Eastern Red (Aromatic) Cedar Chairs

sprague lake, estes park, colorado, 09.19.2004

Cedar Chairs My cousin emailed a link to this plan and asked me if I thought these chairs would be difficult to build. I had just found a decent source ($1/BF) for eastern red (aromatic) cedar and thought it would be cool to build them out of that.
Here are the rough 4/4 and 8/4 boards we used for this project.
After almost two full dust collector bags worth of planing, my garage smelled like a Guinea pig cage. Eastern red cedar planes to a really neat purple, but quickly turns orange/brown once put outdoors.
I didn't take any in-progress pictures because we were working hard to get these done in one day. I will note that using a flush-trim router bit with a template on 1.5" material kept me on my toes! Climb-cutting on the end-grain was an adventure. Here is the first completed chair.
This is the second completed chair. These chairs are more comfortable than they look.
Here is a picture of both chairs. These really came out a lot cooler than I thought they would. The following weekend, my cousin stopped by and we built another set for myself.
What's neat about these chairs is the seat slides into the back for easy storage.