How To Build a Bow-Arm Stickley Morris Chair
Lamination puts beautiful grain and a graceful curve within arm's reach.
Synopsis: This chair, with its large, square legs and wide arms of quartersawn white oak, says “Craftsman” with every feature. It should, since it was based on a design by Gustav Stickley. The bowed arms and reclining back add comfort and style, yet the construction is not difficult. The two greatest challenges are making the bowed arms and cutting the mortise-and-tenon joinery in the curved parts. Woodworker Greg Paolini takes you through the construction step by step, adding tips for cutting accurate joints, laminating the arms, assembling the base, cutting the joinery and shaping the curved back slats, creating a seat-cushion frame, and finishing.
Craftsman furniture is known for its straight lines, quartersawn oak, and sense of earthen mass and solidity. No piece displays those features better than a Morris chair, with its large, square legs and wide arms decked out in beautiful ray-fleck figure. The gracefully bowed arms of…
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Get the Plan
A full-size plan of a similar morris chair is available in the Fine Woodworking store .
Comments
First off, the full size plan is only for the curvature of the arm, the rest is a scaled drawing. The lengths of the side rails, front and back stretchers are wrong in the cut list that comes in the booklet with written instructions. All of the errors that I found with the cut list was also shown in the article that was in Fine Woodworking Magazine in 2012. I have made many projects from the magazine and and usually the measurements for a cut list are spot on. Not too impressed with the plans from American Furniture Design.
I too ordered the plan, but it is for a completely different Morris Chair. The design features are quite different...not even close. To say that it is a similar chair is a misrepresentation.
I'm confused now if I should buy these palnes or not. GW52 says they are the right plans, but with mistakes. 6145997 says they are totally different (which looks like the case by the picture). All I need is the arm curvature layout since the exploded view in the article can give me just about everything else.
Did the plans palns change between these 2 previous posts?
I made a bed using QSWO. My legs were oak sawn at 45 degrees and glued to give rays a flecks on all sides. This left me with a hole about one inch square in the center of the leg. I cut a piece of the correct size and glued it altogether. Heavy and solid.
Thinking to build 4 Morris style chairs for outdoor use - outdoor cushions and cyprus instead of the white oak...any thoughts?
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