Building the Hal Taylor Rocking Chair

This past week I finally started my most ambitious woodworking project: building a rocking chair according to the plans provided by my teacher Hal Taylor. Hal has built hundreds of these chairs, many with a paying student helping, which is how I met Hal in 2005, when he (with minimal help from yours truly) built a walnut rocking chair for my wife Lorraine.

I fully expect this project to take a year or more, cadging a few hours here and there (for reference, it takes Hal about a week to make a chair). Before I can even start work on the chair itself, there are a number of forms, jigs, and fixtures to construct. These are fully described in the pdf "book" and video I purchased from Hal (if you are also interested in these plans, see Hal Taylor's website ). Then I will have to find the appropriate lumber to make the chair. I had planned to make the chair out of the cherry lumber from the tree in my backyard that I had felled and sawed into boards three years ago (after it was hit by lightning), but unfortunately the thickest boards I cut are a bit under two inches, which is marginal for this purpose. Hal thinks it may work but I've decided to save these boards for my second chair, assuming that I will learn much from the making of the first.

The construction of forms commenced about 4 days ago with the gluing of paper templates (supplied by Hal) onto plywood (for the arm, back leg, and front leg templates) or 2" thick poplar (for the back brace and rocker forms) and bandsawing close the the lines. Cleanup and sanding to the line was accomplished partly with my Ridgid combination spindle/belt sander, partly by hand (using offcuts from the brace and rocker forms to make handy convex sanding blocks).


Here is a picture of the back brace (foreground) and rocker forms, with holes cut for the clamps but no aluminum L-bracket attachments or backer strips yet. I used a 1-3/8" Forstner bit to cut the holes, then made the round hole into a "D" shape using a saber saw, with the flat part of the "D" parallel to the surface of the form to accommodate the flat on the C-clamps.





Lessons learned:

Bandsawing very close to the line (but not over!) pays huge dividends in time saved sanding. I need more practice.

A 1/2" blade is too wide for the curved pieces I was sawing. I should have used a 1/4" blade.

The 1/2" 3tpi blade I've been using for a while broke while cutting the radius curve on the rocker form. I finished the cut with a 1/2" variable pitch blade (Woodslicer?) that I had lying around. What a difference! The 3tpi blade left a very rough cut, the variable pitch blade was so smooth I could have passed it off as a finish blade table saw cut. Now admittedly there were a lot of uncontrolled variables: the old blade could have been dull. The tension may not have been properly set. I spray lubricated the new blade - hadn't done that for the old blade in a long time. Still, I was impressed. Going to have to get me another one of those variable pitch blades.