You can now purchase laser-cut templates for the Staked Armchair from “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition” and they are available for immediate shipment. A set of templates is $43 and can be ordered here from our store.
The templates are a supplement to the instructions in “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition.” If you own the book, there is an entire chapter devoted to making your own templates with trammels and a ruler. In other words, you don’t have to own these templates to make the chair.
Why offer them? To remove one more barrier to you making a chair. The templates are laser cut from MDF (they are nicer than my personal set of templates) and contain all the important information you need to lay out your parts: the mortise locations, the sightlines, resultants and even the shape of the seat’s pommel. They are a shortcut. Plus they are a jumping-off point for developing your own designs for arms, crests and seats. When I develop a new chair, I usually begin with existing templates.
The templates are made by FirstLightWorks in Derbyshire in the U.K. Ed Sutton at FirstLightWorks took a chair class with me last year and developed these templates using my personal set. If you like in the U.K. or Europe, you can order the templates here through Classic Hand Tools.
Note that the templates are a supplement to the instructions in “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition.” If you are a beginning chairmaker, you will need the book to guide you through the construction process.
— Christopher Schwarz
Love em and will be purchasing a set soon. One of the hardest parts of doing a chair like this for me anyways, is determining the leg and arm layout. As you say, using this as a reference starting point gets you going.
Will be purchasing for SURE! Will their be videos/procedure to help none-skilled people like me?
Would printed instructions work for you?
https://lostartpress.com/products/the-anarchists-design-book
The blog has tidbits for the trickier parts like this:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/2018/11/20/use-the-sighting-square-not-a-joke/
Way to go, Ed!! (and Chris!) Very cool! Congrats!
Ordered my set tonight……going to make a really swell chair.
What ever happened to enlarging drawings at kinkos by 283% for full scale template?
LAP,
This may be an unknowable remark/question but has there ever been a Welsh Stick Rocking chair, Ralph
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cf/23/30/cf2330de6215ee9fb838cbe173311f91.jpg
This is the only Welsh rocker I have seen…
I actually asked Chris Williams, the Welsh chairmaker and author of Good Work (as you probably know if you’re reading this blog), about this sometime last year. He told me he had never seen and enthusiastically encouraged me to be the first one to make one. I accepted the challenge, but just after a couple of weeks, he emailed me again and told me he had come across one. He sent me some photos of it and it was indeed a beautiful Welsh rocking chair, just as you would imagine it could look. Which means I’d been beaten to the punch around several decades ago….
If you’d like to see the chair, send me an email and I’ll email them to you. My address is lapsklaus@gmail.com
Maybe rocking chairs did’nt work well on the uneven stone floors? Or another possibly… its difficult to sip a cuppa Glengettie wile in a rocking chair.
Yes, I think that’s a plausible theory.
Rocking chairs belong on the front porch of an old Kentuckey home. Welsh stick chairs belong fireside in a small Welsh cottage with a kettle on. They should not be intertwined.
What would John Brown do?
Is there any chance you could make the source files for the templates available? I have access to a laser cutter…