A fellow named William Morris (1834-1896) was associated with the English Arts & Crafts movement started making one of the earliest types of upholstered reclining chairs and marketing them in the mid 1800s.
The chair style was further carried on by American furniture makers such as Gustav Stickley and others in the American Arts & Crafts movement. The chair is still made today, but be prepared to dig into your wallet as these can cost into the thousands of dollars for a high quality one.
The basic design of the chair had the characteristics of a hinged reclining back, adjusted by a series of holes with pegs in the moderately high and wide un-upholstered arms. The chairs were typically made out of quarter sawn White Oak with a combination of pocket and through mortise & tenon joints.
My first step was to come up with a style that I liked, as a look though books, magazines and the web showed many similar but different variations. I chose one with curved arms connected to the seat base with vertical slates.
I had a pile of ¾" quarter sawn White Oak on my wood wall
Hint: when altering the boards on a glue up try to keep the gain running in the same direction to prevent tear-out when planing (don't ask me how I know this).
I chose to make my thickness for most of the boards 1 1/8" thick. Now I know the traditional way to size raw stock is to plane one face and shoot one edge and end then use a marking gage to scribe lines to plane the other surfaces, edge & end to, but I cheated a little. I made a fixture with the side boards at the finish height (width) of the boards, since most of the boards call for 1 1/8" think.
Once the boards were glued up I hand planed one side flat then used the fixture to get the boards down to the proper thickness.
Hint: drawing some lines with a pencil helps to let you know when the surface is flat.
Let me tell you there is no need for a gym when you have a pile of White Oak to hand plane; that stuff is like cutting glass with a butter knife.
Quarter sawn wood only has the desired flecking on two sides of the wood so when it came time to make the 2 ¼" square legs I cut thin strips with the flecks showing and glued them to the sides to give the appearance of quarter sawn on all sides.
Now with the wood sized to thickness and width for the bottom parts of the two chairs it was time to start thinking about making the curved arms. I cut some strips of MDF I have around and laid out the curve I wanted on one piece. I was lucky enough to have a set of graduated sweeps from my dad, from back in the days when automobile bodies were still drawn by hand rather than on a computer. So I played with the different sweeps until I got a nice curve that was similar to the ones I seen.
I traced the shape on the MDF and cut away the extra material then finished shaping with files until I got it down to the line. Next was to use a series of steps where I glued and screw one board at a time and used a flush cut router bit on each to duplicate the shape until my form was 6" wide. Added another piece on one side and one end for alignment purposes and it was about ready to be used. To keep glue from sticking to the form I covered it with some thin plastic before using it; plastic wrap or shipping tape would work fine.
Next came the another big task, that of cutting (16) ¼" thick pieces to use as the arms; four for each arm. Took me about a week to get them to thickness and relatively flat. Perseverance paid off and I was ready to start the glue up of the arms. I let each one stay in the form for 24 hours before gluing up the next. You will need a lot of clamping pressure for this task so make sure you have plenty of clamp handy before you start.
Hint: make sure you have a wet rag ready when doing the glue up, Try to get as much glue off while wet as possible to reduce the extra clean up later.
Once the arm glue up had finished I squared up one side of each then used the table saw to cut them down to 6" wide; I left around quarter on the width for clean up. I probably did not have enough clamping pressure in a few spots as I had to fill a few gaps later, but they say the measure of a good woodworker is how competent they are at fixing their mistakes.
Laying out the mortise pockets in the legs was the next task. Because there are cuts on two sides of each leg, take the time to layout the joint placements carefully, remember there are right & left hand as well as front and back legs. I chose to cut in the mortise pockets before making the tenons on the ends of the pieces; this gives you more flexibility to use re-sharpened router bits or if doing by hand allows for an oversize cut. Now there were so many tenons to cut with deep pockets I chose the easier method of using a router; I would probably still be at it on that hard wood if done by hand as the pockets were about 1 3/8" deep and ¾" wide in many places.
Hint: Make sure your router guide is snugly fit to both sides of the leg. Don't try to make the whole cut in one pass; make a series of cuts each a bit deeper than the next; the router bit will last longer and the finished pocket will be much better.
I took the extra time to clamp stop blocks to each side of the cut so the router would not cut beyond the end of the line I had across each leg. I figured by not doing this I would have to take much more care with each cut or face the possibility of making a sloppy joint.
With all the mortise pockets cut in the legs it was time to cut the tenon joins on the stretchers. A number of methods could be used to make the tenons, but I used my tenoning jig for the Unisaw this worked well and I was left with nice tight joints. I made a quick dry fit of each of the sides then it was time to start putting the pockets in for the vertical pieces.
Before I started the layout for the vertical slats I marked the front on each of the sides while they were dry fitted together as the gap between each vertical slat decreases as they progress toward the rear of the chair.
I laid out the vertical pocket the same as I did the ones for the legs. The stretchers are 1 1/8" thick so I had to clamp two of them together before setting up the router to cut the mortise pockets. Otherwise, there would be too much chance to tilt the router from one side to the other and make a bad joint. Following all the cuts I dry fitted each side again and marked each part with a home address so I would not have any mistakes when they are reassembled. I was pretty sure I wouldn't, but I knew the joints in this configuration were nice and tight. I did another dry fit with the front and back stretchers and I was ready to move on to the next steps.
The next step was to lay out the through tenons for the top of the legs. Since the leg are place in a lower in the back attitude the base of the tenons had to be hand chiseled at the proper angle so this lay out process was crucial to get right.
Hint: the top of the back leg requires extra stock to be left on to ensure proper placement.
I used the actual arm for each side to layout the shape on each side, but if I were to make another I would certainly make a couple of templates to keep from getting parallax errors when tracing the curved line on the side stretchers. My method required me to leave a lot of extra stock on the top of each leg and do a lot of hand fitting; so I guess it was a pay-me-now or pay-me-later ordeal. I had to make sure that I laid out the final shape on each arm to ensure that I laid out the arms from the proper side; I figured it was more prudent to be safe than sorry after all this work.
Next, I took each side apart, one by one, and cut the curvature on the top sides making sure I put each side back together before starting the next. I didn't want any mistakes at this point.
Hope you enjoyed the story.