Hello from between the buses in Indianapolis my friends. Hope you are having a wonderful day. So today it was onto attaching and ruff shaping the front legs.

As you can see the square leg blanks have the bridal or Maloof joint cut and have been fitted. Now I want to drill for the screw that will help hold the leg in place. Here you have two options to either put one or two screws in. Two screws seems obvious for better holding and Sam Maloof used it quite a bit. The problem you can run into to is the top screw has the potential of blowing out into your seat since you need to use 3" screws the carved portion of your seat nearest to your leg can be rather low. The second thing that I have noticed when examining photos of Maloof rockers with two screws and have also seen on Charles Brock's video is that the screws seem to be places right where the two bridle joints meet i.e. the top and bottom of the joint. So the screws are actually going through a portion of space between the joints. This is only my second chair and with the first chair I put only one screw in and that worked fines, so I decided to do the same here. So I found the center of the bridle joint and marked out where to drill.

I used 3" #10 screws. I will be plugging these holes later on so I  had to drill a larger hole. Remember to always drill the bigger hole first. If you drill the smaller hole first there will be to much slop for the bigger drill bit to move around. On the smaller hole I was really only pre-drilling for the screw so it wouldn't split the wood. Then just slowly screw it tight. I used my bit and brace for both drilling and screwing in the  screw. I really liked that it was nice and slow and worked just fine.

So once the leg has been attached you can move on to ruff shaping the legs. If you watch Charles Brock's videos you will notice the leg pattern he uses is straight and not tapered. That is because he will taper the legs on the lathe. I decided to cut the pattern with the taper already in it. Then you just place the pattern in place and mark out the tapers. This should be marked on the outside or inside face of the leg.

 The you just cut down the line and stop before you reach the top of the bridle joint that will be even with the top of the seat. One note while the leg is attached to the seat mark out on the inside face and sides of the legs where the seat and the leg meet so you have a reference mark to tell you not to cut beyond that point. On my pattern the curved portion near the bridle joint is well above the limit lines so when I got to that point while cutting I didn't really have to  make a curved cut to finish the cut. I just cut straight to the point where the two kerfs met. I think the picture shows best what I am trying to explain.

So here you can see the two legs ruff cut to shape with a ruff taper on them. Not the fun part making a square leg round with out a lathe plugged or unplugged.

To here is what I did. I already had the taper cut so I just had to round the legs. Since I had scribed the  1 1/4  circumference on the ends of the legs I had a good reference to work off of. Then I just used a concave spokeshave and rasps to achieve the desired round leg. This was actually quite and enjoyable task and really wasn't that hard.

 So here you can see the leg taking shape. Once I got the round shape near the bridle joint I think started curving out the bottom portion near the joint.

So two legs ruffed out and attached. The chair is starting to look a little like a chair. Next up the back legs.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this post and the progress of this project. This is definitely pushing my abilities but I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Well, take care and keep up the journey my friends, and as always God bless.

Mark Hynek