Dining room arm chair

This chair took a very long time to repair - mostly because I lost interest in it from time to time.However it is finished now!  The chair was disassembled, scraped clean, and repaired or made new parts as required.

Dining room chair is restored.

Most of the original wood is butter nut, and it had a plywood decorative piece in the back. The back of the chair has the same shape except I bought a piece of ash to make a new one. Ash is remarkably similar to oak in texture,colour and workability.  The front and rear pieces that connect the legs were reproduced using rock maple that I had in the shop.

The stain that I used was Varathane Wood Stain - Dark Walnut no.269 with a wax top coat.
As you can see in the picture the different woods reacted differently to the stain. The butternut wood accepted the stain with ease but the rock maple didn't care for it too much. The overall effect is pleasing to me even though irregularities are present with staining.

Rocking Horse

My Opa built several of these rocking horses during his lifetime.  I have some of the pieces from this plan already made by him. He also made fiber board templates of all the pieces. The legs which in my opinion are the hardest parts to make are completed for me.  I bought the plan and now am in the process of finishing this rocking horse.

More clamping options

I made this tool to clamp long boards to the edge of my bench top. The face vise holds the other end of the board.

Rocking chair repair

This rocking chair was in our family for a few decades now. It was made in Japan and now was in need of some repair. The wood was cracked in several places and two spindles on the back were broken.

I used my friend's wood lathe to turn the replacement spindles. Removing the old finish took a lot of time because I used a set of scrapers. This was my introduction to scrapers and I really like using them. Finish was wipe off Puritan pine Varathane and paste wax top coat. We use this rocking chair to rock our children to sleep in the wee hours of the morning.