Product Description
Building Adirondack furniture is a time-honored craft. Sturdy and rustic, this furniture can be a beautiful addition to any indoor decor, although it’s most often used to set the scene outdoors. There, the furniture is subjected to a lifetime of abuse. Yearly it moves from somewhere hidden away (probably dark and musty winter storage) to front-and-center on the summer stage. Now, hour after hour it is beaten on by intense UV light, drenched in driving rains, then fr… More >>
Easy-to-Build Adirondack Furniture:
This book includes very few ideas and they are mostly included in another book (building garden and patio furniture:Classic Designs, step-by-step Projects).
in the end I think it is worth the price (less than 2 dollars, but the shipping was almost equal to the price.
Rating: 2 / 5
This is a great book for the task it takes on: building Adirondack chairs, and a few related items, including a small table and a Westport chair.
Having built booth the Westport and Adirondack chairs, I found the book to do exactly what it says: a good step-by-step guide which offers all the information you need to build the furniture.
I started with the Westport – which was the easier design, then made eight ‘Dack chairs for around our place. I made a few minor changes to the plans to suit my own preferences, particularly the angle of the back and the width of the arms, but otherwise just followed the steps and ended up with strong, good-looking chairs which have now held up well for several years of heavy use.
Rating: 5 / 5
I just finished my first two chairs based on plans from this book, and for the most part am pleased. I am somewhere between a novice and intermediate carpenter, and found the book reasonably easy to use. Two chairs took about 2 weeks to finish, with an hour or so spent most nights.
The good points:
There is a complete materials set.
The instructions are straight-forward and logical (except as noted below).
The end result is a fairly good looking chair.
The bad points:
The directions include an option for a slightly rounded chair, rather than just a flat back which I find uncomfortable. Instead of just making this a completely new set of directions, there was a whole set of modifications to the existing instructions. They were a little confusing, and required a lot of page flipping to integrate. How much more could it have cost to just add another page or two to the book?
Also, there were an option for a profiled seat, but no specifics. While it is true that this is somewhat of a personal preference item, the book only offered an instruction to figure out what was comfortable to you. There should have been a general suggestion as to a profile. If you want a rounded seat, you are on your own.
Summary: I found the shortcomings above to be problematic. I bought the book because I just wanted to cut and screw together wood without a whole lot of thinking. If I wanted to design a chair, I would have done that. I ended up doing a bit of work creating a seat profile.
Other than that, it was ok. It was better than some of the other books I have seen for clarity and description, and it was obvious that the author had actually built a chair from the plans.
I have seen plans that were more detailed and complete for the options listed above, but this is certainly a good jumping off point. And if you are comfortable in a flat-backed non-profiled seat chair, the instructions are perfect.
Rating: 3 / 5
I’ve bought several expensive books on the subject ironically this is the only one I use. The instructions are concise and simple to follow. Very nice pieces… Buy this first and save yourself some money and aggravation!
Rating: 5 / 5
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