Since the seat is sculpted out to make a comfortable place
to sit there is quite a bit of material to be removed. That can be done with hand tools like an adze
and a scorp. However, I am opting to use
power tools to speed things up and not go through the learning curve or expense
required for good hand tools. The
photos show the two tools I have bought so far.
One is a disk with conical tungsten carbide teeth that mounts on my 4.5”
angle grinder. I tried it out on a piece
of scrap and at 10,000 rpm it really removes material fast.
The other is a tungsten carbide burr that
goes in my pneumatic die grinder. It’s
like a beaver on steroids.
Rather than taking a chance of screwing up the actual (expensive) hardwood seat and to gain
some experience with the new tools I decided to do a mockup of the seat using
common 2x6 construction lumber. This
will allow me to practice doweling the 3 degree joints between the seat pieces,
scooping out the seat, cutting the 5 degree joints for the back legs and cutting
the angled mortises.
With this in mind, about three weeks ago, before I had
started anything on the project I went to Home Depot and sorted through their
entire stack of 2X6 studs. It is a good
thing that I only needed two really good ones as that was all I could
find. One must have gotten in there by
mistake, it was straight, clear and almost quarter sawn. After letting them sit and dry I trimmed the
ends to get rid of the checking or cracks at the end of the boards then cut 5
pieces to rough length.
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| Checked End and Result After Cutting |
Next I checked
for cupping (yep), twist (one) and bow (some).
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| Slight Cup Shown by Light Under Square |
Cupping is easy to remove with the thickness sander, the minor bow can
be removed from pieces this length (22”) on the table saw. Twist is not bad if you have a jointer which
I don’t so I had to revert back to the old school method of using a hand plane
to knock down the high corners and flatten.
After going through all that I have 5 boards 22” long by 5”
wide and 1 7/16” thick all flat and square.
Now to let them set for a few days to see if they stay that way.
 |
| Flattened, Square Boards for Seat Mock-Up |
Next up – Seat Mockup Part 2 Bevels & Dowels
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