While a trusty axe and a sturdy shield is essential equipment on the battle field, what every warrior needs when he gets home from a hard day's massacring is a good solid chair to sit on when he tucks his legs under the table, grabs a spoon, and gets stuck into a double helping of his mum's jam roly-poly. Tuco obliges:
I needed a quick and easy way to make chairs for my entry in the Dangerous Ground Competition. Making chairs from balsa wood, matchsticks and/or toothpicks can get pretty fussy. After fiddling about for a while I came up with this method using 10mm square wire mesh. As you can see the chair is slightly over scale for 28mm. I suppose 8mm mesh would be perfect, but I haven't been able to find any.
You will need:
Square welded wire mesh
Wire cutters
Pliers
Scraps of wood or cardboard for the seat.
Epoxy glue
First cut out the shape shown in the image below from the wire mesh. Be careful to clip the wire at the level of the welded joints so as to keep a uniform length. Don't use you favourite super-sharp clippers that you use for cutting plastic from sprues as this metal is tough and will probably dent the sharp 'blades'. Use a pair of sturdy wire cutters instead.
The upper square will form the chair's backrest. Use pliers to bend the wire on either side of it to form the seat and legs. Add a square of wood or any other material for the seat and you're done. Given that you're gluing to metal and needing to do a bit of gap filling at the same time, an epoxy adhesive is probably the best glue for the job.
Want something a bit more modern, like a designer chair?
No problem:
Of course there's no reason to stop at chairs as you could make many other types of furniture using the same techniques, and while they look good in their raw state, they could easily be painted to look like they are made from lots of other materials.