How to MAKE MONEY Woodworking with Adirondack Chairs

If you've ever thought about turning your woodworking hobby into something that actually pays, not just covers your lumber bill but puts real money in your pocket, then stick with me today because I'm going to walk you through exactly how to do it, building Adirondack chairs from start to finish. We'll cover wood selection, templates, sanding, finishing, and assembly, and I'll show you the bonus tip at the end that can add serious value to every single chair you sell. Let's get into it. Building and selling Adirondack chairs is one of the most reliable ways I know to make money doing woodworking. The market for outdoor furniture never dries up, the chairs are genuinely enjoyable to build once you know the process, and the profit margin on each one is hard to beat in this trade. So let's start with why this particular project makes so much sense as a business. Here's what most people don't realize when they first think about selling their woodworking, they assume the furniture market is saturated, or that customers won't pay premium prices, or that they'd need a full shop of expensive machinery before they could ever make it work. None of that is true, and the Adirondack chair is the perfect project to prove it. I've built somewhere between 500 and 1000 of these chairs over the years. That is not an exaggeration. And I can tell you from experience that demand for a well-built, good-looking Adirondack chair is as steady as anything in this business. Here's why the numbers work in your favor. A good set of lumber for one chair runs you somewhere between $80 and $100, depending on the species you choose and where you live. You can sell a finished chair for anywhere from $400 to $500, sometimes more if you're building in hardwood like oak or walnut. That leaves you with $300 to $400 of profit per chair, sometimes more. Now think about this. If a customer orders four chairs for their back patio, which happens all the time, you are looking at well over a thousand dollars of profit from a single order. And once someone has your chairs in their yard and their neighbors come over and see them, your phone starts ringing. What I always tell people who are just getting started is to take those early profits and split them in half. Use half for your expenses and your living and put the other half right back into your shop. Buy yourself a bandsaw. Buy a better router. Upgrade your sander. Before long, you have a real production setup, and it happened because the chairs paid for it. You don't need a full shop to start. A drill, a jigsaw, and a sander will get you building chairs today, and the chairs will build your shop for you. Now let's talk about wood, because your material choice affects your cost, your build time, your finished look, and your profit margin all at once. For outdoor furniture, you have a few good options and a few traps to avoid. Cedar and redwood are my go-to choices for most builds. Both are naturally rot-resistant, they hold up beautifully outdoors, they take oil finishes extremely well, and they're light enough that the finished chair isn't a burden to move around. Pine is another option if you're in a part of the country where cedar is expensive, but you'll need to seal it more aggressively and be upfront with your customers about the maintenance schedule. One thing I love about this particular chair design is that it doesn't care what thickness of lumber you use. Whether you're working with one and a half inch dimensional lumber from the home center or three-quarter inch hardwood from a specialty dealer, the plan stays the same. That gives you real flexibility when pricing a job. If a customer wants something more exotic, white oak, black walnut, teak, you can deliver that. Charge accordingly for the material, and your build process doesn't change when it comes to keeping costs down. Buy in bulk when you can. If you have an order for four chairs, buy all the lumber at once. Most suppliers will work with you on price when you're pulling a significant volume of material, and pay attention to how you're laying your parts out on the board. A two by six gives you the arm, and the off cut from the legs can become a seat slat. There really is very little waste in this build if you plan your cuts ahead of time. Over the course of a multi-chair order, smart layout saves you real money. One more thing about wood selection. Avoid knots in structural pieces. A knot in a decorative slat is one thing. A knot in a back leg or a front leg is a weakness you don't want, especially if you're guaranteeing your work, which you should be. Now let's talk about templates, because this is where serious production efficiency comes from. When you're building your first one or two chairs, a good set of paper templates printed on cardstock is all you need. You trace the pattern onto the wood, cut it out, and sand it smooth. That works fine for getting started. But the moment you know you're going to build multiples, and you will, it's time to make yourself a set of plywood templates. Here's how I do it. I take each paper template, trace it onto a piece of Baltic birch plywood, cut it out on the bandsaw, and sand it smooth all the way down to the line using long, even strokes on the belt sander. Baltic birch is the right material for templates, because there are no voids in it, it's dimensionally stable, and a good set of plywood templates will last you for hundreds of builds if you take care of them. I've had sets that have held up for years of heavy production use. Once your plywood templates are made, tracing and cutting parts becomes fast. You lay the template on the board, trace it with a sharpie or a pen so you get a clear, dark line, cut it out just outside that line on the bandsaw or jigsaw, and then sand down to the line. That's it. The template does the thinking for you, does every single time. And when you're cutting parts for four chairs at once, that consistency is what keeps your assembly stage running smoothly. If you're working with a jigsaw rather than a bandsaw, don't let anybody tell you that you can't produce professional results. I've built dozens of these chairs with nothing but a jigsaw, and the finished product is just as good. A jigsaw is a little slower, and you need to keep your blades square to the table, but the sanding process that follows will clean up any imperfections. It is not the tool that makes the difference. It is the care you take after the cut. Which brings us to sanding, and this is the part of the process I want you to take seriously, because it is the single biggest difference between a chair that looks professional and a chair that looks like a weekend project. Start with 80 grit sandpaper. That might sound aggressive for a finished piece of furniture, but for outdoor lumber, especially cedar and redwood, 80 grit is exactly what you need. It removes the roughness left by the saw, it creates a surface that drinks in oil finish beautifully, and it shapes those curves into something smooth and continuous. For rougher spots or areas where the saw left an irregular edge, drop down to 36 grit on a belt sander, hold it lightly, and use long even strokes from one end of the curve to the other. That part, the long even strokes, is the technique most people skip, and it is the most important thing I can teach you about this step. Do not try to sand down just the high spots. Do not hold the sander in one place and grind away at a rough area. Sand the entire curve with long, continuous strokes, and what you'll get is a smooth, uniform radius that looks like it came off a professional production line when I see a chair with little flat spots or wavy edges in the curves. I know right away that someone tried to spot sand their way through it. Customers notice that. They may not be able to name what they're seeing, but they feel it, and it affects what they're willing to pay. Follow your belt sanding with a random orbital sander at 80 grit. Same technique, long strokes following the contours. When you're done, run your hand along every curved edge. It should feel like one continuous flowing surface. If you feel a bump or a flat spot, go back and fix it before you pick up the router. After sanding, all the curved pieces get routed. I use a three-eighths inch radius roundover bit for this build with standard dimensional lumber. If you're working with three-quarter inch hardwood, a quarter inch radius roundover looks cleaner at that thickness. A palm router with a small base plate is ideal here because it gives you better control on tight inside curves. Here's the routing rule for this chair. You only route pieces on the surfaces that will be visible and exposed in the finished product. You do not route surfaces that will sit flat against another piece of wood, and you do not route surfaces that carry structural load at a joint. Routing those areas would round over a surface that needs to be flat and tight, and it would weaken the joint. So before you route anything, think about where each piece lives in the finished chair, which faces are visible, and which faces connect to something else. Take a moment to mark those areas with a pencil before you start your router. It costs you 30 seconds and saves you from having to recut a piece. When routing inside curves, you may occasionally run into tear out where the router bit catches the grain and pulls a chunk out. If that starts happening, slow down and try making a very gentle climb cut going in the opposite direction. Keep a firm grip on the when you do this. A climb cut can feel like it wants to pull the router away from you. A light touch and slow movement will get you through it cleanly. If you get any burn marks from the router, sand them out completely before the finish goes on. Burn marks do not disappear under an oil finish. They become more visible. Now we come to finishing, and I want to make a case here for finishing your pieces before assembly rather than after. I know it might seem backward. Most people think about finishing as the last step, but if you apply your oil finish to each individual part before the chair goes together, you get finish into all those interior surfaces where two pieces of wood will eventually meet, and you get finish into the end grain of every cut, which is where moisture loves to enter. That coverage is nearly impossible to achieve once the chair is assembled. For cedar, I use a penetrating oil finish in a cedar color tone. For redwood, there's a specific redwood oil finish that makes even construction-grade redwood look rich and red. Whatever product you choose, apply it liberally, let it sit for about 30 minutes, and then wipe off the excess with a clean rag. The wood will have absorbed what it needs, and there shouldn't be much excess to wipe. Let everything dry completely before you move to assembly. One critical safety note. Oil-soaked rags can spontaneously combust if they're bunched up or stored improperly. Lay your rags flat outdoors to dry completely before you dispose of them or store them. I've seen this catch people off guard. Don't let it be you. If you're finding this helpful and you want more content on woodworking projects and turning your skills into income, go ahead and subscribe to Dale Oakfield's Workshop so you don't miss what's coming next. Now let's get into assembly. Assembly is where all the precision of your earlier steps either pays off or catches up with you. If your pieces are sanded smooth, cut accurately, and finished properly, this stage is genuinely satisfying. If you rush something earlier, this is where you'll feel it. Start by getting your back legs and front connector piece together. The front connector is already cut at a six-degree bevel, which matches the angle at which the back legs slope toward each other. Make sure that bevel fits flush against both legs before you drill anything. Pre-drill every hole before you drive a screw. Every single one. Outdoor furniture screws are strong enough to split cedar and redwood if you go in without a pilot hole, and splitting a piece you've already sanded and finished is one of the most frustrating things that can happen during a build. I use ceramic-coated exterior deck screws throughout this chair. For joints where I'm going into the end grain of a board or anywhere the joint is long enough to take it, I use three-inch screws. For joints where two one-and-a-half-inch pieces meet face-to-face, two-and-a-half-inch screws give me plenty of bite without risk of poking through. For the joint where the front legs connect to the back legs, I go a step further and use carriage bolts. Three-eighths-inch hot-dipped galvanized bolts, one high and one low at each joint. You could use screws and get away with it, but if you're selling these chairs and guaranteeing your work, bolts give you the strength and the longevity that professional furniture demands. The extra few minutes and a few extra dollars per chair is worth it a hundred times over when a chair is still solid after 10 or 15 years outdoors. When you're placing the arms, use a small jig. I cut one from a scrap piece two inches by one inch to position the arm flush with the front of the leg. Make sure you're building a left arm and a right arm, not two of the same. It happens. Mark them before you start. Once the arms are in position, use a string line or a chalk line to verify the chair is centered left to right before you bolt the arms permanently. Measure from the string to the same point on both arms. When those measurements match, you're centered and you can drive your bolts with confidence. For the seat slats and back slats, use the same pre-drilling technique throughout and add a slightly wider drill bit pass through the first piece of wood at each joint. This clears the threads so the screw pulls the two pieces together instead of pushing them apart, which is especially important near the ends of boards where splitting is most likely. Space your slats by eye. An eighth of an inch between slats is the standard and it looks right. Use a small spacer if you want consistency across all four chairs in a batch. Now let's talk about a few problems that come up and how to handle them. The first one is slats that have cupped or warped slightly between the time you cut them and the time you're screwing them down. This is completely normal and wood moves. Don't panic. Just push the slat back into position by hand and hold it there while you drive the screw. Once it's fastened at both ends, it stays where you put it. The second problem is splitting near the end of a board despite pre-drilling. This almost always means your pilot hole is too small for your screw or you're placing the screw too close to the end of the board. Move the screw back a quarter of an inch or use the two-step drilling technique, countersink plus wider bit, to relieve the tension on that end grain. The third problem is a finished chair that rocks on an uneven surface. Check your leg lengths first. If all four legs are the same length, the issue is usually the assembly surface. Build on the flattest surface you can find, check squareness during assembly, and the chair will sit right on any flat ground. The fourth problem is tear out or chip out at a rooted edge that you don't notice until finishing. Lightly sand the affected area with 120 grit sandpaper, reapply your finish to that spot, and let it blend in. Penetrating oil finishes are forgiving that way. The fifth problem is screws that won't sit flush or that strip out. Always countersink your holes to the right depth before driving. And if a screw does strip, don't try to drive it deeper. Remove it, fill the hole. With a wooden toothpick and a drop of wood glue, let it cure and re-drive into solid material. If you follow the steps we've covered today, you'll sidestep most of these before they ever start. Now for the bonus tip I mentioned at the beginning, and this one is something I started doing a few years ago that has genuinely made a difference in customer satisfaction and repeat business. Put wheels on your Adirondack chairs. I know that sounds simple, but hear me out. A fully built Adirondack chair and seater can weigh 30 pounds or more. For the audience that's most likely buying outdoor furniture, homeowners in their 50s and 60s, moving a heavy chair across a patio or onto grass is a real effort. When I started adding a pair of 4-inch rubber wheels to the back legs of every chair, customers started commenting on it immediately. They love it. The chair sits with all four feet flat on the ground in normal use, and the wheels never touch down. But tilt the chair back on, two legs, and it rolls effortlessly over grass, gravel, decking, or concrete. Here's how to do it. Use a hole saw to cut a small round disc from a scrap of your build material. Sand it smooth, give the top edge a light roundover, and drill an 8-millimeter hole through the center. Attach it to the back leg using the marked location from your template. There's a specified distance off the bottom and off the back of the leg. Mount a 4-inch rubber scooter wheel with an 8-millimeter bolt, washers on both sides of the wheel so the washer contacts the bearing, and a nyloc nut on the outside to prevent loosening over time. Tighten it down so the wheel spins freely but has no side play. The cost of the hardware is a few dollars per chair. The time to install is about 15 minutes. And the perceived value to the customer, the moment they tilt that chair and wheel it across the yard with two fingers, is significant. I've had customers specifically request this feature for reorders after seeing it at a neighbor's house. That is the kind of detail that builds a reputation and keeps your order book full. So that's the complete process. From understanding why Adirondack chairs are one of the best projects you can sell, all the way through wood selection, templates, sanding, routing, finishing, assembly, and that wheel upgrade that sets your chairs apart. If you found this helpful and you want to keep learning alongside a community of people who take their woodworking seriously, go ahead and subscribe to Dale Oakfield's Workshop and hit that bell icon so you never miss a new video. Drop your questions in the comments below, whether it's about a specific step in the build, pricing your work, or finding your first customers. I read every comment and I'm happy to help. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.