Getting Wobble-Free Chair Legs

I recently built this chair and I really like it a lot, except for one thing. It's not supposed to be a rocking chair, but it is. And I really wanna get that rock out of it. I really wanna salvage this project because this chair is made from lumber that came from a dairy barn that was built in 1890 right here on this piece of property. So the wood has got a lot of heritage to it and the chair's pretty cool.

So I wanna make sure that I get everything just right before I finished this chair. So let me show you what we have to do here. Now, the first step, let's back up to the assembly stage. You wanna make sure that when projects go together, they're going together, dead square. And if you put them together square, that's gonna go a long way toward making sure that everything comes out just right.

Standard woodworking fair there. What we need to do in order to get the legs leveled up on this chair is to start by leveling my bench. So what I wanna do is use a level. I've got a level bubble right there. So looking at this one, what I can see is that the left side, my left side of the bench needs to come up just a little bit.

I'm gonna check it this way as well. And I'm much further off in this direction. Now that's not uncommon. Cause if the floor of your workshop isn't perfectly level, your bench isn't gonna be perfectly level. So we can't continue with the chair until the bench itself is dead level.

So what I'll do is I'll take just building shims. I'll put these under the legs of my bench until it's perfectly level in both directions. Thanks to my shims. Now I've got the workbench perfectly level in both directions. So now the deal is I bring my chair back.

And what leveling the bench does is it gives you a benchmark for the chair. So as the chair sits here, now I wanna level it. So I can see that I need to raise that side a little, and this corner a little. So now I'm gonna work with my shims. In order to get my chair dead level.

Pretty close there. So here's the deal. We've got this surface. The workbench that the chair is sitting on. By leveling this surface, these rails, I've now made this in a perfectly flat plane, parallel the level bench.

In order to do that, I had a shim, these two legs. So those gotta be my two offenders when it comes to rocking. The next thing I need to know is what do I do in order to make this right. For that, you wanna have some thin stock. In this case, 1/8 inch plexiglass, 1/4 inch plexiglass.

You could use hardboard. You could use pieces that you rip. What I really want out of this. I don't wanna significantly shorten the legs but I wanna take enough off to make this work. So what I'm gonna do is have a look at this front leg.

Lay down my thin plexiglass. Now that slips underneath. In other words, I've got this shimmed up more than the thickness of that plexiglass, so that one's too skinny. I'm gonna get rid of that one. come to my 1/4 inch plexiglass, that butts right up to it.

So now using that as a template, strike a line and I'm gonna do this on all four legs. Now we're done with the shims. My next job is to cut precisely on each of those lines. That'll give those legs a trim right off the bottom. And when I come back, my chair should be perfectly level.

Let's see if we still have a rocking chair or we have a nice stable chair. Which would be funny cause this was from barn wood. So it should be a stable chair. Nice. Now we've got a chair that doesn't rock and roll anymore.

Very simple procedure. Relying on leveling the bench, leveling the chair, a little bit of use of builder shims and you can get these legs absolutely perfect.