Maloof Inspired Rocker, Charles Brock Plans, 2

This weekend I worked on the seat, the front legs, and the back legs. I also rewatched the DVD yet again, it really is an invaluable tool. The first thing I did was to dust off my biscuit joiner and look all around the shop, I know I had some biscuits around here somewhere. In the DVD Mr. Brock uses Dominoes but he does suggest that you could use biscuits or dowels, they really are just to align the coopered seat. After checking seat for size I used a plane to trim off a few hundreds of an inch off of each of the ends. Once I was happy with everything I measured and marked for the joinery and cut it on the tablesaw. Using the 1/2 inch slotting bit that Mr. Brock recommends I trimmed the tenons for the legs. I trimmed excess material from the seat using the bandsaw then, using plenty of glue, clamped it up.
While the seat was cooking I picked some nicely figured Walnut for the front legs and cut them to size. Mr. Brock's instructions for laying out the mortises for the front legs were very easy to follow. I cut them to size then adjusted the fit with a router plane. Once this was complete I used the provided template to mark the front legs and cut the waste away on the bandsaw.

Once I took the seat out of the clamps the fun started, using an angle grinder and a Galahad carving wheel, I carved out the seat to a shape I liked then refined it with with a sanding wheel, a micro plane, and finally worked my way to 60 grit sandpaper on my Festool sander. I have to say that I never thought much about sanders until I got to use this unit with it's attached vacuum, does a better, cleaner job that any sander I've ever used, I have some DeWalt random orbit sanders that I used to attach to my shopvac, but it doesn't compare. I wanted to see how the seat was going to look so I splashed some mineral spirits on it and WOW!, it is beautiful.

The next thing I did was to select a board for the back legs and rough cut, then trimmed them out on the bandsaw, following this I attached the pattern and cleaned them up on the router table. The instructions call for an adder block to be glued to the inside of each leg, this was the last thing I did this weekend, stay tuned for more updates. Oh a last note, Charles Brock picked up my last post and linked it from his website! Unfortunately somehow my "about me" section had gotten turned off so he had no idea what my name was, and at the end of my post I added a quote from Douglas Adams, but I didn't put quotation marks around it, so, Mr. Brock called me Doug..., well, who really cares, I'm just psyched that he picked up my post.

"Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."
Terry Pratchett