The Windsor Chair

Apologies for not having posted for a while.  I flew to Arizona to visit my mother for a week and came down with a cold. 🤧 Although it was a mild cold, I still had it the weekend of the Good Sam Show, which I really felt that I shouldn't attend under the circumstances.  😢  I spent most of the weekend just resting.  Last week, I was in training all week, learning Java coding for one of the applications I support.  Between recovering from my cold and straining my brain on all that coding, I was pretty exhausted every night, which meant that I really had no energy to work on the library.  This past weekend, though, I finally got to make something.  Yay!

The library has a Windsor chair.

I had originally intended to purchase one here:  https://www.mastersminiatures.com/54-windsor-armchair-121-p.asp, but I feel like I've kind of been on a roll making my own pieces and thought I'd at least like to try to make one myself.

My biggest concern was how to get dowels small enough.  The smallest I could find online were 1/16" in diameter, and those were just way too thick for half scale.  I thought I would have to buy a lathe, and was blanching at the price, but, on a model ship building Web site, I found out that the best way to make super-skinny dowels was with a jeweler's draw plate, which I promptly ordered.  Basically, what you do is take your 1/16" dowel and keep pulling it through successfully smaller holes on the draw plate.  As you do that, the dowel gets shaved down more and more until it's the size you need.  I found that I had to pull the dowel through each hole several times, and it helped to pull from end for a while, then switch to pulling from the other end.  Here you can see how I was able to really shave down my dowel!  The one on the left is what I started with; the one on the right is what I ended up with. The process is actually kind of fun and Zen, but you do get little wood shavings everywhere.  😊

I cut the arms, back and seat from bass wood, and used my little pin vise to drill the holes I needed.  I had to go fairly thick on the chair back, as I needed to be able to drill holes in the edge of the wood.  The dowels did not take stain well, so I ended up using my India ink pens to try to color them to look like my mahogany stain.

On my first try, the dowels looked too skinny to me (although looking at the original chair, they were probably fine).

So I tried again, going a little thicker with my dowels.  I also made even thicker dowels for the legs and did a little carving on the ends, using the same techniques I used on the barley-stick table legs.  It was fiddly as all heck trying to get all the dowels inserted into their correct holes and relatively straight.  That was definitely the hardest part of making it and accounted for the most use of "magic" words.  The outer back dowels must go all the way through the arm rests, and, as you can see on try one, I had difficulty getting the arm rests even.

Here is the little chair I ended up with, next to a match box. I am actually pretty happy with it, although I know it's not an exact match for the one Theodore Roosevelt had.  Below is a picture of it in the room.