I have been thinking about a chair design that has been floating through my head and decided it would be a good idea to make a model before building the actual chair. I want to make a chair that has four legs but the two back legs splay towards each other to a point, making it essentially a three legged chair. I therefore call it

a four legged three legged chair.

I had the opportunity to work in my workshop a little so I made a model of the chair:

Chair model

I made the seat out of linden wood and drilled the holes at an angle using my Dremel with a small drill bit, by eye. This was easier than I thought and gave better results than I had hoped for. When I put the skewers (legs) in, the angles were right, amazing!

The back rest is carved out of a solid linden piece. Putting the model together was easy and it is surprisingly solid. The skewers have tapered ends so the joints work a bit like real staked furniture.

first chair – front

first chair – back

The outer two spindles point outwards and the centre spindle is vertical. Since the legs are all angled and there are no vertical lines in the chair, I thought it was a good idea to increase the number of spindles to four and angle them like you see on some examples of Welsh Stick Chairs, essentially creating a big shape of a W (I suppose the W stands for Wales?).
So I made another model.

1st chair left, 2nd chair right

2nd chair left, 1st chair right

I like the orientation of the spindles on the second chair better than the first one. The angle of the two inner spindles matches the angle of the front legs and the angle of the outer spindles matches the angle of the back legs.

The rake of the front legs has to be a bit less to decrease the chances of someone tripping over a leg (which is fine at this scale, but not in full size).

I may make one more model, adding stretchers. When I feel like the chair is to my liking I will note all the sight lines, angles and measurements from the model and make a full size chair out of it.

-Rudy Everts