Today, I got the remaining plywood cut to the appropriate sizes and proceeded to make the supports (or legs, or whatever you wanna call them). I made stencils, cut one of each support, and then used those as references for the rest. After some rough sanding, I taped them all together to sand uniformly. They still need lighter sanding and filler (because again, there are gaps in the plywood).
1. File and sand the routed pieces to almost perfectly smooth.
2. Fill in any and all gaps with filler.
3. Sand again to a nice surface.
4. File down the inserts of the supports -OR- file down the radii on the routed pieces.
5. Glue the chairs together.
6. SAND. SAND LIKE YOU MEAN IT.
7. Finish the surfaces (still need to work out best method here).
And that's just the chairs. I still want to make cushions filled with goo, which is more of an experimental thing. I'm not sure how well this will go or what materials I will use. We'll see.
Aaron pointed out that Wes made an active seating chair in IP last year. Bummer. All is not lost. I'm coming at this from far afield, my project looks very different, and is meant to be used differently. Aaron continued to show and send me other examples of active seating, including the phenomenal Peter Opsvik's site. When I mentioned to John in the hall how I learned that an active seating chair was done last year, he proffered a bit of insight: "There are seven billion of us and we've been around for like 40,000 years. What makes you think anything you've done is original?" Which I interpreted as "don't fret." |
Checklist
Accomplished:
Routing
Cutting
Working on:
Filing
Sanding
Experimenting with goo containment (which summarizes the entirety of my IP)
Editing / writing the final draft of the thesis
To do:
Get wood filler, fill wood
Put chairs together
Finishing
Make cushions with goo
Get it all done on time.