Rustic Furniture

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To give a comfortable sitting angle to a chair or couch, front legs raise the front of n the seat a little higher than the rear and bottom rungs are usually longer than the top ones. To offer a slight wedge shape to rug your hips into the seat, front legs are en a little more widely spaced than the red Indeed, you can make a wonderfully stab triangular chair with two front legs and but a single large rear leg post.

Some instructions tell you to eye the angles that rungs take going into air backs or table legs. But they will not level. A level frame will not have to fight gravity so much and stresses will be equal throughout the piece, so I like to make the essential geometry of a rustic piece as square as any Windsor chair with rungs (spreaders, stringers) running level and en tering legs at a 90° angle to the vertical. It legs are splayed by design or, due to irregular cities, this is Bard to accomplish by eye.

Here's how I do it.

I Look at any of piece of furniture as a box wth making up the four sticks each making up the four sides wityh the adjoining boxes. I prefabricate the back front or both sides of a piece, then connect their with the side rungs.

All is kept square and sides are made identical on a workbench with a two-inch- a, and a two-inch-high lip in front. Bottoms of two legs are pressed against the lip and the is laid out as though the lip is the floor the flat, horizontal dimension is reallly a vertical up-down dimension. I align runs between legs, parallel to the lip. With nailed-up pieces, I nail them up on the grid. If I'm making mortise and tenon (open-in-ajoints, I mark the angled lines on the sticks where rungs and legs meet—and also mark out mortise and tenon locations and angles on the sticks. Then I mark the frame's shape with chalk on the grid and snake a second frame piece to be the mirror image of the first.

To drill mortises, I move opposing legs (both front or both back) to the table clamp and cinch them in side-by-side (Using thin wood shims between them to prevent rolling, if needed) so their flat, horizontal orientation repeats the vertical dimension on the grid table—in other words, so the side that faced right or left on the table faces up in the clamp. I center the level eye on the electric drill over the mortise marks and the holes turn out square (vertical in all dimensions). When the chair is assembled, the holes will be horizontal.

Tenon stock is laid out on one of the grid lines and tenons whittled to size so that they protrude from each end of the stick, perfectly straight along the grid line (even if the stick itself bends beautifully in several dimensions). Opposing rungs are identical in length and will go into the mortises to make a perfectly square frame.

Tools for Rustic Furniture Making

Cruising the woods, I carry a hand ax and a small bow saw to "fell" most twig furniture trees. The saw, with its needle-sharp Swedish blade, will trim off larger unwanted branches as well.

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