#HTE

Tools & Craft #18: Let’s Build a Ridiculously Simple Chair

A couple of posts ago I wrote about Playatech furniture, which is made of interlocking sheets of plywood. Now here’s another approach to simple furniture that is tons of fun to make. We  added this book, Ridiculously Simple Furniture Projects, to our catalog. The projects in it live up to the title, especially for someone like me with a full shop.

The chair I’m building is made from one piece of ¾" plywood, just 2’ x 3’. We actually made two chairs by just lopping off three feet from a sheet of plywood and then splitting that in two.

By “we” I mean my local Festool rep and myself. Because of the nature of my job I do partial demonstrations and single operations all the time. But I jumped on this project because I saw that I could actually finish something, quickly, with very little effort, and make an actually useful piece of furniture.

We screwed two 2’ x 3’ pieces of plywood together and cut out both chairs at once. In the first picture you can see me try up the edges of the pieces with a TS75. Most of the time I am using a TS55 which would have been fine for this but a TS75 was handy. It’s the first time I have ever done serious plunge cutting and the stops for the guide rail made it a snap.

It was also the first time I every actually built an entire project using the multifunction table. Sometimes the cuts over hung the table, sometimes we plunged over the table into the expendable MDF table top, which gave a cleaner cut and much simpler setup.

We used a jigsaw on the curves, which we screwed up a little. More on that in another blog. Then we did a little sanding. This was the first time I ever clamped anything vertically using the side slots of the MFT table. It worked like a charm.

Actually building furniture, even simple stuff, really gives you a sense of what you can do with the Festool system, much more so than a demo. That’s because with demos dimensions usually don’t matter as you’re showing customers what the tool can do and making cuts randomly; but here you have to set up specific operations and hit specific dimensions.

The project went quickly. Cutting out the parts and assembling one of them, including tea breaks, took only a few hours.

This chair is screwed and glued together. It’s pretty comfortable. The back is a little high, which feels a little better but makes the chair look very narrow. It feels pretty solid to me and I think it’s a great design. The book shows the chair all painted, which can be a fun project in itself, but I used pre-finished plywood which I had around. I will varnish the edges darker and I think it will look great. On the second chair I’m going to pre-drill the holes and then me and my six year old son can put it together when he next visits the shop. I think if the parts are pre-cut, it’s a great kid project with a lot of bang for the buck at the end.

I should mention that while this project didn’t push my skill level, it did get me making something, and these days, since I am so swamped, I am loathe to take on a real classic woodworking project. The finished piece is real furniture and very useful. When I make the second chair with my son he will have the satisfaction of making something real, not a toy. All of these things are good. Please don’t condemn me because there are no fancy joints on this piece. Not everything anyone does needs to be classic, and the simplest way to not build anything, and not go down to the shop to have the satisfaction of making something with your hands, and to paralyze yourself, is to determine that the only projects worth doing must be really, really hard.

Lastly, if this entry sounds like a plug for Festool, be aware that I sell the stuff (among other tools) for a living. Chances are if you’ve heard of the brand, you already know whether you need their stuff or not, so I’m not trying to hard sell you anything here. If you want to see their stuff in action and you’re in New York City, swing by our showroom and we’ll give you a demo or let you try the stuff out. But whether you do or not, I’d be happy if you’d at least think about buying the book!