Chair Style 3 Plans are Available + a couple tips for building your own chairs

Welcome to my shop. I’m excited to announce that I have finished and released the plans for the first of the chair kit styles! I’ve had requests for plans for the chair kits since I launched them three years ago, and the day is finally here

So this right here is a chair kit, which is a ready-to-assemble chair that includes all of the parts with all the joinery cut. 

I launched these three years ago, and they come in several different styles. The reason I started this project was my observation that a lot of people make tables, but then don’t make chairs. That might be because they don’t have the skill or the interest in making chairs, or they realize how much work it is to make all of the parts for sets of chairs. So these kits allow someone to get into chair making in a less daunting way. 

So here is Style 3 assembled, and the plans that I have published are for this style. It has some complex joinery in it because the seat is sloped back on the frame, and the frame also splays out at the front, resulting in some fun compound angle joinery. 

The plans include a cut list and a material list, as well as plans for the various parts of the chair. It gives you all of the details about where the joinery goes, how the curves are laid out, etc. 

For the curved parts, I have these laid out as coming out of solid blocks. I had a viewer ask about the best way to go about making these parts, and it kind of depends on the way you want to work. If you saw them out of a solid block of wood, it makes the joinery process a lot easier, but you’re going to spend a little more time making each part. On the other hand, you can spend your time in the prepping stage by making bending forms for each curved piece and prepping your stock. That’s especially going to be a big undertaking if you’re doing bend lamination because every single laminate needs to be resawn, sanded or prepped to consistent thickness, and then it can go into the form and glued up into the bending. There is also steam bending, which is going to be a bit faster than bent lamination because you don’t have to prep all of the laminates. You mill your stock to its actual dimensional size, and that is your blank to go into the bending form. With both steam bending and bent lamination, you may have to experiment a bit with your forms to make sure your form accounts for whatever spring-back your material might have. That will likely vary depending on species and even the specific tree that the piece off wood came from. So if you are making only one or two chairs, sawing from solid is a decent way to go. If you are making more than that, you’re going to spend a lot of time cleaning and refining curves. 

Jumping back to the plans, there are four different versions of the plans that you get. One version has integral joinery, so you’re making parts with tenons that are part of the material. The other version has floating tenons, meaning you have all mortises and no tenons on any of the parts. And then there are metric versions of both of those versions. 

Lastly, you also get the templates to make all these parts.

I also want to share a tip on the connection of the back slats to the crest rail. They should be floating connections, so you want to have the back slats in so that they can float up and down, in and out, and have some wiggle room to move around. When someone sits on the chair, the curved part is the lumbar support, meaning that their back is going to press into that back slat and press some of the curve out of that slat. So it needs some room to go up into the crest rail. So those mortises should be cut deeper than they need to be and then they are not glued. The downside to that floating connection is that there’s going to be a little bit of a rattle, which you can combat by siliconing the slats into the mortises. 

So those are the plans for this style of chair! If people like these, I have more chairs that could become plans. Style 3 has been the most popular chair that I have sold, so I figured I would start there for the plans. 

Thank you as always for joining, I greatly appreciate it! If you have any questions or comments on chair kits or chairs, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And ’til next time, happy woodworking.