Child's High Chair

Here is a high chair that I built for a friend’s kid’s 1st birthday party. She really only wanted it for the party and photos. She was looking for a classic style wooden high chair and the prices were really high. Gayle told her “Huck could build that”. I don’t think she realized that chairs are one of the harder projects in woodworking but I’m glad she has confidence in me.

Going in, I was planning on using poplar to build a chair from some plans that I found in an old magazine. I bought materials and started building it when I realized that it probably wasn’t really what our friend was looking for since it was more of a square utility chair (like you see at restaurants) and not a more classic style. So, that got pushed to the side to be completed some other time and I started again. I had no plans and the goal was keeping it cheap since she planned on painting it.

I bought some dowels from Home Deport and an inexpensive Skil drill press (on the shop list anyways) and started building the base. I used mortise and tenons to build the base. There were a lot of challenges drilling out the mortises because of the angles involves but it came out very well. Then, I built the chair portion. Again, since I had no plans or anything, that’s where the stuffed bear came in. I figured he was about the size of a 1 year old. So, I built the chair around him. I used some left over pine I had in the shop and used a jigsaw and a round over bit to build the chair. There are some pocket screws, dowels and M/T holding everything together.

Finally, I had to build the tray and I used some scrap MDF for that as well. To affix it to the chair, I used some simple barrel bolts with multiple holes in the arm to adjust the spacing.

All in all, it was a fun project and I learned a lot.

Thanks for looking!

- Huck