached and plugged.

All the base painted and back slats (with just their backs and sides painted) attached:

 

Two views of the chair all painted:

 

 

Since my husband is a Montreal Canadiens fan, I decided to put the team logo on the chair.  I found it online and printed it on my printer to the size I needed.  Then I cut it out and traced around the parts to transfer it to the chair. I used acrylic craft paints for the white and blue, and some painters tape to keep the lines straight.

Here it is:

 

This is a very comfortable chair and he was happy to get it as his present!

Tea-light candle holder

I decided to make my friend a tea-light holder out of worn barn wood for Christmas.  She has a beautiful country farm house and this will fit in with her decor.

I found a piece of wood in my shop about 3 3/4" wide and an inch thick.  I cut a piece about 16" long.

Then I cut two pieces about 1" wide from the same board for "feet."

I gathered up my tea-lights and traced their circular base centered on the wood so that I could fit 5 candles along the width.

The circles were cut out with my little trim router, to a depth of about 1/2 that of the metal base of the candle. (You could use a drill press with a forstner bit, but I didn't have the right size for that, so "I did it my way!")

I used my table saw to cut out notches for the feet. I ran it by a few times until it was the correct width.

(You could use a dado blade, but I was too lazy to set it up, so "I did it my way!")

I glued in the feet and gave the whole thing a touch-up sanding only since I want this to remain rustic looking.

I hope she likes it!

Plywood storage boxes

Everyone can use some more storage containers!  I made these for my husband, so he could store things in the garage and just grab the box he needed when working on something.

The boxes are made of  1/2" plywood, and not the good smooth stuff.  There are knots and grooves, etc. but I didn't think that mattered for this purpose. These measure 12" x 16"  when finished, but of course they could be made in any size. The end pieces are 12" x 6" deep and the side pieces are 16" x 6" deep.  The bottom is 1/4" plywood and is about 11 1/2" x 15 1/2" and fits into a groove in the sides and ends.

I joined them with glued box joints.  Each "finger" is 1/2" wide and 1/2" deep.  I used a dado blade on the tablesaw and a homemade box-joint jig.  I won't go into how to make one now, there are plans on the internet, although maybe in the future I'll do my own tutorial on that. The wood piece is clamped to the jig and then the whole jig slides over the saw blade to cut one space at a time.  The wood piece is then unclamped, moved over, and run across the blade again.  I always use a scrap piece behind the good piece, otherwise there is usually tearout, especially on something like plywood. What is important is that each piece fits into the other, not too tightly that you have to hammer it together, but not too loosely so that it would fall apart without the glue.  I always practice on scrap wood until I can get a good fit.

For the ends of the boxes I decided to cut out handle holes.  They are centered on the end piece and down about 1" from the top and make about a 4" wide total hole. This is done on the drill press with a hole cutter.  The one I used was 1 1/4" diameter, here it is ready to cut a hole in one end of the handle.  The end piece is clamped to the drill press table with a piece of scrap wood underneath.

 

Here it is started:

After the one hole is cut, just move over and cut the other one. Here's the two holes cut out.  After that you run your jigsaw between them on the top and bottom connecting lines.

There is a 1/4" groove run across the bottom of all the pieces, up 1/2" from the bottom, that will hold in the bottom 1/4" plywood. That I did on the router table using a 1/4" straight bit.  I made three boxes at the same time, so there are 6 sides and 6 ends and 3 bottoms.   I sanded and then put a couple coats of shellac on the insides of all the 15 pieces (I didn't shellac the part below the groove, since that will be on the outside of the box and therefore painted the same colour as the box.

 

The boxes are then glued up and tightly clamped for a couple hours.  I used 8 clamps.  As woodworkers say, one can never have too many clamps!

 

 

  I painted the outside of each of the boxes a different colour.

These boxes are very sturdy and I'm sure will come in handy.  I should have made myself some!