Adirondack Chairs

So someone at work got it in my head that I needed to make some outdoor furniture, the plan was to make 6 chairs, 2 for each of 3 of us. After looking over a bunch of chairs and reviewing several online sets of plans, I decided to go with Norm Abram's plans (available here) from the New Yankee Workshop.


If you have a look at the picture I'll point out a few things I like about them. First, the seat curves. A lot of the plans I looked at had flat seats and that is not the shape of my butt. Second, no vertical support in the rear of the chair. A lot of plans I looked at have a support for the back of the arm rests and this one uses the seat back to support the rear of the arm rests. This set of plans also included a little table and leg rest, so off I sent for them.

For some reason I was expecting full sized plans, so was a little disappointed when I discovered that I would have to blow them up myself. After a couple failed attempts at scanning them and projecting them at work, tracing onto large paper, but couldn't ever get them scanned well enough to work out. So we were stuck with the manual method of drawing a grid on the boards and matching the lines within the grid on the plans at a larger size on the boards. We did this onto masonite so we would have a nice template to trace onto the boards. I think this part of the job took longer than the rest combined. Drawing the one inch grid on the boards was very tedious.

By the time we got the template cut out it was getting pretty hot but we decided to press on a bit longer. We cut the main supports, front legs, arms and arm supports before calling it quits for the day, more on that in a sec...

Here I am demonstrating to Narasimhan the proper way to squat (or hunker down, depending on where you're from, it's very technical) while working on any project. He is a fast learner.

Narasimhan is cutting the arm rest supports on the scroll saw, does my renter's insurance cover personal liability suits?

I'm cutting the front legs on the ShopSmith table saw. A good all purpose tool if you don't have a lot of space, but I'll be getting a real tablesaw as soon as I have some space.

And here we have the lower portion of the chair complete. This seemed to go pretty slow up to this point and it was hot and miserable.

This was my breaking point for the day. After cutting this out and routing the edges I don't pre counter-sink the wood and treat it like green pine, figuring the screw head will stuff into it fine. Nope, cracked on the last screw, and after a few choice words I sent it across the garage and quit for the day.



After resuming work (and getting a nice countersink drill bit) things moved along smoothly. I used liquid nails on most of the joints, though it got a bit tedious after a while. The arms went on fine, though I didn't get them on perfectly strait, it was good enough.


And the back support. This is bolted on pretty nicely, though it was kind of a pain keeping everything still while drilling through the (mounted) arm rests and the back support at the same time.

Hooray! Cutting out the back rest slats. Getting close to sitting down :-D.

Back supports are on! If you look at the gaps and tops of the slats you can see they don't line up quite right. The gaps are off because I didn't get the arm rests strait, and the tops are off because I was freehanding that part.

I'm routing the back seat piece. It is curved to match the curve of the back rest, fancy...

I had been screwing most things down, but by the time I got to the seat I figured some 2" brad nails would do the trick for them, as they don't get many lateral forces.


And here is the completed chair, well, almost. It still took a bit of time sealing it up with some wipe on polyurethane. I'm debating making the back rest a little taller on the next one so I can lean my head back to fall asleep, but I'm pretty happy with the way this one came out. It feels pretty solid though I wonder if I would have been better off using 2x4s for the front legs.

This was the only chair we ended up completing, though assuming the house purchase goes through I'll need some more seats near the pool. Pat (who tricked me into this project) pretends that he'll make some too, and of course Narasimhan wants his. A nice easy wood project, everyone should make a few.

Here's a quick snap of it at night all sealed: