Re: Need help with boring and reaming
Edward Damewood, Northern Alabama
>I'm not too familiar with the Welsh stick chair, but it sounds like you're trying to socket tapered chair legs into a plank seat at some prescribed angles -- same operation as for a Windsor chair. I'll try to help, as I have legged-up a couple of American sack-back Windsors.
The legs are in line with the sighting line but the splay is not nearly wide enough.
Okay, that's one angle right out of two. You're half-way there. Or maybe a third of the way, depending on how you look at it. You need to (1) get the leg along the sightline, (2) get the right angle off of vertical from the seat, and (3) go deep enough, but not too deep.
As I bored the mortises, everything looked ok. Same when I reamed them...The reamed holes are very round and not oval as I had feared they would be...But, when fitting the legs, things were way too 'upright'. As I said, everything looked ok during boring/drilling...
It sounds like you were very concerned about elongating the holes -- so much that you may have lost focus on the angle itself. Did you use a bevel square to check your angle as you went along? It sounds like you were on the sightline, so I'm guessing you had that marked on the seat plank itself.
Where is the angle more likely to get messed up, boring or reaming?
I don't know how big a bit you used when you bored the initial leg-hole, but I would say that the initial hole only gets you in the ball-park -- it basically gives you a reference and a starter-hole for where you do the reaming. The optimistic way of looking at this is that you can adjust the hole with the reamer if it isn't at exactly the right angles. The pessimistic view is that it doesn't matter how well you bore the initial holes, because you can really mess them up during the reaming.
For most of us -- meaning those of us who haven't made tens or hundreds of chairs -- I would consider this an iterative (ream a bit, test, adjust reaming, test, etc.) process. Drill and ream the legs in pairs (both the back legs, then the front legs, or vice-versa). Get one of them like you want it, then try to make the other look right with it. Test the legs in the holes as you go and be very careful not to remove too much stock with the reamer, because you can get too deep in a hurry.
You're doing handwork on a chair, so there is a lot of testing, eyeballing, and adjusting involved. If it looks right and works well, it won't matter if the angles are off a smidgen from the original. If you're making a set of four and your brother-in-law is going to line them up and critique them...well, that might call for tighter tolerances.
I fear I may not have helped, but I did try. Good luck, and keep us posted.
Regards,
Ed
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