Cutting piecese and shaping the outside surfaces..

Click here for a Flickr slide show of some more progress.  the frame pieces are cut and machine shaping has begun.  They are still full thickness and appear quite heavy.  Tomorrow I will thin them down and taper them.  Exciting!

I bought wood

I bought wood for legs and a beautiful veneer for the seat, arm rests, and back, as well as wood for patterns and jigs.  Ordered a router bit for shaping the fronts of the legs, laid out the shapes on the wood, and then picked up my truck from a brake repair place.  I'm looking into going to Burning Man August 30 to Sept 6, so that's a good deadline for the finished prototype.  I'm trying to locate a shop in Fort Bragg/Mendocino for September.  I have a few leads from my visit to the College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg.  I've got to move the prototype forward a bit, first...

fUn! :-)

New Patterns...

I made paper patterns for the revised chair today.

details to follow..

I have an idea...

I made a sketch accentuating the anthropomorphic forms, and have a great marketing tag in a high end niche.  It has great commercial potential.  I have been advised to remove it from the blog site, so....

DELETE!

details to follow :-)

Chair Refinements..

I added a back rest and arm rests.  I trimmed back the corners of the seat, and lightened the upper members, so I'm feeling a lot better about the lines, though I'm I still not satisfied with the arm supports.  I have an idea for an ogee shape for them that might be better.  Also, I still have arch the bottoms of the seat stringers.

Tomorrow.

Meanwhile,  a fellow named Paco is helping me add some plies to the leaf springs on my truck, to firm up the suspension, and to cure the lean to the right by adding an extra ply on that side.  We went to a junk yard today and bough a suitable leaf spring to cannibalize.  The junk yard folks were true-to-form crude people, but very helpful none the less.

Design is an evolutionary process

I love pencil and paper; it's interactive.  I put down a sketch, and immediately see alternatives or the next step.  Tracing paper goes over and a new sketch goes over the first, and so forth.  If a sketch is good to suggest the next idea, then a 3-D mock up is fantastic.  Maybe this will be a series of evolutionary models.  I installed arms and the back bone today, but I'm not happy with the marriage between the top half of the chair and the bottom half.  Now, the arm rest supports are not yet trimmed at their tops, I left extra wood to be able to tweak the arm rest positions, so what's there now looks a bit heavier than it will when the tops are trimmed.  But, I am also thinking that maybe the arms and side legs should be all one continuous shaped piece, and the front and back legs as well as the back rest support could also be all one piece.  I have to try some things.  I am certain the corners of the seat should be less aggressive.  I like the forward motion implied by the angles of the legs and will try to emphasize that.  The back is leaning to far back....

I did sit on this for a few seconds, even though there is no glue in the joints and there are no ties across the bottom.  It felt pretty good... :-)

Chair Progress 2

Click here for a Flickr slide show of the work in the new shop here in Oakland.  I made a lot of progress on the chair mock up this week.  I rebuilt the seat armature twice more since the first try from Jerome, each time getting the angles more accurate.   The joints are looking pretty tight, now, and the only way I knew to achieve that was by honing in on successive tries. 

Where I can, I am taking some liberties with the mock up for expedience, for example the finished chair will not have the screws used in the mock up.  Also, the stringers under the seat will have arched bottoms, the seat itself will have rounded edges, and so forth. 

I tried sculpting one sample leg.  I'm undecided how much contouring I will finally do; I may just shape the backs of the legs and keep the surfaces facing outwards crisp. 

I'd hoped to finish this this week, but it will go into the middle of the coming week.  I still have time to select materials before I start the real piece.  For the structure, I'd thought a light hard wood, like ash or hickory, and for the seat, back, and arms, a darker, precious species.  On the other hand, after another fellow in the shop made something nice out of plywood, letting the edges show, I thought sculpted plywood legs would be amazing as the layers would show off the contouring.  We'll see, there is still time.

I am having the most fun I've had in years, absolutely loving this.  I wrote to an unemployed friend today, "I felt like I'd hit rock bottom, like I'd lost everything, and I had no desire to get back in the design business, to again beg people to 'pick me.'  But now, I've embraced my situation and I'm going all in, betting on myself and only doing what I want.  If someone likes it, fine, if not, they can find the door.  We'll see if it works."  Another friend said "So, you are a teenager."  So be it, I'm alive!  At the end of the day today I found myself looking at the chair and thinking, "I'm glad this exists, I'm glad I did this."

Something is coming...