>> TOM: This week on Classic Woodworking, we're making this Craftsman-inspired dining chair.

It's made out of sturdy and strong white oak, and includes a curved crest rail, reclined back rest, and traditional mortise and tenon joinery with pegs.

This chair is designed for comfort and made to last for hundreds of years.

A warm shellac completes the finish, along with this leather upholstered seat.

And that'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: Let's face it-- chairs can be intimidating to make.

But they really don't have to be that complicated.

And this chair design is a great place to start.

It's a good, solid, mortise and tenon chair.

What we want to do is break it down into three views, or three perspectives.

I like to make a full-size drawing where we have the side view, which shows the curvature of that back leg.

All the joinery is indicated here.

Then we think of it in the front view, where we see the back rest and the top crest rail.

The curvature again, with all the joinery, is indicated here.

And lastly, we think of it looking from the plan view, or down on the seat.

So we have the front of the chair represented here, which happens to be 20 inches across, and 16 across here.

So we draw the taper of the seat from front to back.

Let's talk about some of our terms.

We have our legs, or sometimes called posts.

We have our rails, seat rails.

These stretchers, which are a lower support to the construction.

Now, the back rest has three elements.

The bottom is called the shoe.

The back rest itself, the splat.

And this curved top horizontal piece is the crest rail.

To start with our project, we'll begin by laying out our curved back leg.

So to make our back leg, we'll reference our full-size drawing.

Now, once we have a drawing like this, we need a bridge or something to transfer this information onto our materials.

And for that, we make patterns.

I like to use this quarter-inch thick...

It's like a Masonite, also called Fibrex, material.

I slip it up behind the drawing, and then, using carbon paper or stippling through the drawing, get that shape, then slip it back out, saw it out, and refine these curves really nice and smoothly.

Because this will be repeated many times.

So I have my stretcher, my shoe, and my crest rail mortises indicated right from the drawing, as well.

Now that we have our pattern, we can begin to lay out on our materials.

I've got a wide white oak plank.

This is about 11 inches wide.

I need to dress them down to an inch and five-eighths thickness, my final leg thickness.

I'll take my pattern.

I'm going to set up my leg right along the grain, for strength, and just trace it out.

Now, we'll be just making one chair today.

So I just need to get out two legs.

And once again, just trace out our chair.

We're ready to head to the band saw.

(saw running) So we've got our legs all sawn out.

Now, you notice that when I band-sawed my pieces out, I stayed off the line by about a 16th of an inch.

And that was intentional for having some material to skim off on the jig.

Now, the jig is made simply by using our pattern.

These edges are routed flush to our pattern so they'll create an exact representation of our pattern onto our solid stock.

To use it, we just set our work piece into the jig, indexing off the end stop.

We'll use these holdfasts to lock it in.

And then when we trim it at the shaper, it'll cut that exact surface on the front of our pattern, even recreating these flat areas that we intentionally put on our pattern to simplify the joinery.

Once we've run that first surface, we'll release from our holdfasts and go to the second cut, indexing again off the bottom stop.

And we'll make this second cut.

Then we'll have an exact copy of our pattern cut efficiently and accurately for all our dining chair parts.

Let's head over to the shaper and make those cuts.

I want to show you this shaper.

A shaper is just an industrial router.

And I've got a nice, heavy cutter on there with the same flush cut bearing on the bottom.

So let's get started.

(shaper running) There, just a beautiful smooth finish, exactly the same as our pattern.

I'm just going to go ahead and hit the other one, and we'll head back to the bench.

(shaper running) These legs are just beautiful right off the shaper.

Now we're ready to lay out our joinery.

Now, to do that, all I need is my pattern.

So first, I wanted to choose a right and a left leg.

I'll just mark that out with a little arrow so I know that has to come together, my right and my left.

I'll set my pattern, just carry a little tick mark across for the rail, and the stretcher down here.

And now I can, with the square, just accurately square them across.

And I'll make a scribble toward the outside of the leg where the mortise will be.

So that's it for our mortises on this surface.

Now we'll flip it over.

Again using our pattern, we'll put it on the inside surface, and mark for our shoe mortise and the lower back stretcher.

And I need to just carry these lines across using that flat surface for the shoe and the stretcher.

I want to get my front legs prepared, as well, and we can mortise all our legs at the same time.

Here's my plan view where I've got the front dimension of 20 inches going back to 16.

So you can see it here, I need to cut that seat angle on the outside surface of my front legs going back.

So I need to make a cut indicated by that chalk mark.

Now, to accurately set that up, I'll just take a bevel gauge and bring it up.

And I adjust it to the angle on the plan and lock it in.

Now I can carry over this angle to the table saw and make these rip cuts.

(saw running) So with the seat angle cut on my front legs, I'm ready to mark out the joinery.

So I'll just lay the leg right up against it, make a little indication mark here.

I'm just going to take my mark and square it over.

That's it-- all my mortises are marked on my legs.

I'll head over to the mortiser and start mortising them out.

So we're going to start by mortising for our side rails.

And when you're dealing with a piece that has a curved back like this, I've sawed out a support block that'll support that negative space and keep it flat on the table.

But it also will index the work piece so that the mortising chisel comes down at 90 degrees to my flat surface here.

(mortiser running) (mortiser stopped) (mortiser running) Whew-- feels good to have all those mortised out.

We have one more set of mortises to make, and that's for our crest rail, represented here on the drawing, and our shoe.

Those will be quarter-inch mortises.

And you can see I have it already drawn out here.

In this case, it was helpful to make a template, which I just made directly from my drawing, and I mortised right through with the quarter-inch mortises.

So with my template, it makes it super-easy to lay them right on my pieces and mark them out accurately.

All right, so we just need to reset the mortiser with a quarter-inch chisel, cut out these mortises, and then we'll be ready to cut our tenons.

(mortiser running) So we'll begin cutting our tenons on the back of our chair.

We'll start with these three horizontal pieces.

They're all the same length.

They were cut to a stop allowing for seven-eighth-inch tenons.

So we'll go ahead and lay out this tenon for our shoe on the actual leg.

Then I'll make a pencil line for the cheek cut of the tenon.

And I'm going to use a spacer jig to simplify cutting the thickness of the tenons.

This one's laid out to cut a three-eighth-inch thick tenon to fit perfectly into the mortises we've already cut.

(saw running) (saw stops) That looks great.

Now we'll reset to cut our five-16th-inch tenons for our crest rail.

(saw running) (saw stops) Now all we have left is to reset our saw one more time to cut our five-16th-inch tenon for our lower stretcher.

(saw running) Now we'll reset the saw and lay them horizontally to get our seven-eighth-inch shoulder cuts all around.

(saw running) Now that we've got all the tenons cut for our back rails, we want to focus on our seat rails.

Now, this is where things can get a little tricky, because we're going to start cutting that angle.

But our front rail was actually straight, just like the back rails.

So I went ahead and cut that with a straight tenon and square 90-degree shoulders.

Now, the side rails are where we need to start thinking about the angled joinery.

And all you have to do is follow the drawing.

I cut my side pieces exactly the same length, including the tenons, as on my drawing.

And then to simplify things, I transferred the angle and length of the tenons right onto my work piece.

(saw running) (saw stops) Now with our straight tenons cut, we're going to lay over the blade to our same seat angle as we earlier got off our plan.

Now we're going to drop the blade and make our cheek cuts on our back tenon.

(saw running) So those look nice.

I've got the angled tenons cut, but now we have to cut these angled shoulders.

Now, to do that, I do not want to change the angle of my saw blade.

All I'm going to do is lay them now flat on the table, drop the saw, and make cuts from each side so that they line up, and we'll have a perfect 90-degree angle from our shoulder to our tenon.

So we've got all our mortises and all our tenons cut, and these are our lower stretchers.

They were cut the same way as our side rails, except we just added this additional angle on the back where the leg goes backward.

Then the splat we did a similar way.

Right off our drawing, we picked up the angle of the tenon and cut it to length.

But before we can do any assembly, we need to cut a few more details on our back.

We want to cut this curved crest rail.

So to do that, I've got my crest rail, which has all the joinery cut on it.

All we have to do is lay our curved pattern on the front.

And I'll trace that front arc.

Now, I'm just going to step it back seven-eighths of an inch to give me my seven-eighth-inch thickness and draw another arc.

And that's it.

Now I'm just going to take it to the band saw, saw it out, and we'll clean it up.

(saw running) Now I'm going to turn our attention to the shoe.

You can see on the finished chair we have this facet on the front, and the arc on the bottom.

Now, to make those cuts, I've got a couple of little templates that I can lay them out with.

This is going to mark the facet on the top of my shoe.

So I'll just make that line from the back on each side.

And this arc on the bottom of the shoe, which will lighten it up, and also relates the curve of the crest rail.

We'll begin by making a facet by ripping at an angle on the table saw.

Then we'll come to the band saw, and make these other faceted cuts and this arc cut, and then clean up back here at the bench.

(saw running) (saw running) So now for our back leg, we need to detail this a little bit.

We start to taper from the outside down to a one-inch square at the top.

So to do that, we're going to mark it from the back, then we'll go to the band saw, band-saw to the line, and then clean it up back here at the bench.

(saw running) (scraping) That's it.

So this last little detail, the pyramid at the top of the leg.

You can see how much it adds, and it's such a nice Craftsman-style feature.

To make it, we're going to draw a line that's a quarter-inch down from the top all the way around, and then we'll draw an angled line to make almost a gabled roof.

(saw running) Then the final two facets that we hand-plane with some guidelines that make an X.

There we are.

Now I'll flip it around.

I'm just looking to meet my quarter-inch line and that center line.

Now I just need to draw the crossing lines to give me the location for the final detail.

Now I'll connect each of the corners to the center.

Now I'm going to hold the plane at approximate angle of the facets.

I'm seeing it come down to the quarter-inch line.

Adjusting the angle.

And that's it.

Now, with all our details cut on our chair, we're about ready to glue it up.

All we have to do is knock some of these edges off with 220 paper, and we'll set up for our glue-up.

Now, in gluing up, I'm starting with the back.

And I have to start with the back rests and work our way out.

So I'll first glue up this back assembly between the shoe and the crest rail.

Here's where you want to be organized.

Let's go ahead and get that in.

The side splat pieces.

I'm going into the crest rail.

I just want to get some clamp pressure on here.

Suddenly the five pieces become one, and you start to feel momentum gaining, like you'll soon have a chair in front of you.

So we'll go ahead and get some glue into these side mortises.

I'll smear everything out.

Here's my lower stretcher.

I know the offset goes up.

I can put the back assembly.

So I'll get that started.

And then come up to the crest rail.

Oh, that's great-- nice fit.

That's it.

Nice.

I'll get some clamps right across.

Seeing some nice squeeze-out right along that shoulder.

So gluing up the front is a very simple process.

So I'll just get glue into those two.

Here I go-- plug in... ...the right side.

And down to the other side.

All right, so we're in the final stage of the glue-up.

We're going to glue our front to the back, so the process is really just the same.

I'll pick up my side rails.

And there's my front.

Now I'll fit in the stretchers.

It's time to fit our angled tenons into the back.

And it's just about there.

The rest of it we'll get with the clamp.

So I'll stand it up.

(sighs): Starts to feel pretty satisfying.

But we've still got to get those clamps on.

That looks great.

What a satisfying feeling-- all those pieces now just one.

And that is one solid chair.

Now, to finish it up, we added a few pegs, just like this finished chair, at each of the joints, which reinforced and gave it tremendous strength.

Then we added these little blocks, just at the seat height, to act as a place where we could fasten on the seat frame.

Now, the seat frame is really simple.

It's just a half-inch piece of Baltic birch with a hole cut.

Then I had this upholstered by a professional upholsterer.

And he put some webbing on, and then some medium-density foam, some cotton batting, and some leather to top it off beautifully.

And the finish is a nice amber shellac, rubbed out with fine steel wool, and then a wax for that soft luster.

That's the Craftsman-style dining chair.

Now I just have to build seven more.

Join me next time for more great projects 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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