Phone Chair – Party Line

 

Phone Chair – Party Line

If this is your first visit to this blog, you might want to read my previous posts on how I planned and made my first miniature phone chair, and the latest update.

Never was I so motivated to finish income taxes. Not necessarily because I wanted to know how much we might owe or if we might get a refund, but because the idea that I came up with as I finished my seventh chair was to return to the inspiration that started me down this path, my sister’s quilt.

Because as it turns out, I needed two more chairs at home.

While I had made one chair for my wife’s phone to relax in, when I came home with my two phones, there was competition for which phone would get the phone chair first.

And obviously all three couldn’t fit.

So to recreate the beach scene from my sister’s quilt, I decided to make a green chair and an orange chair for myself to go with the purple chair I had given my wife. Off to the hobby shop I went with a photo of my sister’s quilt on my phone so I could match the colors as best I could with pre-mixed paint (I use those so I won’t have to try to mix and match the same color each time I need more fresh paint).

Making two more chairs also would allow me to refine my improvements to bring me closer to that perfect chair that I had been trying to make.

The first refinement was to add a piece of wood to my leg subassembly jig that would improve the alignment when gluing the front leg to the back leg.

The added green piece is exactly the width of two pieces of wood, in this case to match the width of the back leg being glued and the back leg template of the jig. So that when I glued the front leg to the back leg, the front leg would be properly aligned to ensure the glued legs would sit flat on a flat surface.

The second refinement was to make a second spacer to go with the spacer I had made previously. The two spacers could then be used when gluing the arm subassembly together.

This would ensure that the space between the two arms was the same in the front and the back of the chair.

While working on these additional chairs, I also came up with a slightly modified layout that left a pretty sizable piece of unused wood leftover for re-cutting those pieces if the knife slipped and I messed up a piece. This extra bit of real estate may come in handy on your first chair.

I cranked out the green chair first…

…and then I started on the orange chair. As I was making these two, I decided to time myself while performing the different activities required. Although I have been known to hole up for hours working on a project, I’ve never actually timed myself. But I thought this would be useful information if I ever wanted to turn this into a commercial operation in retirement.

Building one entire chair from start to finish took a little over 2.5 hours broken down into:

20 min. – Sanding and painting the board (2 coats)

55 min. – Cutting and sanding the edges of 22 chair pieces

50 min. – Painting the edges of the 22 chair pieces

30 min. – Gluing the pieces together to assemble the chair (not counting drying time between gluing each piece)

With both chairs finished, there won’t be any more fighting over a chair to relax in…

…and when all three phones want to go to the beach together…

…they can line up by the water…

… just like in the original quilt that spawned their creation…

…for a real pool “party line.”