I glued up the back and seat panels previously, but saved cutting them for absolute last because I wasn’t super confident of the planned measurements actually holding up. And, I only have so much poplar left that’s suitable for panels. But now we’re there and the measurements were pretty close.
In a nod towards pretending this isn’t industrial production, I left the panels whatever thickness they happened to be after planing smooth from the 5/4″ or 6/4″ rough stock. The dados in the rails were plowed to 3/4″ at the table saw (front, back, top rails) or router (seat, back side rails) so I needed to take the edges of the panels down some.
This seemed like a perfect time to try out my new Veritas Skew Rabbet Plane (RH version). I this early last year, but I had not had a chance to use it yet.
Compared to the old Stanley No. 79, it’s loaded with geegaws, but works pretty well. A full review is HERE. We’re going to stick with the chair project in this post.
In pre-industrial woodworking, there was a lot less concern about thickness and dimensionality of wood parts where it didn’t matter. For instance, the seat panel for this chair is basically a panel and frame. The panel’s thickness only matters where it enters the grooves of the seat frame. In a perfect world the seat panel will be just slightly thinner than the groove to allow easy assembly because forcing the panel might blow out the rail.
Too thin is no good, the panel would rattle around and possibly not contribute enough to the structure. Given that you are probably not preparing each board as you need them, boards on hand are whatever they turned out to be. To fit the joint, you just plane down the edges on the back side (sometimes the front depending on the piece) to bring it down to the correct thickness for the grooves.
There are lots of ways to do that of course, but only one way “required” me to purchase a fancy new tool. It’s a lot more work than putting the tall fence on the table saw and running the edges that way, but this is popular, so it wasn’t a lot of work really. Having planes set up for this also means I can do that when the table saw is not available (it’s also my finishing table, or could be set up with a dado head or any number of things I’d be too lazy to undo just to thin an edge).
Anyway, the plane worked pretty well and the board fits perfectly. So, on to assembling the seat frame which is the core of this chair.
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