A tiny bit of progress

Told you all it would be a while. Here's the chair without the back. I finally got it off.

This little bugger was the culprit, it was jammed in the channel with the dowel that holds it in place. I chipped up the bottom of the backrest support bit hammering it up far enough to get the screw out. The channel took a few misses too so it has some choppy-ness that will have to be dealt with.

The backrest support. I've taken the backrest out (would've been smarter to do it before, but I never said I was smart. As you can see it's equally or more rusty than the head rest piece, plus the channel is longer. Uses the same principals as the headrest though for adjustment. Lever pulling back (and down) against a big dowel that is lifted by a spring loaded smaller dowel from underneath. The smaller dowel is pretty lodged in there. I'm going to have to setup a vice (hello Harbor Freight) on the back porch and hammer it out. I'll be able to also setup a wire wheel out there to clean off the parts, I still have to figure how to clean the inside channel that the small dowel moves in though.

 The back of the chair. You can see that the awful pink may have been an attempt to match the original. I'll probably go with plain black.

That's about it for now. I'm also going to do a quick and dirty mod to my 20 year old handmade-from-scrap-wood desk. The wife has come up with some nice nagahide (sp?) to cover the old fiberboard and a friend of hers picked up one of those quasi-fake travel trunks we can steal the brass corner bits off. I was also thinking of lining the surface with some copper channel if I can find some cheap enough. Almost picked up some carpet joiner tack-strips, but they're all textured and I don't think it would look right. I want nice bright (and smooth) brass.