Gary Weeks & Company, Furnituremakers

A Boring Machine for Recessing Chair Glides

Gary Weeks — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:47:49 +0000

Wood chairs scratch wood floors, and other hard surface floors. Our lightweight and tightly constructed chairs make an irritating noise if friction with the floor introduces vibration. An elegant and satisfactory solution for these two problems has been elusive.

There are many varieties of glides and pads offered for sale. These are their general characteristics: Chair glides are made of low-friction plastic. Chair pads are made of felt or carpet. Glides and pads have two basic means of attachment: peel-and-stick adhesive and mechanical fasteners.

Glides (think Teflon) slide well across the floor and reduce the noise of dragging chairs. When new, glides will not mark floors, but when use embeds grit into them . . . scratches happen. Pads, as long as they are in place and sound, reduce vibration and do not mark floors directly or indirectly.

Peel-and-stick adhesives are surprisingly good, but if a glide or pad is stuck directly to the bottom of a chair leg, the side loading inherent in moving the chairs tends to, and will, squish it off to a side, making it first ugly and then ineffective. Fasteners do resist side loading and other detaching forces. Most glides are directly attached by a screw, nail, or other driven fastener. Pads and some glides are stuck into a mechanically fastened cup. Failures do occur — fasteners break or wallow out the wood that holds them. Broken or loose metal fasteners make deep and nasty gouges in floors.

We have tested many glides and pads. Many. We have talked to many manufacturers, retailers, and representatives. In the process and finally, we found the material, designed the attachment, and built the equipment to “pad” our dining chairs, barstools, footstools, and side tables and, therefore, protect the floors they are used on.

We use a US made, woven not compressed, synthetic felt. This felt is thicker and tougher than that found in hardware stores or websearches. This felt comes to us with the highest quality, pressure sensitive adhesive on one side. We stick the felt into a shallow recess in the bottom of our furniture legs, to produce the benefits of a mechanically fastened cup. This recess resists the side loading that moves most felt pads off chair legs.

Developing a way to make these recesses consistent, accurate, level with one another, and hassle-free was very difficult and time-consuming. Hand boring was inconsistent, inaccurate, out of level, and hassle-bound. We have long used the crosscut table top to be sure the chair legs all met the floor and were level to it. I mounted a plunge router under this tabletop, built a mechanism to plunge it and found that we could not hold the chair leg against the force of 22,000RPM’s . . . I lost three days work. I built a contraption to bore the recess with a forstner bit turning less than 1000RPM’s, again mounted under the tabletop of the crosscut saw . . . six days work. Works great.

We do the final leveling of the legs on a sanding board.

We bore the recess with the boring machine.

After finishing, we apply the pads. After many years—or much use, our chair-owners will likely need to replace felt. We’ll send new pads for free and these instructions: “Use pliers to pull out an old pad. Peel the backing off a new pad and stick it in the recess.”

Sharpening the Turning Tools

Gary Weeks — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:17:11 +0000

By hand and eye at the lathe, we turn our rocking chair front legs, footstool legs, Berry barstool legs, Paschall table legs, Johnson Pedestal table base, and spindles for all dining chairs and barstools. We use no duplicating machinery. I ordered a duplicating attachment many years ago, and sent it back the day I got it. We are faster and better . . . by far.

Work of this speed and accuracy cannot be done with dull tools . . . must be done with very sharp tools. Grinding and honing have become routine — after many missteps and struggles to find the right grinder, the right wheel for that grinder, a system for holding the tool at the grinder, and the right honing stone. All of the above must be easily accessible and organized so the time spent sharpening is minimal. The hands on the tool must be steady and true.

Fitting Drawers

Gary Weeks — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:04:31 +0000

In our casegoods, the drawers are fit to the openings formed by the frame of the case. They slide in and out, wood to wood. Fit is critical: too tight and the drawers will swell and stick in times and places of high humidity, too loose and they are sloppy. But fit is not absolute and unchanging — the dimension of wood varies with its moisture content. The moisture content of the wood at the time of assembly and fitting can be measured. The equilibrium moisture content of the wood in the case at its place, and places, of residence cannot be known — but can be assumed to be in a range of 6-14%. (Think mountains of Nevada-southern Florida.)

By measuring the dimension (depth of drawer, for example) and the moisture content of the wood at assembly, we can calculate the depth of the drawer at a moisture content of 14%, and fit it accordingly. It is far worse to have a stuck drawer than a loose one.

Aaron is fitting a drawer of a walnut buffet.

We have built the table of our stroke sander so we can sand drawer sides — smoothing, dimensioning and aligning.

Gluing Chair Seats

Gary Weeks — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:47:40 +0000

Our chair seats are always made of seven parts, doweled and glued together. When we are laying out the parts for chairs on the lumber, we select a board or portion of a board that will make eight, or more, of these seat parts.

Making the seats of seven relatively narrow parts makes them more stable. Laminations, done correctly, are always more stable than a section of wood as it came from the tree, because the growth rings, and therefore the tensions, are crisscrossing and counteracting. To further advantage, this width of seat part allows us to cut the contours of the seat scoop in manageable sections at the bandsaw.

Selecting the parts from one larger board ensures that the color, texture and figure are integral across the seat. Cutting eight seat parts to choose seven greatly improves the composition of figure in our chairs by providing many more possibilities for order. The possible permutations of seven things taken seven at a time are 5040. The possible permutations of eight things taken seven at a time are 40,320.

At each joint, we spread an even and full layer of glue and drive in four dowel pins for alignment. When all the joints have glue and dowels we clamp them tight and leave them overnight.

The Lumber Shed

Gary Weeks — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:39:42 +0000

We moved a lumber shed last week. It occupied a space behind the shop where we will eventually expand the building. But we moved it last week because of the Bastrop Wildfire. In that fire, friends lost houses, cars, shops, and more. The mill at Texas Kiln Products, our supplier of mesquite lumber, was completely destroyed. While our shop is masonry and relatively fire resistant, the lumber shed is a box of tender.

We unloaded the building, jacked it up, winched it onto the trailer, and moved it down the hill beyond the bare-ground, “defensible” space we are creating around the shop.

This shed does not hold wood for making our catalogued furniture. That lumber is stored elsewhere. In addition to framing and finish lumber for working on the buildings, the shed holds old growth pine and fir, figured wood, uncommon species, pretty wood, rot-resistant wood, very hard wood, very soft wood . . . the collection of an aficionado.

Twenty-five years ago, Pat Adams said of my collection, “This wood is like nuclear waste. You will protect it from the elements, try to think of a way to use it, and store it forever.” I cannot deny the impracticality or reconcile the cost of storing with the “price” of the wood. But I cannot throw it out. Love creates duty.