All of the holes are now drilled in the seat. The spindle holes do not go all the way through, they are each around 1 inch deep. The bow and leg holes do go all the way through. The bow will have cylindrical tenons cut on its ends, and these will be wedged on the underside of the seat for strength. The leg holes need to be made into tapered, conical, holes, to match the tapered ends of the legs. This process is done using a tool called a reamer.
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| Time to partially cut out the seat - the area along the back is left for clamping |
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| Jerry the shop dog - he's a bit of a troublemaker, hence the cage... |
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| Cut out and ready for reaming |
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| A clear view of the leg holes and sightlines |
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| The reamer is aligned using a bevel square and right angle square |
Here you can get some sense of how the sightlines work - the reamer is kept in line with the sightline using the right angle square, and then by keeping it in alignment at the desired angle with the bevel square, the hole can be reamed at the desired X and Y angles I talked about earlier. In chair making these angles are called "rake" and "splay" - rake is the angle of the leg from front to back of the chair, while splay is the angle side to side.
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| Tuning the tapered tenons with a homemade tenon cutter |
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| Kind of like a large, extremely sharp, pencil sharpener :) |
This reamer was purchased from
Tim Manney, an excellent chairmaker and teacher. Tim is also my source for the method that I used to make my own tenon cutter shown here.
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| Testing a leg for depth - the lines I made at 15/16" diameter on the legs are used here |
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| Two front legs done |
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| Aligning the reamer with the right angle square |
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| Two rear legs done |
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| Starting to look like a chair! |
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| Done with reaming |
This seems like extra work, and it is - one
could just put cylindrical tenons on the ends of the legs, and not have to bother with either reaming the leg mortises, or tapering the leg tenons. The reason why we take the time to use this method is that the end result is much stronger, and will virtually never loosen, when cut and assembled properly. If you consider what happens when someone sits on a chair using tapered mortise/tenons, the act of sitting actually wants to make the joint tighter! There is no other way that I know of to join legs to a chair with this property.
