I’m not quite ready to figure out how I’m going to model the small hand held target so I
decided it was time to work on seating for the lobby. Where I take Taekwondo we have a
variety of chairs some with padding and some without. I could do that. Or, I could just
make a folding chair and use several of that. Not just any folding chair though. I wanted
the basic metal one. You know, the one that, you are glad to have some place to sit but
hopefully you won’t be there long.
Something like this that I found on an Office Depot website.
I didn’t figure on how much of a challenge it was going to be to model. And where to start.
Well, with the frame. The frame for the back of the chair looks like a tube of metal so
that’s what I started with first. Not the best choice. And I figured that out pretty quick
but it meant that I had to stop and rethink what I was trying to do. I finally decided on
using cylinders and sections of a torus. I set the torus to the same number of segements as
the cylinders so that I could connect the ends. I then only created a quarter of the torus.
I copied it and rotated it and then I had the corners. Cylinders down each side and one
across the top gave me the components I needed to create the frame for the back of the
chair. I discovered on another project that if I was going to connect two components then I
had to make sure there was no face in between them. So I deleted the end faces on the
cylinder ends that were connecting to the torus sections. Then I attached them and I was
able to move them right up close and weld the points. Nice. So after a false start, I was 
making progress and I was off and running on the frame. Mostly. I was able to use the frame from the back and select part of the top of it and copy just that part so that I could make the brace for the bottom part of that frame.
At this point I had the basics for the brace, I just needed to make some adjustments refine it. The extenders needed to be squished instead of completely round so I worked on that mostly using the soft select tool and some scaling. I did have to do some point or vertices manipulation to clean up the look. It was a bit rough. The whole piece had to be scaled in a little so that it would fit properly between the legs of the frame. And of course setting just the right height for it was important. I still had a seat to fit in there and those little caps to go on the bottom of the feet.
With the main frame created, creating the frame that would be the back legs was pretty
easy. What would have been easier is, after I attached the bottom brace to the frame I
selected the bottom part of the frame and made a copy of it. This would have given me the
right width of the frame and the bottom brace, without a lot of extra work. I didn’t do
that. I created a new cylinder at the height I thought I needed and then made a copy of
that so at least they were the same height. I then made a copy of the bottom brace and
moved it in between the two new cylinders. I made a little mistake in creating the
cylinders that I would discover much later. Anyway, I adjusted the spacing of the cylinders and the brace so that they were nice and tight and looked just right. When I copied the brace, I made sure not to adjust it’s location along the Z axis so that it would be at the right height. That saved a little frustration. At this point, I needed the second brace for that frame set so I copied the one that I had in place and transformed it’s position only along the Z axis this time and that was that. And easy.
I think that was the last easy part on this chair.
Now it needs the back rest part, a seat, the brackets, some bolts, end caps for the feet
and such. Just a few more bits to go.