Making a rocking chair - part 2

Cutting the laminates for the rocker and the back braces.

As I don't have a table saw, I use my band saw to cut the laminates. I then have to reduce them in thickness to 2mm (for the back braces) and 3mm for the rockers. To do this I use my drum sander.

Finally I have lots of thin pieces of ash ready to laminate together to form the rockers and back braces.

The back brace pieces get sorted and arranged so that they will look nice once laminated together. I then use masking tape to keep the stacks together.

Then the laminating starts. One at a time, it takes 4 days to complete this stage!

This is the head rest. This is made from six pieces of wood which are coopered to form a curve. Once the glue is dry the head rest is shaped from this. But this gets put to one side for the moment.

Back to the back legs. This wedge of wood is glued to the inside of the joint area to the seat. This kicks out the back leg by 6 degrees. Once the leg is attached and shaped this wedge is reduced to almost nothing.

Now back to the seat. Time to start cutting some joints. First the front leg joint. I do this with a simple router jig. You can see the jig to the left and it in use and then the finished notch.

And the same for the back leg. This is also finished off using a router jig.

A rebate is then put onto each side of these notches to form one side of the malof joint.

I use the router bit mounted in my router table for this.

Finished front and back leg joints.

The chair seat is now ready for shaping. Beginning to look less like a lump of ash and more like a chair.