I had this Book, where the author took modern furniture design and build it with easy and accessible materials. The idea was, that people on welfare should be able to afford to build them. From this Book I took the most famous design “The 24 Euro Chair” and build it my own, but with a little twist. Originally it was intended to enter the “Two 2×4 Challenge” from the ModernMaker Podcast Guys. But things went way slower than expected and I finished the build way too late to enter. Now, about one year later, the video is finally edited, so I want to share it with you.
But let’s start from the beginning:
The imperial system is very uncommon in Germany, so there are no exact 2×4. So I got some construction lumber that is kinda close to that dimensions and is still affordable to be in the spirit of the 2×4 challenge. As I used a very different material then in the plans, I had to change them a little bit, but nothing too crazy.
First, I cut down my lumber to the exact thickness, that I needed, which is 18 mm. I raised the blade a little bit higher than the middle of the lumber and took 2 passes. It worked very well and the boards came out very clean, so they didn’t need any sanding to even them out. During that I had one piece throwback at me during the second pass. Even pine is very soft, there was enough stress in the wood to pinch the blade and shoot at me. Luckily, I remembered to not stand behind the blade during a cut, so nothing really happened and I could continue my work. After cutting down the lumber into boards, I ripped everything to width and then marked where my pieces go on the finished chair, to cut them to the right length. The crosscuts where made on the table saw as well, because the miter saw wasn’t set up at that moment and there weren’t too many of them.
After that, it was basically just drilling holes, inserting dowels and gluing everything together. My plan was to challenge myself and not use any screws in this build. It worked out, but it made things a little bit slower, as I didn’t have enough clamps to glue up multiple parts at the same time. So I had to wait to let the glue dry a lot, which was one of the reasons I didn’t finish in time. After that it was a lot of sanding to get in all the corners. It would be a little bit easier to sand every part before gluing, but I didn’t thought of that at the time and in the end everything worked out fine. As a finish, I used a foam brush to apply some varnish, which is rated for outside use. Hopefully this will help to let the chair last longer, as it will sit outside for the most time.
In the end, I am very pleased with the result. It was my first “real” furniture project, as in it was the first project where I didn’t just slapped some pine boards together and hold everything in place with screws and brackets.
Go check out the video to see a bit more details and if you already have, thanks for watching. If you want to see more videos subscribe to my YouTube channel. I’ll post around 2 Videos and Blog Posts a month. For more “Behind-the-Scenes” Action and if you want to see what I am working on, go to my Instagram Account (@mrhpilipbecker).
