After a long hiatus, I got back in the shop recently to help some friends make a few adirondack chairs and footrests. I've made a few of these chairs before so I was confident that we could knock them out without too much trouble. Most plans call for use of templates made beforehand so the actual pieces can be easily replicated
Our friends D&D wanted chairs with a curved back pattern, so we decided to go with Norm Abram's
design from the New Yankee Workshop. I have one of
Norm's books that provides the plan and layout for templates, so that made getting started pretty easy. The wood we choose we reclaimed redwood from my old deck, which was replaced last year with Trex. I am glad I saved the old 2x6 redwood boards since a project like this is perfect for them. It took quite a bit of time jointing, re-sawing, and planing the old deck boards into usable 4x stock, but it was worth the effort. We ended up with ~200 bf of usable boards with really nice character. The photo below shows the stack of redwood after the considerable milling was done.
The process included sorting the boards for the best stock, tracing the outlines of the templates, rough cutting the shapes on the band saw, then trimming the stock to the template using a pattern cutting bit on the router table. After a little finish sanding, the chairs were ready to be assembled. Each chair took about 8 hours from start to finish. We also decided to make a couple of footrests after chairs were done. These weren't included in the original plan but they were pretty easy to adapt to match. Each footrest took about an hour. Below are photos of the finished chairs and footrests. The first is in my garage right after assembly. The last two show them in their final resting place, on D&D's beautiful new patio. They're planning to apply a simple clear finish to let the color and grain pattern of the redwood to come through. These should provide years of comfortable backyard seating around the fire pit.
