Building an Adirondack Chair

Hi everyone! A few weeks ago I took a 3-night woodworking class on building an Adirondack chair. It was fun and exhausting. Today I’m sharing some in progress photos and a few tips I learned in the class.

Tools and Supplies

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links.

Here’s a rough list of the materials and supplies used to build the Adirondack chair:

• 1x and 2x cedar
• Screws
• Screw wax
• Carriage bolt
• Bandsaw
• Spindle sander
• Belt sander
• Router table with roundover bit
• Table saw
• Drill/driver
• Straight edge
• Combination Square

The screw wax was new to me. I never heard of it prior to the class.  It helped prevent the cedar from cracking when the screws were inserted.  Cedar is prone to cracking and great care was taken to prevent it from happening.

The chair is made out of Eastern Red Cedar.  It’s really beautiful. I love the variation in the colors.

The Template

Unfortunately, I don’t have a template to share, but I did a little searching and I found a template that closely resembles the chair I built in the class.  It features the curved seat and back.

There’s also a assembly video that goes along with this template. You can watch it here.

Building an Adirondack Chair

Here are several photos I took while building the chair.

Once the shapes were cut out, matching shapes were attached with double sided tape and shaped on the spindle and belt sanders.

A lot of work was put into building the Adirondack chair, but it was well worth it! I need to build one more adult sized one and a child size one.