Shop Equipment

One of the best pieces of equipment that I own is a router table.  If you are a beginning woodworker, a router table is one of the first pieces of shop equipment I recommend you purchase.

The router gives you some flexibility and reduces time spent on certain points in your projects. One of the selling points of my Adirondack chairs is the soft corners and edges. Before I got the router table, I had to use a sander to round off the all the edges.  The problem with the sanding method is the finished work can be inconsistent. Some places you’ll have a nice 1/4 radius edge, and in other places it could be larger or even smaller.  Having consistent rounded edges give the piece a professional look.

Some Advice:

Saving Wood and Saving Trees

When working on a smaller project such as the Adirondack chairs I work hard to use the least amount of wood possible. This doesn’t mean I scrimp on how much material I use, but it means that I try and use as much of a length of board as possible. For example, let’s say I am making a single chair and table. This requires lengths of 1x6 in 35, 35, 28, 28, 27, 18, 18, 17, 17, 16, and 16 inches. To use as much lumber as possible I will group the cut lengths to get as close to a stand length of board (10’, 12’) as possible.  So in this case I get two 1”x6”x12’ (12’-144”) boards and lay out the cut pattern thusly: 35, 35, 28, 28, 16 = 142” and 22, 27, 16, 17, 17, 18, 18 = 135”. This leaves me with 2 and 9 inches of scrap.

Of course, I take into account the wood grain and color when laying out my cut patterns. I want my arm rests to look like they came from the same piece of wood so I group those together. When there are pieces that aren’t important visually I can mix them across the various lengths of the dimensional lumber.