technē and poiēsis

To attach the seat of the chair to the frame, I chiselled out two perpendicular grooves on the bottom of the seat. This is the kind of work that a CNC router would do very well. However, once I found the right technique, it went pretty quickly. I just had to make sure to be very accurate with the tracing at the beginning because I am counting on the snug fit between the grooves and the frame to hold the seat in place. First, using the flat side of the chisel, I marked the sides of the groove down to the depth I wanted. Then, using the bevelled side of the chisel, I knocked out the material from the middle.

Drilling a hole through a piece of wood seems simple. But I keep doing it wrong. I've been trying to make 1cm holes to fit my 1cm dowels. Since I don't have a drill press, it is impossible (at least with my level of skill) to be perfectly vertical and stable while drilling. This means that the side where I started is slightly larger than 1cm. The dowels still fit snugly but you can see the shadow around them. On the back side, the wood kept splintering as the large bit poked through. I tried putting a piece of tape, but that didn't help. I managed one or two times to drill from both sides, but that meant that both sides had that slightly larger radius from the drilling inaccuracies.  However, the shadow line disappears after sanding because it gets filled with sawdust.