The Woodworker & Woodturner – August 2019

PROJECT

54 The Woodworker & Good Woodworking August 2019 http://www.getwoodworking.com

Oak kitchen bar chairs

THE BAR

RAISING

Realising a pair of

folding kitchen ‘bar’

chairs no longer fit the

bill, Robert Couldwell

takes to the workshop

and goes about making

a replacement set in oak

2 Perfect components

1 The problem – the original chairs

Fig.1 Oak kitchen bar chair dimensions

I

n my previous articles for this magazine,

I worked on the premise that an amateur

with no formal training and little in the way

of machinery could produce reasonable

pieces of furniture. My first project was a

softwood slatted vegetable drawer-unit copied

slavishly from an article in The Woodworker, which

certainly satisfied my wife (not easy) and is now

in regular use in the larder.

My daughter, seeing this, asked if I could make

a desk needed for her new work-from-home job.

Initially thinking I would make this from softwood

and MDF and providing her with a sketch which

she approved, I suddenly thought I should be

more ambitious and make it in oak. The result

was, surprisingly, a success and featured in the

April 2013 issue. It also resulted in several other

commissions (unfortunately for love not money),

until pressure of work gave me no time for

anything but essential (DIY) woodworking.

The problem

Recently things changed and a new project was

born. We’ve long had a pair of folding kitchen

‘bar’ chairs in use, but when used in our current

house, the protruding metal legs were a constant

source of annoyance as it was very easy to trip

over them. It came to the point where my wife

insisted I do something about them (photo 1).