Tuesday, 2021 April 06
In my February post on the state of my shop, I mentioned that the cedar stacked on my work cart was for some outdoor furniture I was working on and promised more details later. This post is about that furniture.
Last spring, after a long fight with the city of Kent, we finally got a new deck. Last summer we also expanded our patio to take advantage of the change in the deck's footprint. This meant that we both had some leftover Azek decking material and we had more space for people to hang out (once Covid is over, of course). We decided we'd use up some of the scrap in the form of some outdoor seating.
The wood visible in the above picture was the beginning of that. The 4x4s were for the legs and the 2x4s were for the basic frames (I'd need additional 2x4s, but I didn't cut those until after assembly was well underway.
The 4x4s were tapered on a new tapering jig I built for my table saw. I then cut mortises into the 4x4s and tenons on the 2x4s and created basic square frames, 21 inches tall and 23 inches square. I failed to take any in-progress pictures. You can, however, see the tapered legs in this picture.
Next came the Azek. We wanted variety so we settled on three different designs. I added auxiliary framing members where necessary to support everything (for the most part the auxiliary frame pieces were just screwed in place). After a good coat of water seal I screwed down the decking material. At first I tried to use the same concealed-with-plugs technique as our deck, but I found that the cedar was so soft that my screws tended to strip out before going deep enough. In the end I just drove the screws down flush with the top of the Azek.
Here are the three final products. With the Azek installed they measure 22 inches tall and 24 inches square. It turns out that 22 inches is probably just a little too tall, but not uncomfortably so.
Sunday, 2021 April 04 Wednesday, 2021 April 07
