Maloof Rocker - Getting & Rough Cutting Chair Wood

While waiting for the bit to arrive I worked on building a couple more of the jigs needed for construction.   This one is for making the reference cut to the back leg where it attaches to the seat so both legs are raked at the same angle.

The major milestone was a day trip with a neighbor to Albuquerque to pick up the wood I will use to build the chair.   We stopped at two places, Albuquerque Exotic Hardwoods where I was like a kid in a candy store and ended up buying a piece of Katalox (Swartzia cubensis) to be used for the feature strips in the rockers and the plugs.  I looks a lot like Wenge but the piece I got is darker and is supposed to be a little less oily making it easier to glue.  As a reference Cherry has a Janka Hardness of 950 pounds, White Oak is 1,350 pounds and the Katalox is 3,660 pounds.  Being that hard it will be interesting to see how difficult the material is to work.  Second stop was at Albuquerque Hardwood Lumber Company.  There I picked up the needed planks of rough sawn 8/4 cherry.  When I did my cut list and added a waste factor I found I needed 46.9 board feet of material.  After picking though the stack of material and doing a rough layout of the pieces on the planks the total amount I had selected came out to 46 BF.  Coming that close to my estimate made me happy. 

Rough Sawn Lumber

Once back in the shop I ran the rough sawn pieces through the planer so I could see if there were any flaws not visible while the pieces were rough.  Sure enough a few surprises became visible like knots, a couple of small pits and a crack or two.  I will say, after half a day swinging around planks 2” thick, 10” wide and 10’ long to feed through the planer I was ready to quit.

Surfaced Cherry

 Now that I could see exactly what I had I could start doing the actual layout of parts on the planks.  This is a partial layout of the back slats.

Slat Layout

Once I had a layout drawn out I rough cut the major pieces to length, width and thickness.  Fortunately only a couple of the pieces had any twist or bow that needed to be removed.   

I also checked the moisture content at the fresh cuts and found it to be around 6% indicating they are pretty dry.  The pieces are now set aside to rest and see if they are stable or are going to move.   I am hoping that they stay flat and don't twist or otherwise go wacko on me.

Rough Cut Cherry

I know the process of taking rough sawn lumber to smooth then doing an efficient layout working around flaws, rough cutting to size followed up by making them flat and square does not seem like much but it took me the better part of 3 days.

Once the router bit arrives I will be able to move on with finishing the seat joints on the Mockup.

 Next up – Seat Mockup Part 4, Routing & Glue-up