Making a Chair The Easy Way || Mid Century Modern Furniture Build

This video was sponsored by Policy Genius. Hey, what's up? I'm back in the shop taking a little break from the treehouse so that I could build a piece of furniture. Now this chair right here, you can see it's kind of, um, well, it's seen better days. My wife bought this for a whopping six dollars at an antique store about two years ago and believe it or not, we've been sitting in this thing. It hasn't fallen apart yet, but any day it's bound to. It's got some rot on the bottom of the legs. It looks like it sat in water for a while. All the joints are coming apart. So I thought, why not build her a brand new chair? Not this exact same chair. I might tweak the design a little bit, but I want it to be able to fit these cushions that we already have. So I'm going to scrap this chair, use it as kind of a guide or a template, and build a brand new one from the ground up. I think this is teak or some sort of mahogany. Not quite sure. I'm going to build a new one out of black walnut. Follow along, check the link in the video description for products and tools and supplies and all that stuff. And don't forget to just have a good day, have fun, love yourself, and be kind to one another. I'm just joking. Who cares about that? Watch the video. Okay, bye. Now this builds a little different than my normal builds because normally I'm building stuff from the ground up. But with this, I have to tear this thing apart before I can rebuild it, which is either going to make it easier or harder. As you can see, this chair is old and it's gone through some adaptations. Like, I don't think this string in the bottom is original and it's got a bunch of different screws all over the place, which tells me that it probably started to fall apart a long time ago and somebody just tried to do some quick fixes to keep it from totally collapsing. So first things first, I think I just need to tear this apart down to its individual parts and pieces so that I can see what I'm working with. So I got out my impact driver and removed some drywall screws from the sides of it. Along with the drywall screws, there was a couple of these really ancient flathead screws. And then I got out my favorite tool and started disassembling. And by that, I mean just hitting it with a hammer until things really started to fall apart. A few good whacks and I at least had the seat part, oh boy, separated from the body of the chair. Now I'm going to rebuild this in two separate parts. The first part is going to be what you see here, kind of the base structure. And the second part is going to be this thing, the seat structure. Now in the original chair, they incorporated the seat structure into the base structure so it was all tied together in one piece. But I really think this made the chair a little weaker. So I'm going to do the base structure completely separate so that it's nice and solid and the seat structure will just kind of sit in there after the fact. So next, I needed to get the seat structure separated into two individual parts so that I could get accurate measurements and get everything rebuilt. Speaking of rebuilding, I'm going to be making this new chair out of this glorious black walnut. So I went to my local lumber store and I spent about half my mortgage on these four boards of six quarter black walnut. Next, I took measurements on the seat section of the old chair just to kind of roughly figure out how big a piece is I needed to chop down and mill up. With all the measurements in my noggin, I went over to the chop saw and I started breaking down my stock into manageable pieces. I like to do this because it's way easier to mill up short boards than it is to mill up long eight foot sections. So with some short boards cut down, I first went over to the joiner and edge jointed everything and then I face jointed it. Now that I had two perfectly square and flat sides, I ran everything through the planer to get a third flat side. And when I was done with that, I had completely forgotten about all those measurements I put in my noggin. So I went back over and re-measured the seat section to get the correct width that I needed to cut down this walnut to make the outside frame of each seat piece. That width was right at two inches, so I set my table saw to two inches and I started ripping down pieces. With all of my lumber ripped to the correct width, I set up a stop block over on my chop saw and I started cutting everything down to the right length to make two borders to make my upper and lower seat section piece frame things. It's gonna look something like this. Two sides and a top and a bottom. And then all those little slats are gonna run in between, but we'll worry about that in a second. For now, we're just focusing on the frame and making sure that it's the same size as the chair that we tore apart. Which it is, so on the right track. Now for those little slats in between. I went back over to the table saw and I ripped down some thinner pieces of black walnut, this time to an inch and a quarter. Now in the original seat, only the back had slats. The lower section had that weird jute rope stuff. But since the cushions I'm going to put on these seats are pretty thick, I decided to opt for slats on both the back and the base. Since you're not gonna feel the slats through those thick cushions. And I don't want to mess around trying to weave rope. Because I'm a woodworker, not a rope worker. Now with the two side pieces on the border and then all five of these slats on the inside, that's a lot of pieces to get lined up. So I decided instead of trying to do them all at once, I would just go ahead and get the border joined together. Not glued up, just dry fit together. And with that securely in place, then I could kind of figure out how to, you know, fit all my slat pieces in between it. So using some of these awesome Rockler quick grip clamps, I just hooked my frames together and started marking out for my dominoes. That's right, I'm gonna use dominoes. I know you might not approve, but I don't care. So just deal with it. And using the domino joiner, I mortised out all my holes in the frame so that I could dry fit it together with some 8 by 50 millimeter dominoes. So with all of my frame pieces mortised out, I inserted all my dominoes and dry fit the entire frame together. Like you're seeing me do here. That's why I mentioned that I did it. That's kind of how this whole video thing works. I say what I'm doing as I'm doing it. So I guess it's a little redundant that now I'm telling you that I'm saying what I'm doing while I'm doing it, because obviously that's what I'm doing. Anyways, we're getting off track. Once I had my frame dry fit together, I did the exact same thing to my other seat section frame, and now it was time to start laying out exactly where we wanted our slats to go. Now I wanted them to be evenly spaced, so I grabbed this handy dandy Woodpecker's even spacing guide gauge thing. It's basically like an accordion you just pull apart, and those individual points, they always stay even. So it's really good for marking out things like this that you all want to be even. Anyways, once I had all five of my slats marked dead in the center, I transferred that line from my lower portion onto my upper portion. That way I knew they would all stay parallel. I just did this by squeezing the boards together and using a square, and boom! I have all my marks for the dominoes for my slats. Next, all I had to do was, well, use the domino joiner again to mortise all those holes out. There's going to be a lot of domino joining in this video, so let me just stop you right now. If you're getting upset saying, I don't have a domino joiner, oh it's expensive, you could just use a dowel and jig. Quit whining. Next, I wanted to make my slats sit inside the frame just a little bit to give them just a slight reveal. So I took them all over to the planer and I planed them down. I did this before mortising out the holes in my slats. Now you can see they have just a little bit of a reveal inside of that frame. Next, I needed to mortise out the holes in the slats themselves. Now because I wanted these holes to be dead center in the middle of each slat, and I had 10 slats to do, I thought I might as well throw together a quick little jig. I just did this with some scrap pieces of walnut and some double-sided tape, and I taped the pieces right onto the little fence for my domino joiner. Then I can just slide one of these slats right in between and make sure that I drill out the exact same hole on every single slat, every time. So I just clamped my domino joiner to my workbench, then I'd slide in a slat, and I'd just pull the back of the domino joiner towards me. And bada-bing, bada-boom, zip-zap-zoop, I had a perfectly mortised out hole right in the center of each one of my slats. With all my slats mortised out, next I wanted to soften the edges just a bit before I glued everything up. So I chalked up an eighth inch roundover bit in my little trim router, and I just hit every single edge of each one of my slats. That's four edges for 10 slats, so that's 40 edges I had to do, but it went pretty quick. Next it was time to finally glue up the two parts of my seat assembly. Now the way I'm gluing this up is I'm gluing in the frame pieces on either side, and I'm only gluing one slat piece in place. The other four slats I'm just going to let float with just dominoes, no glue, because those slats are going to be sandwiched in between that top and bottom rail, so they can't go anywhere. So really I just used minimal glue, this way I don't have to deal with a bunch of squeeze out and cleanup, and it's going to be just as strong. So after applying glue to those three dominoes, I just inserted the other dominoes nice and dry like my mom's meatloaf. And then once I had all my dominoes inserted, I slid on those slats. I think you call these slats, I mean I don't know what else to call them. They're skinny straight pieces of wood. It could be staves, maybe. No, that sounds dumb. I'm going with slats. With all my slats and side stiles inserted into my bottom piece, I did the same domino pattern on the top, just gluing three of those seven dominoes, and slap it on my top piece. You can see I get squeeze out on every single one that I added glue to. Can you imagine the cleanup mess if I had added glue to every single slat? That would have been a lot of glue squeeze out, and completely unnecessary. In no time my seat assembly was all in clamps, and I could start focusing on my leg assembly. I just don't know exactly where to start. I guess I'll start the same way I started the other parts, and that's just break the old chair apart into its individual components. So back to my hammer or whacker, and pretty soon I had one side of the leg assembly all disassembled. Disassembled into its individual parts. I just had to cut off these dowels because they were still glued in partly, and I didn't want to struggle with them. So I just used a flush cut saw to cut the dowels off, and then I could take each individual part and trace it out onto a piece of quarter inch plywood. Now these shapes don't have to be exact. I mean we are building a new chair. We're pretty much just using the old pieces as a reference. It will slightly be different, but that's okay because then it will be unique like a snowflake. After tracing out each individual piece onto some quarter inch baltic birch ply, I went over to the band saw, and I roughly cut out each one of those shapes. Just coming right to the edge of my pencil line. We're going to clean this all up over on the oscillating belt sander here in... well actually right now. Again there's really no wrong way to do this. I mean the pieces are going to be whatever shape they are when you're done, and that's what we're going to use to make a chair. The only real important parts are the top and bottom cuts, because those have to be perfectly straight so that it sits level on the floor, and that your armrests will sit level on the top. So for those cuts I used the chop saw, and I got them pretty accurate I think. Then I just laid each one of my now quarter inch plywood templates onto the old pieces to make sure that nothing looked too crazy. So far so good. Then using those templates I traced out each one of the shapes that I needed onto some new black walnut stock. Remember that we're making two sides of this chair base that are identical, so we need two of each individual piece. I managed to fit all those pieces onto one board. So next I took that board over to my miter saw, and I cut it up a little bit to make it a After cutting it into smaller chunks on the chop saw, I went back over to the bandsaw, and I cut out each shape roughly. Now when I traced these out I used a sharpie marker. I like to use a sharpie because it gives a nice fat line, which means I can pretty much cut right on the outside of that line and know that I haven't cut too much material off. You want to cut as much material as you possibly can, but not so much that you go smaller than your end piece, because that won't look good. After cutting out all these pieces I decided I need to make another template for the middle stretcher. Originally I thought it's just a straight piece so I don't need one, but looking at it closer it had a pretty good taper to it. So instead of doing a taper jig on the table saw, I just went ahead and made another template for that middle stretcher as well. Then with all of my pieces roughly cut out, I decided to send them all through the planer and just thin them down a little bit. Make the chair look a little more sleek and feminine and sexy. Can I say those things about a walnut chair? I mean, I just did, so apparently I can say them. The real question is, should I say them? I feel like that's been the question I've asked myself my entire life. Anyway, so I'm getting off topic. Next, I took my templates and using double-sided tape, I stuck them to the top of each one of my roughly cut out pieces, and we are ready to head to the router table. Oh, hey, how's it going? This video is sponsored by Policy Genius. 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Now, back to building a chair. Now, to cut out each one of my individual pieces, I'm using this pattern routing bit from Bits and Bits. It's a spiral up cut, down cut, bottom mount bearing. I don't know what you call it. It's available on their website, and it looks like what you see on the screen here. Bottom line is this thing is awesome for template routing because you can go any direction you want on the grain and do end grain like you see me doing here. No problem, and I never get any kickback. I'll include a link to this bit down in the video description, and I even have a coupon code so you can get it at a discount. The trick is you just want to cut your shapes pretty close to the size of your template so you're not removing a lot of material at once, but as you can see, this thing cuts like butter, and it was making very quick work of my individual shapes and pieces. In no time, I had pretty much all of my pieces templated out, and it was still only the first day. I mean, we are cooking on this chair. Look, doesn't that look nice? Once I had my pieces cut out, I just use a putty knife to get in between my template and the solid stock, and I pry the thing away. You do want to be pretty careful because the double-sided tape I use, which there's also a link in the video description, is crazy strong, and you can snap these quarter inch templates in half if you're not careful. So just go slow and just gently work the template away from your stock piece. Once I had the template removed, I just peeled off the remaining double-sided tape stuff. Is it double-sided tape or double stick tape? Is that like tomato tomato? I think probably. I'm going with double-sided. With all of our base pieces templated out, there was just one more thing I wanted to take care of before I called it a day, and that was this seat assembly portion. As you can see, it needs to be angled like this, but that doesn't work too good because it creates a gap. So I took the original piece off of the chair I broke apart, and I used it to set an angle on my table saw so that I could get the angle right on the back of that seat section. Once I had the table saw set to the same angle as the original chair, which just happened to be 15 degrees, I ran my entire first seat section piece through, cutting a 15 degree angle on the back side of it. And then I did the exact same thing to my upper seat section assembly thing, cutting a 15 degree angle on that one as well. Now these pieces can come together nice and tight at the correct angle. Well, at the same angle the original chair was at, if that's the correct angle. And with that, we have all the pieces cut for our seat assembly, all of our pieces templated out for our base assembly, and all of that in one day's work. I think it's time to go eat some dinner, but I won't show you that part. The next morning I came back out to the shop and I was ready to join my two seat assembly pieces together, but first I just wanted to clean up the shape of them just a bit. So I got this little round over router corner template thing. I traced out how much material I was going to be removing. I cut off most of the excess with the band saw. Then using double-sided tape, I just stuck this rounded corner template thing onto the corner of each one of my seat assemblies. And using that same pattern routing bit from Bits and Bits, I added a nice little radius just to the front two corners of my lower piece and the upper two corners of my upper piece. Because I don't want to radius the corners that I'm going to join together with the other piece, if that makes sense. Anyways, pretty soon I had these nice radiuses and it was looking a little cleaner. I also got out a half inch round over bit. No, that's wrong. Pretty sure it was a quarter inch. Quarter inch round over bit and I rounded over the front portion of my chair. Kind of where your legs are going to hang over just to soften the edges a little bit. Then it was time to glue my upper and lower seat frame assembly together. Now because this is at an angle, I didn't want it to slide around when I tried to clamp it up. I didn't have any salt in my shop, but I did find this packet of sugar. So I just sprinkled it on top of the glue. Now what this does is add a little grit to the glue so that when you clamp up your angle, it doesn't want to slide on you because it catches on the grits of that sugar. It actually works pretty good. And with that thing in clamps, I set it aside and it was time to start working on the joinery for all the pieces that I templated out yesterday on my base assembly. Now because I based all of my new pieces off of the old pieces, I also wanted to make sure to line everything up the same way that the old pieces were lined up. So I kind of laid out the old pieces on the new pieces and marked where everything should go. I marked out for my dominoes. I drilled all my mortises with my domino joiner and then I was, well, I guess I was still drilling out mortises with my domino joiner. Sometimes I try and guess what's going to happen next when I'm doing these voiceovers, but I don't really know because this is the first time I'm ever watching this video. Anyways, after mortising out all my holes, I inserted my dominoes and I started assembling my leg structure things. As you can see here. Insert that in there, lift this up like that, and hey, starting to kind of look like part of a chair. Now this middle stretcher, I shrunk down so it's inset on one side. Oh, but it's flush on the other side. So it'll be flush on the inside where the chair actually sits. So I made another piece and it's a mirror image. So it's flush on the inside, inset on the outside. That's important because it to be flush on the inside so that your chair can rest on that brace piece and everything works the way that it's supposed to. If that doesn't make sense, just don't worry about it. It's really not that important. I'm just showing you because it was on the TV screen and I thought, I don't know, I should explain what you're looking at, right? With all of our lower leg assembly dry fit together, it was time to start figuring out how to attach these armrests to that lower leg assembly. So I just laid the armrest up there where I thought it looked good and I marked the top and bottom for dominoes. Now I wanted this to be identical on the other side, so I just pinched the two pieces together and I transferred the marks from my first piece onto my second piece so that everything would line up the same. Now you see my lines that I marked out on this piece. They're facing inwards towards the inside of the chair. I also wanted to transfer these onto my other armrest, but I had to do this weird flip thing because like I said, it's a mirror image on the other side. Then I clamped the two pieces together to make sure they didn't wiggle around on me and using a square, I transferred my marks from my one piece onto my other piece. These are all just my marks to line up for my dominoes to hook everything where it needs to go. And with all of my pieces marked out, I started mortising some holes. Now the backrest is actually going to cross across this armrest on the back of the chair, which means the armrest has to be perfectly flush with the leg towards the back of the chair. But I didn't want it perfectly flush with the leg on the front of the chair. I wanted the leg to land more in the middle of the armrest on the front so that the armrest had a little overhang. So I did all my mortises for the chair except for the front of the armrest first. Then I adjusted the fence on my domino joiner to set that mortise down more in the center of the armrest. I did that one last. This way I could use the edge of the leg to mark out for my dominoes, but I could still have it set back. I don't know if that makes any sense, but you can kind of see it here. In the back of the armrest, it's flush with the leg, but when I hook this on like this, the front of the armrest overhangs the leg just a little bit. See? Kind of nice looking. And I have a chair. Kind of. I mean parts of a chair to dry fit together. Let's keep going. Now that I have two separate leg assembly pieces, I need to connect them with some cross bracing to make them one. Now in the original chair, it only had one cross brace piece at the very front and it relied on the seat assembly as all of the other bracing, which is why I think eventually it led to the entire thing breaking down. I'm going to connect these two pieces with three separate cross braces that are at integral parts where I can just basically set the seat assembly in and it'll just stay there. Kind of floating and unattached, but it won't really have anywhere to go when you're sitting on it, so it doesn't need to be attached. Anyways, once I clamped all my pieces in place and I set my seat assembly in there to make sure it landed where I wanted, I figured I'd have my front brace, my middle brace, and my back brace. These will all catch that seat assembly very nicely. Now I just have to mark out to join them all together. Like I mentioned, a lot of dominoing in this entire process. So I marked for all of my dominoes and then I started disassembling my pre-assembly to mortise out a bunch more domino holes. I feel like I used like 80 dominoes in this one chair, but what are you gonna do? After mortising out all the pieces on my individual leg assembly sections, I mortised out holes at the ends of all of my connecting stretcher pieces. And then I was finally ready to connect the entire thing into one unified chair. Again, this is just a dry fit. I really wanted to make sure all these pieces fit together the way they were supposed to before I added glue to anything. And what do you know? Darn it, I already broke. I'll just plop this back in here, pretend that didn't happen, squeeze it together, give it a little push, give it a little wiggle, and a twist. What do you know? I have all of the pieces cut and fit together for my entire chair. Now I just gotta thread this seat assembly in the back there because that's the skinniest part where it's flush against that back leg. Give it a little wiggle, and wow, that's looking pretty good. It almost looks like a chair, like a pretty rough chair. A lot of pretty sharp angles and edges still, so I gotta do something to fix that. At this point, all of my pieces were done and cut and assembled, but as you can see, everything's very square and rough and rudimentary. We want to class it up a little bit, give it a little more shape, a little more flair, a little more pizazz, which in my mind means just kind of rounding everything over to soften it up a bit. So I grabbed the quarter inch roundover, and as you can see, after doing one arm, it gives it a nice little subtle, I don't know, roundy over looky thingy. I also didn't like how thick the front of the armrests were, so I marked on each one where it met the leg, and I decided to taper them down towards the front just a little bit to give them a thinner profile at the front of each armrest. I did this by just going over to my oscillating belt sander, and just eyeballing it by hand, just tapering that front down until it got to a point that I thought it looked nice. After doing one, I tried to just match the other one as close as I could, keeping in mind that they're separated by the width of the chair, so you're never really going to be able to compare one right next to the other. But as you can see in this side profile, that nice little taper up towards the front just gives it a little extra shape and makes it look that much softer and cleaner. You might also notice I took the time to add a round over to every angle on the base of the chair that I could, so at this point, instead of this boxy thrown together chair, it's starting to look like something. Something you could sit in and drink a glass of whiskey and tell stories. The days of old. I don't really have any of those stories because I'm not that old yet, but one day, one day I will tell the stories about today and the chair I built. And because I'm old, I will be telling a story of the days of old. Anyways, next I started just throwing glue in all my joints. I decided to do this glue up in two sections. My two side leg assembly pieces first, and then once those were dry, I would glue in all my cross braces and glue on my arm rests. Now because this is at an angle, the clamp wanted to slip on the back, so I just clamped on another little clamp first as a catch for my clamp so that it couldn't pop off. Essentially, I clamped my clamp and that seemed to work just fine. As you can see here in this delightful sped up version, put my little clamp on the back, put my big clamp from back to front, and squeezy squeezy out pops the glue. That's just what you want to see. After that glue was dry, I removed all the clamps for that glue up and it was time to glue all my cross braces together and get this thing assembled. Now I'm ready for it too. I'm tired. I need a place to sit down. So I put a little glue on my dominoes, trying to use as little of glue as possible while still using enough glue to hold it together, because squeeze out is just a pain, especially when everything's all rounded over and nice. It just makes it really hard to sand in there. Anyways, pretty soon I had all my cross braces in place and now all I needed to do was glue on my arm rests. So I squeezed a little glue in all my mortises, added my dominoes, and I plopped those things on. I'm not even going to put clamps on these. It was such a nice tight friction fit and I mean it's not like it's going to fall off of there. So I just added my glue, tapped them in with the mallet, and let them sit until the next day. In the morning I came out and removed my clamps. Everything was set up nice and secure. I took my seat assembly out. Hey, how's it going? And I gave everything one more once over with the sandpaper to get rid of any squeeze out or glue fingerprints I might have left behind. Then I pulled out some Rubio Monocoat Pure and I started polishing the entire thing up. And boy does that walnut start to pop. And this thing is looking clean. You know, I never told my wife I was doing this. I just took the old chair out of the house and broke into pieces. But I gotta think she can't be mad once she sees the new chair. I'm probably not even going to tell her I did this. I'm just going to replace the old chair with the new chair and see if she ever says anything about it. I mean, you guys agree this one looks better than the other one, right? And just like that in two and a half days I managed to get the entire chair rebuilt, put back together, and I finally had a place to sit down. Before, after. That was actually a ton of fun to recreate something that already exists. I know it was a little easier because I was able to take that apart and use some of the parts and pieces to get measurements, but honestly there's no reason you guys can't build a chair just like this. Just go for it. Or go find a chair that you like at a thrift store and take it apart and rebuild it yourself. It's a good practice to just kind of build your skills and you get a nice chair out of it. Make sure you check that video description down below for links to all the products and tools that I use. There's also a link down there to our Patreon page where you get a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage, you get extra access to me, weekly live streams, you get discount codes, all sorts of great stuff over there. You can watch the videos without commercials. I mean, if you're not signed up for Patreon, go do that. There's also a link to our website where you can get sweet merch, t-shirts, hats, all sorts of stuff. Until next time, I'm just gonna sit here and take a nap.