And finally (whew), here's the chair he made in the class he took.

Re: Re: Windsor Chair
 

I think he enjoys it. Perhaps it's the homemade look. Perhaps he just wants to use some of the stock we already have. I'm not sure.

Nice use of the Freedom Curve.

Dowels are not appropriate because the grain isn't consistant. They could break off instead of flexing.

edit- I forgot to mention how awesome that chair is. It must be great having a Dad with so much know how.

The next step was to rout out a lip for the plywood back to rest in. We took out the middle upright and put it back together, then laid it facedown on some pillows and styrpfoam blocks. My dad ran along the inside back wit ha router, and I squared up the corners with a chisel.

As an aside, this view shows the cross section of the joint holding the endcaps on the top, which I illustrated with truly awful ASCII art a few posts back. It also illustrates wh the screw insets were put so deep, and why it would have been difficult to put them in later - screwing into a stepped surface is very difficult.

Here's an interesting aside. Before I started work on the bookshelf, I did some design work with POV-Ray, to play with dimensions and to see whether the pins sticking up would look too odd. Here's the result.
forgive the overdramatic background.

Two points HM... first is, is that bookshelf square? Or is it just the angle or my eyes? It looks like it's on an angle to me.

Second: You really should use a sharp bit in that router...you're burning the wood.

Brian

It's the angle. The frame is square, but it's got some give, which will be fixed when the back is in.

The burning is not really an issue. That area won't show. But we probably should deal with that for future use.

Who knows anything about sharpening stuff? good resources etc..?

So, with the walnut for the feet cut to rough lengths, my dad routed a design into the top edge. This was pretty thick wood, so I had to find a pretty big router bit.

I then drew a cut line far enough from the edge to leave room for error, using a square.

We tried using a chopsaw to cut the 45 degree angles...

...but it wasn't accurate enough, so we set up the tablesaw using a protractor. Good thing we left the extra space.

And here's the test of the joint. These clamps are great for corners, whether it's furniture or picture frames.

With the corner edges cut, I traced the pattern, and cut it out with a scroll saw.

I used a drill press and a sanding drum, and my father used a drawknife (not pictured), to smooth out the sawcut.