Decided to build something a bit more complex so I thought I would design a rocking chair base for an old race car seat I have lying around. The Maslow did a FANTASTIC job cutting it out. 1/8 compression bit to get the most precise corners. However my rocking chair design skills were the fail here. First I made the chair too narrow. The base of the seat is only 9.5" wide, but it flares out. I should have made the legs flare out. Second, I designed the supports of the chair to be in the middle of radius of the legs with a larger tail, however I didn’t realize how far out the seat is positioned forward from the mounting base. Once mounted the seat is actually way too far forward. I think with a normal seat it would have been fine, but for this chair its way too far forward.
Phase 2 fails. Ended up extending the bottom supports and built a new top with slides so the seat can be adjusted.
This take introduces a few new issues. First. When the legs were parallel, the distance between the radii of the legs was the same, so all 3 lower supports could be even. When I flared out the legs, I did not account for the fact that the radii are now converging meaning that at least the back support had to be smaller. Second issue, as you can probably tell from my drawing is the slide slots mean there was not enough support. Between trying to make the bottom supports fit and slotting the new top, I ended up breaking a couple of pieces, so back to the drawing board.
This is the latest working version (still WIP). I reduced the flaring out of the legs by increasing the base width. Still need to calculate out the cuts for the back support. Also considering rethinking the rocking skis all together cause rocking on the edge of plywood caused it to fall apart very quickly.
It’s exciting to see your progress! Which design software are you using?
Piece of paper and then draw it all out in illustrator, then KrabzCAM. I used to use sketchup but they changed up all their licensing plans. I might try Fusion, but its just faster for me to sketch it all out in my head and just cut then to muck with 3d software.
What if you just added a thin strip of wood along the edge of the skis?
I was actually thinking of adding a strip of sheet metal or old bike tire. I gotta do some experiments.