Scale Dinning room table and chairs

I have always enjoyed building model airplanes, and I thought a nice little project for this Christmas Season would be to build some playscale furniture for 12″ dolls and post it on ebay to see how well it does. I never thought it would be very difficult to build something like that and while it wasn’t really difficult it was extremely time consuming.

I drew up a nice set of plans for this table and chairs that makes the build process much simpler. It can be built with common size balsa sticks that are just cut to length, and placed on full size templates that are included in the plans. The plans come with a material list, exploded views of the table and chairs, step by step instructions, and full size templates. It is in standard adobe reader format and it can be printed out on standard size paper.

I decided to model this table after the one we have in our dining room and scale it down to the right size for 12″ dolls. I had to do a little research to find out the scale that barbie dolls, the larger GI Joe action figures and the Fashion Royalty dolls were designed around. It turns out they use the 1/6 scale where 2″ = 1′. After taking a few measurements of my table I started the construction.The main reason this little table took so much time to build is, for one, I had to figure out how to do it as I went along and another is the fact I had to basically mill out each piece of wood for all the little details.The Table wasn’t too hard to build, but the chairs turned out to be quite the challenge. I ended up doing an assembly line process for the chairs and had to come up with some unique clamping techniques to hold everything together while the glue set.

I used a set of clamps that are designed for clamping two work pieces at 90 degrees. I just took them apart and they worked well for clamping the chairs together.I stacked wood to get the seat heights and bottom portion the exact same height for each chair. Once I finally figured out all of these tricks the chairs went together quickly.

Here you see the complete set after the initial construction was complete.

Painting it was yet another challenge. With all the tiny details it was fairly difficult to make sure I covered every little thing.

My wife decided she wanted to embroider a design for the seat cushions, but we were still a little unsure of which covering we should use so we uploaded this photo to our Facebook accounts and let our friends vote on which one to use…the flower design won the contest. :)

And here is another shot of the final product. I never though I would say this, but I sure wish I had a barbie doll to set up and make sure the scale was correct. :)It is now posted on ebay until December 14th…I wonder how well it will do or if it will sell at all?

Another shot of the final product.