Thanks again folk for your kind words - I shall probably bore you to death in due course with progress reports! At present I am ripping lots of thin strips and laminating the back braces and with only one former and 24 hours per brace, it will take a while before any new pictures.
Alf, I did consider the 'Rat but the seat blank was rather heavy and I worried about holding it firm in the clamps - also, the corner notches are three inches on a side and I don't have a router bit that big (sigh). The titemark is great - I have the LV wheel type marking gauge but adjusting it is a real fiddle, it always seems to be a little off and with the Titemark there is no such problem.
SimonA, I made my own router table after I had used one of those awful pressed metal thingies and after one prior wooden one I built. This one incorporates nearly all that I regard as important in a router table although I would revise my specs somewhat were I to build a new one- mainly in the area of storage for stuff under the table - there is just to much wasted space under the table at present.
kityuser, I got the green oak from Morgans a very good yard I thought (
http://www.morgantimber.co.uk/). Even though they were very large and obviously geared up for large customers, they provided a knowledgeable yard hand to sort through the stacks with me and it was a real help and a useful education to chat with him at the time.
AG, yes scorps and travishers did come to mind but in the end, it was modern technology, that well known woodworking accessory, the angle grinder, that carried the day. Hal says he now uses a router copier for initial shaping of his seats but not having the machine or anything for it to copy, this was not really an option. I suppose I could have made up a carriage and a template of the cross sections for the router to follow but I suspect the angle grinder worked out a lot quicker and ultimately more accurate. I did use the router to plunge some holes at different depths on a sparse grid in the seat area to give me a total of eight reference points for the carving out operation. This allowed me to make flat bottomed, clean holes rather than a hole made by a drill (even a Forstner bit with its point) that would not have been perfectly clean and flat.
