How We Build a Rocking Chair

We have a spiral bound book entitled, "Rocking Chair Shop Notes."  Each rocking chair part has a section: seats, back legs, arms, and so forth.  We refer to this notebook for essential dimensions and settings and to keep the chair making steps in order when making rocking chairs.  We have learned that often doing step A before step B makes the process faster, easier, and safer.  But it is easy to forget subtle differences, so we wrote it down.  There are 178 steps in this book.  The assembly, sanding, and finishing steps are not included.

The numbered pages of this website section are similarly organized, but I do not here give a complete step by step description, by any means.  I have written general comments about the processes and indexed some photos of us at work on rocking chairs to some of the comments.

As a unit of work, or run, we make the parts for six or eight rocking chairs of a species of wood.  When we get the parts ready, we assemble two chairs per day.  We put the rockers on these two the next day, sand them on the third day, and give them their first coat of finish on the fourth day.  When we start assembling a run of chairs, we start working on our next run or project.  It may be rockers of another species, dining chairs, dining tables, other furniture, or improvements to the shop and chair building process.

This is a small shop where skilled artisans build fine furniture.  This shop is very focused and organized for what we do.  The jigs, fixtures, tools, and machines that we have built are narrowly specialized.  But the knowledge, care, and skill of the artisans are deep and wide.

we begin the process with layout