Making a child size chair

So roughly 6 years ago I sat down and designed this little kids chair in sketchup. I think, though it was a while ago, that my intention was to take part in a ‘2×4’ challenge, one of those things where you build something cool out of one length of construction pine and nothing else, but I didn’t end up using this design for that.

So it sat on my hard drive, gathering digital dust…until now. Karl from https://www.karlpopewoodcraft.com/ launched a little challenge on youtube recently, a simple, ‘Build a Chair’ challenge. Nothing too detailed, just simply inviting woodworkers to, well, build a chair. 😉

I wasn’t planning on entering, as at this time of year I had already pencilled in daily mortise & tenon practice, similar to my earlier daily dovetail practice. Thinking back to this design though, I thought I could build this chair and use it as my mortise & tenon cutting practice. And long story short, that’s what I did.

If you’re after the Sketchup model for this chair, here it is!

Let me know if you make one of these yourself, I’d love to see photos or video of it in action. I think it is a super cute design and if my children were smaller, I’d make a bunch of them.

As far as the practice went, I did well, the chair looks great and is solid and square. However I can thank the wonders of glue for that, as I know my tenon cutting leaves a lot to be desired. I still have a fair bit of improvement to go in that area, so I’ll probably switch to a daily mortise and tenon method to keep my practice up, but I’ll use blanks from another one of these chairs instead of random scraps. That way, I practice each morning, but at the end of the month I end up with a free chair for my trouble. 😁

Cheers to Karl for putting the challenge out there, if you hit this link, you’ll be able to find all the video’s on youtube that have used the #KPWCBCC2020 hashtag to join in on the chair build.

It’s a been a great year skill wise for me, and I’m really keen to see where else I can improve before Christmas. Make sure you bookmark this page and sub to my youtube channel to see how I go.