A place to hang my hat.

Its been a long and rocky start to 2014. I won't bother you with the details lets just say i have  used so much tissue i should buy stock in Kleenex.

When i'm having a rough go of thing i always look around the house and begin to be bugged by the little things. This time around i realized that every chair back in the house had a coat or sweatshirt draped over it. This will not doe i thought so i put some sketches down and came up with this. 

A lot of the furniture i design ends up looking aeronautical. Turns out that this is no exception. As soon as i had my hands on a cedar 4x4 i started working on my coat rocket.

I don't have a band saw so to cut the shape into the body i needed to draw it out, cut and chisel the excess away until i could smooth it down with a plane and spoke shave. 

Once the thing was four sided i set about making the whole thing round. This process is just like making oars round so if you are curious about it you can look here.

 Once i got the thing reasonably round (I wasn't trying to win any competition here). I lopes off the leftover square ends and set about finishing off the top and bottom. I now had to figure out how to attach the legs to the thing.

 I had made the legs out of knotty pine. I cut them out with a jig saw and cleaned them up with a hand plane and a spoke shave. I decided to take a play out of my child hood model building. I never had the patience as a child to glue just one fin on a rocket at a time. I remember my dad and i building a little jig to glue all the fins on at once. So i just scaled the jig up with scrap lumber i had around.

 Out of the jig and getting varnish.

 

The finished product looks great. I don't know what i'll build next but i think there is some lofting in my future if i can just bring myself to focus for long enough.