Doug’s Tall Dining Chairs

Viewer Project - By Doug Burgener from Redwood City, CA
Added on February 19, 2015

When telling people I was building new dining chairs, the common response was something to the effect of “Isn’t that a lot of work? Why don’t you just buy them?” These people are obviously not woodworkers. Those of you who are know exactly why we put forth this time and effort, because that sense of satisfaction upon completing such a project cannot be bought.

While I have been around woodworking my whole life (my dad was a high school wood shop teacher), the past 10 years of bouncing around apartments for school and early career is just not conducive to building up a shop. So most of my builds have consisted of smaller projects I could do with hand tools. Now that I own a house, I needed something to justify a few new tools and further convince the wife “No, that’s not a garage, it’s a shop. Cars don’t go in there.” Agreeing to build a new set of dining chairs helped me to do just that.

This was my first venture into fine furniture and also my first attempt at chairs. The design is by Greg Wood and comes from an article he wrote for Rockler about building a tall counter-height chair (http://www.rockler.com/how-to/build-tall-kitchen-chair/). The design was fairly straightforward and not too difficult to build, and to top it off the chairs are very comfortable.

The chairs are made from solid 8/4 cherry, finished with a coat of natural danish oil and four coats of Arm-R-Seal.

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