>> TOM: This week on Classic Woodworking, we're making this Adirondack chair.

It's a contemporary twist on a classic design, made in solid cypress.

I've added curves for comfort, a sloping arm and a side curve, and the flat area at the front is a built-in drink holder.

It's all coming up next, right here on Classic Woodworking.

♪ ♪ >> Funding is provided by: >> Woodworking is a passion.

Woodcraft understands that.

We offer name brands and tools for fine woodworking.

Woodcraft, proud sponsors of Classic Woodworking.

And by Felder.

>> It's not only about work.

It's about fun and success.

We are with you.

Felder Group is your partner for your woodworking projects.

>> And by SCM-- a rich heritage of woodworking technology since 1952.

>> TOM: Hi, I'm Tom McLaughlin, and today, it's all about the Adirondack chair.

I designed this chair thinking a lot about comfort, having this nice curve in the seat and this lower lumbar support on the back.

I start with a drawing like this because it helps to have the actual-sized parts, and the key element of this design is this curve on the side.

It gives a clean, contemporary look to the chair.

And to make that piece, I pull my pattern right off the drawing.

I've got a board here that's one-and-a-quarter inches thick and ten inches wide, and I can only fit one side piece on here.

So a little trick is if you make a rough curve cut first and then bring that piece over and glue it onto the other side, now I can get two side pieces out of the same plank.

So I've already done that here.

You can see how we've got a very nice edge-glue match.

And I can now lay out my boards.

I'll just trace the shape.

I don't need to trace the slots in the middle-- those are for joinery later.

And they nest right in here and I have plenty of material.

So with my side pieces traced out, I'm ready to cut them out on the band saw.

I want to cut on the waste side of the line and leave the line as I cut.

(saw whirring) I'm ready to clean up my edges or smooth those band saw marks.

And to do that, I'm going to use a spokeshave on this inside curve... And a block plane on the outside.

Nice.

Give it a quick check.

That's looking good.

I'll clean up my ends and then my other piece, and we'll be ready to rout our slots.

We've got our side pieces all cut out and smoothed.

Now we've got to create our joinery.

Here's an example side piece that will lay in just like this on our chair.

You can see this curved slot along the inside.

That's there to accept the seat slats, which shape and form the curved seat.

This front and back mortice are for the front and back rails of our chair.

Now, I've laid out the faces on my side rails.

That's important, so you don't end up with two rights or two lefts, and I'm going to lay it down, so I make sure I cut my joinery on the inside of my face.

I've got my pattern.

I'll just set it on my work piece.

And I've got little brads that I'm going to tack in.

And you'll never see these holes, because they're on the inside.

I tack in the brads to keep my pattern stable while I make the cuts.

(hammering) So I'm going to clamp my work piece to the bench.

And now, let me show you this router set-up we've got.

I've got a guide collar set in the router that's five-eighths-inch diameter, which will ride perfectly in these slots.

And there's a half-inch router bit that will plunge and create our half-inch slot along the guide.

Get my safety gear on.

And we'll get started.

(router whirring) (grinding) (router stops) So now we've got our side pieces made, we have to make our front legs, and they need to fit around and support our front leg.

So we'll do that with a dado cut.

Now, I've got this one positioned, I'll make a quick X where I want to place my dado.

So I've made this layout jig, which is just a recreation of our drawing, and I've set these indexing stops at the floor and a stop for the end.

Now, with the pieces placed into the jig, my side rail is positioned perfectly, and I'm able to knife out the profile into my leg.

So I'll hold my marking knife with the flat back to the work piece and make a nice clean knife line, and I'll flip my knife and get the top.

Now, once I've got my knife line, I'll draw a pen line just inside that knife line because it's difficult to rout to a knife line, and then I'll clean up to it with a chisel.

(router whirring) (router stops) Now, I'll just get up close to it and work my way across.

(pounding) ♪ ♪ So I'll continue cleaning up and fitting to my side rail, and I'll do the same with the other piece and we'll be ready to cut our mortice in the top for our floating tenon.

(blows away dust) We've got that dado cleaned up nicely.

Let's see how it fits.

I'll set a little index line at the bottom for the correct overhang.

(grunts): And a nice press-fit in.

So with our leg fit around our side curve piece, we're now ready to make our floating tenon that joins the leg to under the arm.

And for that, we need to first cut a slot mortice.

We'll do the same as we did with our inside of our curve piece, and we have a jig we'll tack to the top and we'll rout with our guide collar.

(hammering) (router grinding) (router stops) Let's see how it looks.

(blows dust) There's just a little dust in the corners.

(blows dust) Clean that out.

Now we just have to glue in our floating tenon.

I'll get a little glue in the mortice.

A little on the tenon.

And all we have to do is press it in.

I just have to clean up this squeeze-out.

Now we're ready to get onto our arms.

One of the most interesting joints on this chair is this sloping arm.

The arm comes out horizontally and then drops 12 degrees, and the way we create that is with a miter here, six degrees on each side.

And you can see there's a slot that I cut in the middle of it.

That's for our reinforcing spline that'll get glued in, and you'll have a really strong joint.

The grain is also aligned so it appears as if the board continues as one piece.

We'll get our sloping arm, which gives greater arm comfort, and our flat surface for our drink holder.

So to make our miter, we'll head over to the table saw.

So I've got my arms set to go in, to miter for the front.

I've made a mark, a location mark, for my miter, and I've set my saw blade at six degrees.

I'll first run them through and make this cut, and then I'll swing the piece around and make a second cut for the end of my arm.

(table saw whirring) (table saw stops) I've reset my cross-cut sled with a vertical fence, and I kept the saw blade at six degrees.

Now I'll run all four pieces through against the fence and I'll get a slot cut at 90 degrees to my six-degree bevel.

(table saw whirring) So now we're done with the front of our arm, we're moving to the back, and this great bridle joint.

A bridle joint is just an open-ended mortice and a tenon that fit together with this large area.

The great thing about them is that they're fairly easy to cut and because of the large interlocking glue surface, they can be very strong.

So to make our cut, we're going to use these pieces we've pre-cut to length, and we have cut our seat angle on the back.

These are the back of our arms.

So what I want to do first on the back is cut the open-ended mortice, so it would be something like this area here.

I want to remove this center area.

So to do that, I'm going to use my vertical fence, and because I've got an angle here, I'm going to use an angled backer block and hold it up vertically like this.

Then, for a little safety, I'll clamp the work piece against my vertical fence, and then my hands will be away from the blade, since it is up quite high.

Then we'll just run it through, I'll remove the piece, turn it around, and we'll run it through again.

We'll do both arms, and then we'll be ready to cut our tenon.

(table saw whirring) That looks nice.

Now that we have our open-ended mortices cut on our ends, we're ready to cut our cheeks of our tenons on our back pieces.

For that, we'll just slide over our guide.

(table saw whirring) (saw stops) That looks nice.

Now we just need to reset our saw, make our shoulder cut, we'll head back to the bench, fit up our joint, and glue it up.

(table saw whirring) All right, we've got our bridle joint cut, and let's see how it fits.

Beautiful.

Now, we got a little extra material here that'll get sawn off later when we shape our arms, but let's talk about our mitered arm joint.

One of the tricky things about having a miter like this is, if I put my pressure at the ends, it's just going to force open the joint.

So I've glued on these little temporary glue blocks.

They're glued on parallel to the joint surface, so when I apply the clamp pressure, it's 90 degrees to our mitered line, bringing us a nice tight joint.

They'll just get sawn off later and it'll be no problem.

So let's glue it up.

♪ ♪ So before we can glue up our bridle joint at the back, I'm going to cut this curve on the back piece.

It's a lot easier to do that now than after we've glued up our bridle joint.

I've got this shape from our drawing, and that radius will be drawn onto my work piece.

I got a couple of marks here indicating the location, and I just score right around.

Now, our back slats lay at an angle into this rounded piece, so we're going to have to saw this curve with our band saw at an angle.

So let's head over and cut that out now.

(band saw whirring) So we'll glue up our bridle joint, and to do that, I'll get some nice glue into the open-ended mortice.

Then I'll get a little on the tenon.

That's looking great.

Okay, ready to fit it up.

There we go.

And I can feel it seat right up nicely, so I'll set a clamp across.

There it is, it's coming up nicely.

Now, because it's an open-ended mortice, I need to clamp those surfaces together.

And for that, I'll use these good old hand-screw clamps and get it right on the surface, get the other end done, and then we'll set the arms aside, and we'll be ready to work on our curved back slats.

So now it's time to make our back slats.

To do that, I made a pattern right from my drawing with that nice, back-supporting curve.

I've got to make nine of these slats that are about three-quarters of an inch thick, and one-and-seven-eighths wide.

So to do that, I dressed a piece of stock one-and-seven-eighths thick, and we'll lay our pattern right down on it.

Now, I already drew a line and band-sawed to this curve.

So I bring it back to my bench, I set my pattern down, and I'm just going to set the pattern back, not more than a sixteenth, as close as I possibly can.

Then I'll tack on the pattern.

(hammering) Now with my pattern attached to the board, I can flip it upside down, and the pattern will ride on a guide bearing with a two-inch router bit, so as the pattern rides on the bearing, it'll cut my surface flush and as smooth as my pattern.

Doing it this way saves time and it creates greater accuracy as I go through making my nine backrests.

(router whirring) We can take our pattern off, and we've got this beautiful, smooth curve that's identical to our back slat pattern.

Now, at the band saw, I want to show you a pretty interesting technique for cutting parallel curves.

I've set up on the band saw a pivot point.

It's a singular edge that I made by cutting two 45s together.

I've set that about an eighth-inch in front of the teeth on the blade, and all I have to do is set my work piece against that fence.

Now, as I feed the work piece through, I'm going to keep it parallel to the blade and just keep rotating back and forth so I'll follow the curve nice and smoothly.

Here we go.

(band saw whirring) So you can see, I've got a beautiful parallel curve on my back slat.

And it's so smooth because it just tracks so nicely on that pivot point.

Now I can return to my blank, so I'll just set my pattern just barely back from that edge, not even a sixteenth, and tack it down again.

(hammering) Now we'll repeat the circle until we have all nine slats.

Whew!

We've got our nine back slats all set, and I've even gone ahead and pre-drilled, getting ready for assembly.

Now I can turn our attention back to our arms.

We need to mark them and saw them to shape.

So I've got this pattern that I made right from my drawing, I'm going to set it down and draw the shape right on our work.

Now, for this back area where we have our back curve, I want to smooth that out, so I'll just set my square to about two-and-a-half inches and set it right on that curve.

And using my pen, I can trace right around and follow that curve.

And I'll just continue the curve right out into my arm.

Now, with it all marked out, I'm ready to head to the band saw.

(band saw whirring) (saw stops) So I've got my arms all cut out.

Just need to smooth these out.

And for that, I'll use my block plane again.

That's going well.

I'll come always with the grain.

And watch it here where the bridle joint changes direction.

I'll come in from the end.

That's looking good.

That feels great.

So now we're onto our seat.

Our seat is made up of nine slats and a front and back rail.

We cut them all to our seat angle, and our front and back rail got morticed, and we glued in our floating tenon just as we did at the top of our leg.

The slats are simply rabbeted underneath to fit into our half-inch curved groove.

Now that we have all our parts done, we're ready to glue up our chair.

To begin our glue-up, we'll start with our sides, and I brought back my layout jig to assist in indexing our parts.

So I want to get some glue on this dado surface, and also the outside of the leg.

That looks like enough.

Set my curved rail in.

Now I'm going to run my screws in, which are right inside this curved slot.

(drill whirs) And that's it.

That's a nice tight fit.

Now I just need to clean out some of that squeeze-out, and we'll repeat for the other side.

Now, for a complex assembly like this one, it's really good to do a dry run.

And it's good to have an extra set of hands.

I've got Calvin, my shop assistant, here to give me a hand.

Set the tenon into the mortice.

Get the front rail into its mortice.

Start sliding in the seat slats.

We'll work our slats in from front to back.

I'll get my front rail in.

And at this point, they're all in.

I can start to push the front rail together.

And then we can set our clamp.

So at this point, I can use my spacer blocks, which are about an eighth-inch thick, to space out the slats.

When I get those set in place, I'll tack from underneath.

You can use a nail gun or tack little brads at an angle.

Now we just need to clamp these arm supports in the back, and those will be glued in, as well.

And then we're ready to fit our arm in.

Then I'll take this front clamp and we would have good pressure right down on our arm onto the top of the leg.

It's really important to practice your moves before you glue it up.

For now, there's just a few final touches I want to show you back at the bench.

So we added a few final details to our chair.

These brackets under the arm which offered more support, these cypress plugs covering the screws into the back rail, and you can do whatever you want on the top, but we decided to angle it to relate to the angle on the arm.

Well, there you have it.

A new twist on a classic design.

I'll see you next time right here on Classic Woodworking.

♪ ♪ >> Closed captioning is provided by AWFS, the Association of Woodworking and Furnishings Suppliers.

Funding is provided by... >> Woodworking is a passion.

Woodcraft understands that.

We offer name brands and tools for fine woodworking.

Woodcraft, proud sponsors of Classic Woodworking.

And by Felder.

>> It's not only about work.

It's about fun and success.

We are with you.

Felder Group is your partner for your woodworking projects.

♪ ♪ >> And by SCM-- a rich heritage of woodworking technology since 1952.

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