[upbeat music] [chain saw engine roaring]
- I'm Alex Hsu.
I'm a furniture designer and artist
and I would describe my style as thoughtful,
playful and craft focused.
- My name is Lauren Verdugo.
I'm an artist and furniture maker.
I would describe my style as sculptural, functional
and sustainable.
- [Interviewer] What'd you think when you found out
you'd be transforming a folding lawn chair?
- It's already a perfectly comfortable chair.
So I want the function still be there.
It's called a folding chair,
so let's hope it still folds.
- It was gonna be tough to hack a chair in eight hours.
Chairs are notoriously difficult
because they take ergonomics into account
and even more difficult if they have mechanisms that move.
- Just to qualify it, fine woodworking doesn't happen
in one day, [laughs] normally.
So this is gonna be a challenge.
- Time's of the essence, so I'm ready to get started.
Let's get to it.
[upbeat music]
My design process is quite meticulous.
I like to have everything sort of figured out
before I even start to dig into my material.
- I like to make all my mistakes on paper first
because the second you start cutting up some wood,
the second your mistakes become a way bigger
or way more expensive.
- Seeing as the chair is quite cold and industrial,
I was hoping to introduce wood and cork
which could potentially interfere
with the folding mechanism.
- When you're working with wood,
you're typically not working with a blank canvas.
The grain is gonna have some sort of swirling,
it's gonna have some cathedraling in it.
A lot of those beautiful elements you'll wanna bring out
in the chair.
So that definitely dictates the design.
- So the first thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna take the existing frame.
I'm gonna remove all the webbing and I'm gonna see
what we're working with.
- For the frame, I'm gonna make sure that I clean it off,
get the aluminum all nice and shiny.
- Aluminum is a pretty slick material
and paint doesn't adhere to it so well
so scuff sanding it beforehand gives it a little more grip
for the paint to adhere to.
- And then once I do that, I am able to prime it.
- From there, I'm gonna source some lumber
at the lumber yard.
- Typically I'll go to Street Tree Revival in Anaheim.
They deal with what's called urban lumber.
So they're saving trees that are close to a water line.
They're already dead.
They might fall on something.
They're a fire hazard, anything like that.
And they'll take them,
and instead of putting them in the chipper,
they will put them into kilns
and turned them into raw lumber.
- So we made it to the lumber yard
and we are gonna pick through this pile
to see if we can find any winners.
- And these two are what I pulled.
Beautiful, straight grain.
I think these are gonna do just great.
- This grain on this wood is gonna be hypnotic
having a lot of shutoyans which shutoyans
is just that ripple,
kinda looks like it's flowing through the wood.
Holy shutoyans [laughs].
That's what I said when I saw the wood.
I was like, "Holy, shutoyans."
[upbeat music] So the next steps
would be to true up all four sides
and make them all square.
- When you get wood from a lumber yard,
it usually comes partially milled.
So it's quite rough to the touch
and it needs to be machined in order to
have that nice smooth surface.
- This is the jointer,
and this is gonna make this nice and flat.
[jointer engine roaring]
Basically you're making reference surfaces.
So everything's repeatable and accurate.
- Being square in woodworking is a actually a good thing.
If you end up having a slight angle,
you'll have a gap in one of your joints
and that will definitely show
that you weren't paying attention right from the beginning.
It used to be like that.
Now it's flat.
- Then I'll head over to the plainer,
and the plainer uses the flat surface
that we created on the joiner as a reference surface
to then create a smooth surface on the top of the wood.
[plainer engine roaring]
So basically this is the process
that you start pretty much every project with,
starting with rough and getting to smooth plain lumber.
- The arms of the original chair are a funky,
definitely will not match the wood the way I want it to.
The chair arms are actually riveted on,
so I can't technically take them off,
and I realized that trying to replicate those parts
would take most of the day.
So we're just gonna add a piece of wood on top
and mounted it that way.
I took this template and made it out of my drawing.
So I'm gonna put this on here, trace it and cut it out.
[upbeat music]
[band saw engine roaring]
Okay, so now that we have two identical arms,
I'll go ahead and make those arms into what will be
the new arm rest.
[trim router engine roaring]
That's pretty far along.
[upbeat music]
So this is starting to look good.
As soon as you put your arms on there,
it'll have a nice place for your arms to travel down.
I'm gonna flip this over.
I end up using rasps and files that way.
I'm shaving off pieces of material
and it's turning into more of a sculptural bow.
It helps keep the flow.
I'm being very careful here
because I can't take off too much
or else it will not match the other arm.
If I mess up,
then I'm gonna have to make the mistake on both arms.
- For this project,
I really wanted to introduce a pop of color
and I thought the best way to do that
would be introducing some laminate.
So this is my humble collection of laminate samples.
Most people use it for testing a color swatch
for let's say like a kitchen table or something,
but I thought it'd be a good idea to repurpose these
and incorporate them in the slat for the final chair.
[upbeat music] It's a game
of swabbing them in and out
and figuring out which looks the best.
Whoop, put a little too much pressure on the end
and cracked it.
So if you do use laminate,
beware it can be a little brittle.
[table saw engine roaring]
I'm gonna trim off the edge here
and I'm actually gonna cut it to the final slat size.
- So this is this seat that I have here.
I'm gonna cut a really nice little half circle
into this part here.
[upbeat music] That way,
it'll look really nice on that rounded frame.
[table saw engine roaring]
- I'm gonna take the board over to the router table
to create a groove and the bottom of the slats
so that they eventually nest nicer onto the tubing
of the frame.
Gonna go up about a quarter of an inch, yeah.
All right.
[table saw engine roaring]
- All right. That looks pretty good.
- Looks at that.
Looks great. Good cut.
I want this chair to be custom
so it's gonna definitely need to be curved
'cause it's supposed to be comfortable.
So I'm gonna go ahead and scoop the butt pattern
that I'm gonna put on the seat out.
- After I've created that groove
on the underside of the planks,
I'm gonna take it over to the table saw
to cut the wood into individual slats.
The table saw makes my life a lot easier
because it allows for me to make repeatable cuts
of equal thickness.
I wanna add cork to the top of each slat
[table saw engine roaring]
so I'm gonna take the slots back over to the router table
and route out a groove for them to sit in.
[router table engine roaring]
The router table is a super powerful tool
and it comes with a lot of bits that you can use
that can allow you to achieve certain profiles.
So in this case, I'm using a straight router bit
to cut this groove that the cork will fit in.
[router table engine roaring]
Cork is an amazing material.
It's made from the bark of a cork tree
and it's infinitely renewable.
Harvesting it doesn't harm the tree at all.
So it's still a little rough,
but we're gonna sneak up on its final thickness
on the belt sander.
[drum sander engine roaring]
[upbeat music] - So the next step
would be sanding.
[orbital sander engine roaring]
And more sanding.
And more sanding after that.
[orbital sander engine roaring]
[upbeat music]
So I'm looking to remove any lines
that aren't obviously the grain.
So I'm looking for saw marks or scratches in the wood
that are a little bit deeper than the surface.
I'm gonna take this off and put on the 180 grit sandpaper.
I'll go from a lower grit, which is more coarse like 80,
and then I'll work my way up to the higher grits
which I will end up ending at 180.
[orbital sander engine roaring]
I feel like every woodworker
at the very beginning says that sanding's therapeutic,
which it is, but it's always hard when you're on a deadline.
[orbital sander engine roaring]
[table saw engine roaring]
- Now that this is cut to size,
we're gonna take this piece of cork to the router table
so we can get it to fit inside this groove.
So in this case, [router table engine roaring]
I'm using a round over bit
to create a speed bump like profile for each slat.
Then I'm gonna take it over to the table saw
to cut off the little strips that I need.
We got little cork speed bumps,
back to the router table [laughs].
It's really just about repeating that process back
and forth, hopping from the table saw to the router table.
[table and router saw engine roaring]
Let's see.
They just pop on in.
Cool. There we have it.
The glove fits now [laughs].
- So the best part of any project is finishing,
but more importantly, seeing that gorgeous wood totally pop
every time you put that oil on it just starts singing.
Oh my gosh.
Woo, that's a treat and a half.
Wow, look at the comparison there.
That's insane.
Oh, so the last step,
the one that we've all been waiting for is assembly.
We got these oil pieces and the finished frames
so let's see it all together.
[upbeat music]
[drill engine roaring]
- So once the slats are all done,
now it's off to final assembly.
[drill engine roaring]
- Hello?
- Hey Alex.
- Hey Lauren.
- I'm so stoked to see what you made.
All right.
See, I knew you were up to something.
That is so awesome [Alex laughs].
- Wow, your piece, the way that you sort of accentuated
the figuring of the wood and augmenting the armrest,
that was a challenge that I wanted to stay away from
but I'm glad you did something to them.
What type of tree is that?
- This was a street tree.
- Oh, great.
- It's Indian Rosewood.
So it's at least weatherproof.
It's like teak.
- I love that side view too of the little notch
that you made for that axle,
and then seeing that rough edge of the wood itself.
That's a really nice detail.
- I like how you kept with that green.
I really liked that green,
except you made it a much better green I think [laughs].
The fasteners on the back, the little blue guys,
what are those?
I love those.
- I think they're called saddle washers.
It's a little bit nicer attachment method.
Reminds me vertebrae or spinal aesthetic.
- Yeah, and that cork came out really nice.
- Thanks.
- I didn't know you could do that with cork.
That's really cool.
It didn't crumble and stuff.
- Pretty amazing, yeah.
The binding agent is strong enough.
You basically can work it just like wood,
except it doesn't really expand or contract
and environmentally friendly.
- Is it comfy?
- It's relatively comfy.
You might look like you've been grilled
if you take this chair to the beach,
a couple ribs on your back.
- But really softly, a very soft grill [laughs].
- Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, trying to make a chair in general
is incredibly challenging,
and then trying to make a comfortable chair is even harder.
So I was leaving the ergonomics up to the original designer.
- Does yours fold by chance?
- Mine does fold most of the way.
I would say like 90% of the way
- I was not expecting it to fold right.
And then I was like, "Click," and I'm like,
"Oh, check it out. It folds."
So that was a nice thing, yeah.
I would be happy to walk home
with either one of these chairs.
I wouldn't be mad.
- Absolutely. Big hat tip to you.
- Thank you. Thank you [laughs].
One hat to another.
[upbeat music]
- Lauren, it was lovely to meet you and see your chair.
You've done an amazing job.
I would love to link up since we're both in LA,
check out each other's shops and talk a lot of stories.
- Yeah. I'm down.
Might even have to make some saw dust,
who knows? [Alex laughs]
- Looking forward to it.