Sunday, October 26, 2014

Rietveld Steltman chairs


A friend of mine made a Rietveld Crate chair and I thought "Wow I want that too!". The chair looks great, but off course I thought "I can do that better" :-) Also, the chair is a bit big for my needs. So it reminded me of another asymmetric (almost mathematical) Rietveld chair: The Rietveld Steltman chair. Originally this chair was designed for a Jewelry shop (named Steltman) in the Hague and it had leather on it. There were two of them, mirrored versions of each other. The later wooden version was far more popular.  

After googling for dimensions I came across this blog from 'Rietveldbuilder'. He has exact dimensions of each part and also a drawing how to put the thing together. Great! 

I had a 'spare' table which I could use for this project. This could be my biggest "Ikea hack" ever. The Ikea BJÖRKUDDEN table, made of birch wood was 119cm x 74cm and it was 2.5cm thick. Hmmmm the original has parts of 4.4cm thick, that's a big difference. To fiddle a bit with dimensions I created a parametric 3D model on Thingiverse. It looked like the original is a bit big for me. Also with the thinner wood it didn't look quite as good. So I made it all smaller. The best of it all: I could make 2 of them from 1 tabletop!

The description also mentions mortise and tenon joints, but I didn't want to spend time on that. I decided to go for biscuit joints, fast and easy :-) The Lamello Classic X biscuit joiner did it job very well. The joints were created super accurate and it was very easily too.




Some tech details:
The 3D model gives me the following dimensions:
ECHO: "A", 44, 100, 600
ECHO: "B", 44, 100, 344
ECHO: "C", 44, 100, 456
ECHO: "D", 44, 100, 556
ECHO: "E", 44, 100, 400
ECHO: "F", 44, 100, 400
ECHO: "G", 44, 100, 256
ECHO: "H", 44, 356, 400

The model input (commented out are the original sizes):
THICKNESS = 25; // thickness of the material 44
WIDTH = 85; // width of most wood parts 100
HEIGHT = 690; // total chair height, default 700
F_LENGTH = 400; // seating height 400
H_WIDTH = 300; // seat 356
H_LENGTH = 337; // depth 400





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