One Way to Level the Legs. The chair is sitting on a level worksurface, the front legs are raised on blocks to achieve the proper tilt to the seat. The seat is then leveled from left to right with shims (if necessary). Measure from the front of the seat to the worksurface – 17-3/16″ in this case. Decide on a final seat height – 15-11/16″ in the illustration. Subtract the seat height from the overall height to determine how much wood you need to cut off – 1-1/2″ in this case. Cut a block of wood to that length. Use the block to scribe the legs with the help of a Half Pencil™.
Cutting down the legs of a chair so they rest flat on the floor is another one of the “great mysteries” faced by most beginning chairmakers. If you’ve never done it, it seems impossible. But if you’ve done it even once, it seems completely obvious.
If you’ve never done it, know this: Leveling the legs requires no special talents in geometry or math. The only skill required is being able to saw to a pencil line.
There are about five or six ways I know of to level the legs of a chair. I have tried them all. The following method is the one that is the easiest to teach. Most students grasp this method with ease, in my experience. If, however, you read through this technique and say: But why don’t you do …? My answer is simple: Try your theoretical method and see how it goes. There are lots of ways to do this operation.
Set the Stage
To trim the legs of your chair you need a flat worksurface that is level. This can be a piece of plywood that you have shimmed with wedges, the top of a table saw, your workbench or that one patch of floor in your shop that is inexplicably level.
To level the worksurface, I use a spirit (aka bubble) level and construction shims. I test the surface in the X axis and Y axis and add wedges until the surface reads level according to the spirit level. Then I gather the tools necessary for laying out the cuts on the legs: a handful of small wedges, the spirit level, a modified carpenter’s pencil, a tape measure, a 6″ rule and some scrap wood.
The Modified Carpenter’s Pencil
One of my favorite layout tools is a carpenter’s pencil that has been planed to half its thickness. I call it the Half Pencil™, and it is a useful thing to have around. It allows you to make pencil marks in the same way a spear-point marking knife works.
A marking knife works well for joinery because you can run the flat back of its blade against one surface (such as a try square) to accurately mark another surface below. The same principle applies to a half pencil. You don’t have to tip the pencil to make a perfectly accurate mark.
If you are skeptical, plane a carpenter’s pencil in half. This is easily done by placing the pencil against a planing stop. If you don’t have a planing stop, stick it to a scrap board with carpet tape and plane it in half with a jack plane. Once you own one, I suspect that you will find uses for it outside of chairmaking.
The Half Pencil™. Plane a carpenter’s pencil in half with a jack plane until you get to its lead. This pencil (turned upside down in this photo) can scribe your legs without accounting for the pencil’s thickness.
The Two Big Ideas
Put the chair on your level surface. I’m sure that (like my chairs) it will wobble on the flat surface and look a bit awkward. This is how all that gets fixed.
The goal is to prop up the legs so the seat is:
1. Level from left to right.
2. Sloped from front to back so that the chair is ideal for either dining/ keyboarding or lounging.
Getting the chair level from left to right is straightforward. Place your bubble level on the seat and shim the legs so none of the legs wobble and the seat is level to the floor left to right.
Level, Left to Right. Use shims to level the chair’s legs from left to right. Make sure the legs don’t wobble.
Now you need to set the “tilt” of the seat. How much does the seat slope downward from front to back? A seat that is level from front to back isn’t ideal. The sitter will feel like she is being pushed forward a tad. The seat needs to slope backward.
But how much?
The system I use is based somewhat on the way chairmaker John Brown worked. The seat should slope backward by “one finger” for dining chairs. And “two fingers” for lounging chairs.
Place the level on the pommel and the back of the spindle deck. Place one finger under the level at the back of the chair. Does the bubble level read level? If yes, then your chair is pitched correctly for a dining chair.
Usually, most chairs need to have their front legs propped up on scrap blocks to be sloped two fingers or three fingers back. If your chair (as built) is pitched at “one finger” and you want it to be “two fingers,” then you need to prop up the front legs by “one finger.” My fingers are about 3/4″ wide. So, I’ll cut scrap blocks about 3/4″ wide and place them under the front legs and any wedges.
Two Fingers. I have put blocks under the front legs of the chair until the bubble level reads level from front to back with two fingers under the rear of the level. This pitch is ideal for lounging.
Then I check the slope from front to back. If I can put two fingers under the bubble level at the back of the chair and the bubble level reads level, then I’m where I need to be. If I want more pitch, I’ll add taller blocks at the front legs. If I want less pitch, I’ll use shorter blocks.
Mess with the blocks and wedges until the seat is level from left to right and pitched like you want it in real life. And make sure it doesn’t wobble on the block and wedges.
Future armbows and combs for stick chairs in a corner of John Porritt’s shop. (Photo by Sue Porritt.)
by Brian Crawley
John Porritt recently gave a stick chair talk in Austerlitz, New York (click here to read about it). With so many of his chairs gathered in one place, I was able to take some quick photos of John’s different approaches to armbows. The joints are all based on those he has seen in traditional Welsh pieces. I’ve added a few more comments, too, on how he fashions sticks, legs, tenons, seats etc., intended less as prescription than permission to explore. Given that so many Welsh chairmakers look to have figured things out for themselves, there are an endless variety of solutions to be found, both within the tradition and outside it.
In the woods nearby, John looks out for near 90° bends he can use for armbows, and gentler bends for combs. His friends know by now to keep a lookout for him, too. If a bent branch is big enough, John can get bookmatched grain on the arms by sawing the limbs in two. But whether sawn from one limb or two, the armbow pieces need to be joined together in the middle somehow.
The two antique chairs John brought with him to the talk display two different common solutions. One has a long scarf, which stretches about 5″ across four of the chair’s six long sticks. The scarf is pegged at the center, I presume before the holes for the sticks were drilled, to help keep the assembly together. (The joint is not glued.)
The other, shorter of the two chairs uses a small square-edged half-lap, and a doubler above. There is no visible peg in the doubler, but there is a cut nail by the left side of the moulding. Maybe this is a later fix, as there is not one in the parallel position on the right. But there are several large builder’s cut nails underneath, one of which goes through the half-lap; of course the sticks going through reinforce the assembly too.
John suspects this chair may have been a lobster pot style, where the outer two sticks on each side bend inward toward a small comb. The doubler helps hold against the extra tension introduced by the bent sticks. John felt the more extreme bend of the outermost sticks of a lobster pot chair might be steamed, where the gentler bends beside it might not.
Two antique armbows, one a long scarf, the other a half-lap.
John’s chair with birch burl armbow uses the same scarf joint as the antique, pegged through the center (and glued). It strikes me that such a joint might be the first solution a self-taught woodworker might come up with, after the first time a butt joint fails on them. Though a simple joint, the two long slopes, angles matched with hand tools, are likely trickier to get right than a beginning craftsperson might imagine.
Six-stick black birch armbow, pegged scarf. (Photos by David Douyard.)
Sometimes John uses a doubler to bridge a long scarf joint. It might be called for if the grain in the arm’s bend is getting short, and will break over time, without support. Or it might be more a design choice, prompted by a visual need. John likes to consider how to bolster the confidence a sitter has in the look of a chair. (I have a light Texas ladderback chair, with a seat of woven twine. People always ask if I’m sure it will support them before they take a seat. They have no such insecurities with John’s chairs!)
Six-stick red chair, pegged scarf, doubler.
And as seen in the second antique chair, John sometimes uses a half-lap in his armbows. His joint is a bit more elaborate. The half-laps have angled outer edges, and central wedged and tapered keys to lock it together. After it is hammered home it is pegged from above once or twice, the number of pegs dependent on how deep the armbow.
Two chairs with half-laps, wedged and pegged.
It looks almost like a large timber-frame joint, and is in fact patterned after one John saw in a ridge board in a house in Wales. Another variation is a longer half-lap that extends across four sticks, not two.
A chair with a longer half-lap, wedged and pegged.
Two of the chairs John had in Austerlitz feature three-piece armbows with more elaborate timber-beam-style joinery. In both cases these joints span the middle of the armbow. The grain of these arms is too short to have stood the test of time without the extra support. The central piece has a dovetail in its bottom half; in the upper, there are angled edges at the sides, with pinned and tapered wedges at either side of the central two sticks. Tim Bailey, an antiques dealer in Nassau, New York, showed John how local German cabinetmakers from the Mohawk Valley wedged their dovetails. He admired their use of “belts and braces” (Brit-speak for suspenders!).
Eight stick chair, three-piece armbow, dovetailed, wedged, and pegged.
John’s current chair of soft maple and ash has a central insert cut from a piece of wood twice as thick as the arms. A dovetailed section abuts the arm, and a longer section above with a long-grained glue surface. I thought the upper half was a fourth piece to the armbow, but that’s a trick of the grain. It has two big locust pegs, wedged top and bottom, wide of the five sticks, down through the central piece into the arms, inspired by those German cabinetmakers. (“Belts, braces, and concrete abutments,” quipped John.) 1
Five stick chair, three-piece armbow, dovetailed, pegged and wedged.
John uses a limited tool set to make his chairs. The first stage of removing waste from a comb or an armbow is done with a band saw, one of his few powered tools. He keeps more wood than he thinks he’ll need, until late in the process. After the band saw, he uses a drawknife, not with a shavehorse, but with a big, old Record vise he uses while standing. We took turns working on the leg shown below, winded ourselves, then broke for tea.
John working on a leg with his drawknife. Note the bandsaw behind him.
John favors a Siegley or Hahn jack plane (prior to the c. 1901 acquisition by Stanley, when they still looked distinct from a Bailey plane). The iron is thicker than a Stanley, so it doesn’t flex in use. There is no chipbreaker; the lever cap, set back from the cutting edge, secures the iron. The single blade “just works better for green wood … rather than have …shavings getting jammed in there,” says John. It is also a pound lighter than a Stanley No 5.
With a very sharp blade, John uses it to shape the legs, sticks and their tenons. Next he uses one or more of several shaves. The largest of these is a Stanley cast iron shave with a cutter he has reground to work as a scraper. With diamond sharpeners, he makes two flats that meet at just under 90°. The scraper removes any tear-out left by the jack. It cuts at the arris, not with a burr. The mouth is quite open.
The block plane, a Stanley No. 60-1/2 set up as a scraper plane, further refines those surfaces. He does not round off all the flats and ridges, but leaves them for textural interest. John likes the surface to look worked, but not careless.
John’s tools. Note the surface of the finished sticks in the green box behind the bench.
A second, more recent power tool, is what John calls a planer, which I call a jointer; it’s a Craftsman pedestal model from the ’50s. (I think a Yank’s “planer” is a Brit’s “thicknesser.”) John needs to fix the Craftsman tool up, but the idea is to save some of the wear and tear on his wrists. He has a lathe, too, but rarely uses it for chairs. He did do a chair with a front turned short stick, like one of the antique chairs pictured above. John was little worried he’d managed to turn the front stick into a cricket bail; maybe there’s a design memory, akin to muscle memory?
The front sticks were turned on a lathe. Howzat!
John likes to leave the ends of tenons on his short sticks and legs a little proud – the same with pegs. Given wood movement, a perfectly flattened tenon won’t be flush with the chair’s seat or arm for long, so why fuss over it?2 John thinks the tenon’s extra height, and the mushrooming effect on its edge, gives a wedge a little extra to hold onto. He shaves them from the perimeter of the tenon toward the center, with a spokeshave set fine, or a chisel. He then burnishes them with a deer antler.
The short stick, leg and peg tenons are proud by a bit more than 1/16″, a bit less than 1/8″, which done by eye, not measured. John has kept some of the wane in this armbow.
The tenons on the underside of the seat protrude a bit further, maybe 3/16th” and are also done by eye. John likes to leave the ridges or “dawks,” made by a round moulding plane set up like a scrub plane.
To saddle a seat, John uses a scorp and adze. One chair has an unsaddled seat – common in the tradition. Most of John’s, though, are lightly saddled. He used the adze more in the past than now. “I’m actually ruining my hands, with too much handwork … though I don’t ever want a machine to dictate what I do,” he says. He uses a handsaw to trim tenons down, and a sliding bevel to set angles. (You can see more of his kit in a photo essay of John’s shop Megan Fitzpatrick did for Fine Woodworking.)
Though most of his chair seats are from one piece of wood, when John joins two, he uses pegged loose tenons. I’ve done a similar joint in a cricket table top, in a Derek Jones class. There, we cut the mortises as deep and wide as a Domino 500 could manage, made our own tenons, and drawbored them to close the joint as tightly as possible. John does the same process – minus the Domino.
A seat made from two pieces often has pegged loose tenons.
John’s stretcher configurations are as various as the armbows. Some have none; others have stretchers on the side, back to front; still others have a medial stretcher as well, resulting in an H-shape. Several chairs have seats of white elm, which, with its interlocking grain, it is very difficult to split. “If that’s dry, and the legs are dry, and they’re driven in, and they’re wedged” it doesn’t need stretchers, says John. With a seat of ash or oak, though (eminently splittable), stretchers “just give more confidence,” to the maker and the sitter, he says
Sometimes, not usually, John leaves the tenons of the long sticks proud of the comb. (Photo by David Douyard.).
For reference, John recommends the website and Instagram of Tim Bowen Antiques. Tim and his wife, Betsan, wrote about some of the pieces that passed through their hands in The Welsh Stick Chair.3Harvard & Harvard Antiques is another website John tracks. I found a couple of nice lobster pot chairs pictured there on a recent visit. 1stDibs, an conglomerate site of different antique dealers’ wares, often has a few good stick chairs among its offerings.
John sometimes shares a wry lament about the length of time it takes him to build a chair, but at this point in his life he’s unwilling to rush it. He does a variety of other work to make ends meet. He fixes plane totes, saw handles, infills and the like, for major antique tool dealers in the U.S. and private clients. He works on other, larger antique pieces as well. Passing through his workshop I’ve seen an original Holtzapffel lathe, with many missing pieces he had to fabricate, and a harp made in a medieval style. It had a key piece of wood the soundboard was anchored to; its grain was tearing apart under pressure of the strings, so John had figure out how to rebuild and reorient the piece, without modernizing the design. Both pieces are back in use now.
A few years back, Martin Donnelly posted a picture to a Facebook saw group that caused quite a stir. A very rare 17th-century saw was restored by John and his friend Tom Curran. After together working out how the missing piece might look, John added the wood to complete the missing section, and wood to fill old fastener holes. Tom carved the added piece in a style sympathetic to the original, and John colored the new to match the old. One of Tom’s specialties had been making beautifully worked flintlock rifles, from whence his carving skills derived.
A saw handle restored by Tom Curran and John Porritt (Photo by Martin Donnelly).
John did a simpler repair to a J. Nicholls saw of mine (Nicholls was one of the mid-19th-century Philadelphia saw makers Henry Disston eventually bought out). Simpler but not simple – the large chip missing from the lower ogee curve had sprung the alignment back to front. I watched John do the repair, with minimal intrusion on the old surface, and the color matching he’s perfected over his years of working on antiques.
I’d found out John is interested in teaching, but not in travel. So I asked if we could work for a couple of days one fall. I brought two stools I’d made, and we worked on finishing them; I brought some old saws in as well, and he worked on the Nicholls while I tried fixing an old Groves saw handle.
My J. Nicholls saw handle, restored by John Porritt.
There’s a sense of adventure, and play to John’s work that struck me in watching him. Once a wood repair is in place, he’ll add a stain, maybe burn it off, add another color, wipe it off, rub in some roofer’s cement, scrub it off. It’s a back-and-forth process that mimics the dings and furrows of outrageous aging. Hours are involved, but fun, too, in working toward beautifully imperfect patinated surfaces, which I think because they remind of our own temporality, and our connection to those who came before us, and those who will follow after.
Brian Crawley is a woodworker, screenwriter and award-winning playwright.
To see more of John Porritt’s work in aging a surface, check out his book, “The Belligerent Finisher” (Lost Art Press).
Near to John’s home is a place called Germantown, clearly named for those who settled there. I remember driving north on the Taconic Parkway years before I met John, joking with my daughter on the madcap tour of Europe we were on, given the place names on the exit signs: Athens, Nassau, Ghent, Rotterdam, Guilderland, Troy. Some of these were doubtless settled by corresponding Europeans. But Austerlitz was named by the eighth U.S. President, Martin van Buren, to piss off a political rival who had named a town Waterloo. (At Austerlitz, Napoleon won his battle. Which we in the States would be more likely to know if Abba had recorded a follow-up to “Waterloo.” As they still could. I think they’re all still with us. “Austerlitz! Could be the next of our megahits, whoa whoa whoa whoa, Austerlitz! Martin van Buren says it’s the tits.” ↩︎
I took a class with Mike Pekovich once, and by a similar line of thinking, Mike prefers his dovetail pins proud. If a pin will only stay perfectly flat for one season, he makes a design feature of the height difference.) ↩︎
Editor’s note: Lost Art Press is currently out of stock; we hope to have it available again soon. ↩︎
The following is an excerpt from Chris’ newest book, “American Peasant.” The book is an introduction to a style of peasant furniture and decoration that is almost unheard of in the Americas. Built primarily with tongues, grooves and pegs, the furniture is frequently engraved with geometric symbols that beautify the piece and protect its owner.
With this book, you will learn to build 10 simple pieces using common tools and whatever lumber is on hand. And you’ll learn to engrave the pieces using nothing more than a cheap craft knife and a vinyl flooring cutter. (We were so thrilled with this tool that we now make a commercial version of it.)
In addition to furniture making, “American Peasant” delves into other areas of the craft that will make you a more independent woodworker. Learn to make your own commercial-grade glue using only three ingredients (food-grade gelatin, salt and water), all of which you can find at the grocery store. The glue is strong, reversible and non-toxic (it’s edible, though we don’t recommend eating it).
You can make your own finish using beeswax, linseed oil and citrus solvent. This non-toxic finish is easy to apply and to repair. Plus, it looks better with age and use.
Finally, you’ll learn the language of the engravings, which come from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the U.K. These geometric engravings can protect a loved one from sickness, guard your valuables and grant good fortune to others (there are no negative engravings or spells in this book).
Many projects in this book use a tongue-and-groove joint to create the wide panels that make up the fronts, sides, backs, lids and bottoms of the pieces.
On many original pieces in Eastern Europe, this joint was created using rived stock, as discussed in the previous chapter. The tongue was at the tip of the board. The groove was plowed with a T-shaped grooving tool that is unavailable in the West. It’s a clever and effective way to build furniture – if you have rived stock.
Sawn stock from the lumberyard or mill is rectangular in cross section. And the grain is rarely dead straight through the board. So the approach to making these pieces requires a different tool.
For centuries, planemakers have made wooden-bodied tongue-and-groove planes, sometimes called “match planes.” One plane makes the tongue; a second makes the matching groove. These tools are effective, if you can find them in working order and they haven’t lost their mate.
Stanley Works had a clever solution. In 1875, Stanley started making the No. 48 Tonguing and Grooving Plane. It is one plane that makes both parts of the joint. The position of the tool’s rotating fence determines which part of the joint the plane cuts.
In one position, the fence exposes only one of the plane’s two cutters to the wood. So it makes a groove. Spin the fence 180 degrees, and it exposes two cutters, which makes the tongue.
Vintage Stanley catalog listings for its tonguing and grooving plane.
The No. 48 was designed to be used on stock from 3/4″ to 1-1/4″ in thickness, with the tongue centered on 7/8″-thick stock. Later, Stanley made a smaller plane, the No. 49, which joins boards that are 1/2″ thick (though it could handle boards that were slightly thinner and thicker).
The Nos. 48 and 49 are remarkable tools, and Stanley made many of them. So you can find them (and copies of them) on the used market. Sometimes their irons go missing, but replacements are out there or can be made easily.
A Stanley No. 48 set up for tonguing (left) and grooving (right).
Lie-Nielsen Toolworks makes heavy-duty versions of the Nos. 48 and 49, which have some improvements, especially the tools’ wooden handles and the use of a single iron, instead of two irons. These are the tools I use throughout this book, and I recommend them. (Note: There are other modern manufacturers who make planes that can do the same task, but you must swap out some tooling to make both parts of the joint.)
Both the Stanley and Lie-Nielsen tools have some peculiarities in setting them up and using them. Here are some tips to get you started.
Sharpening
I sharpen almost all my plane blades at 35 degrees. This keeps my life simple, and it doesn’t hurt how the tools perform. Argue the minutiae with me over a beer sometime, but the simple fact is that this is how I have worked for many years.
To ensure my edges are dead-square and at 35 degrees, I use a side-clamping honing guide when possible.
To sharpen the two blades for the Stanley versions of these planes, you clamp them in the honing guide and sharpen them like a bench chisel.
The ingenious Lie-Nielsen forked cutter clamped (with care) in a honing guide.
If you own a Lie-Nielsen version of this tool, you have only one iron to sharpen, which looks like a forked tongue. You can sharpen this iron in a honing guide, but you need to be careful when cinching down the guide on the blade. With some honing guides, you can bend the forks of this blade. So take care and cinch the guide down to where the blade is held firm, but isn’t bending.
Setup
Setting up the Lie-Nielsen tools is simple. Put the forked blade in the tool, secure the lever cap and set the blade projection. Set it for as heavy a cut as your muscles can manage.
Setting the blades for the original Stanleys takes more fiddling, but that is a positive aspect of this plane. I set the blade that is farthest from the fence a little deeper than the blade near the fence. These slightly offset cutters ensure tight-fitting joints. Here’s how:
First thing to know: The fence of the tool should always run against the “true surface” of every board. This is true for both the tongue and the groove.
If the term “true surface” boggles you, here’s a quick explanation. In handwork, we call a surface “true” if it has been flattened so it can join other surfaces. On a dining table, for example, the underside of the tabletop needs to be true so it sits flat on the table’s base. The top surface just has to look flat. So when you are tonguing and grooving backboards for a cabinet, the fence needs to ride against the faces of the boards that will face toward the inside of the cabinet.
The true face relates to other pieces of the project. The true face of a tabletop is the underside because it has to mate with the base.
So, when the single cutter is exposed to make the groove, the groove is a little deeper than normal because the blade is set deeper.
When set to make the tongue, the deeper cutter overcuts a little compared to its shy cousin. The net result: The show surface of the joint is always tight. The non-show surface has a small gap between the boards.
One of the advantages of separate blades is that you can set one deeper than the other – ensuring a gap on the back and a tight joint facing the user.
Use
The main difficulty with these tools is that the fence becomes wobbly. This is almost always caused by the user “unscrewing” the fence as they switch back and forth between the tonguing and grooving settings. If the fence becomes too loose, the boards won’t mate flush.
I keep a screwdriver on the bench when I use these planes. And I make sure the tip of the screwdriver fits the head of the screw on which the fence pivots (this prevents the screw’s slot from getting chewed up). After I adjust the fence, I snug up the screw, which prevents the fence from wiggling.
Whenever I spin the fence on my tongue-and-groove plane, I cinch the center screw to keep everything tight.
The above question is one we answer every day. And no matter how many times we repeat our answer (many times it’s even woven into our announcement of a new title), people still ask. So here’s the answer:
We don’t know. Our individual retailers get to decide which Lost Art Press books they carry and which they don’t.
Plus, every retailer orders books on different schedules, so we have no idea if Lee Valley or Dictum is going to carry a book until months later when they issue a purchase order.
Our recommendation: Send a note to your local retailer asking if they are going to carry the title you are interested in. Chances are if enough people ask about the book, they will carry it.
The Ordering Process
For those of you who want all the details, here is how we sell books to retailers. When a book is released, Lost Art Press is the sole source for that title for 30 days. This gives us a small headstart on selling our own title to our regular customers.
After 30 days, the book is added to our wholesale price list and sent out to our retailers. Some of them want to see the physical book before they make a decision. Others want to see a pdf of the book to make sure the content is something for their audience. Still others order it sight-unseen.
Most of our retailers place a few big orders during the year instead of ordering a big batch of a single book. This saves them on shipping charges. So they might order stock for Christmas at the end of the summer and restock in January. Other retailers order books when they are released. Still other retailers might wait a year to see if there is demand for it in their market before ordering.
After they place the order, we assemble a pallet of the things they order and we await a truck to pick them up. The truck’s schedule is usually out of our hands. Sometimes it can take weeks for a truck to show up.
After the retailer receives the new book, they usually write their own product description that suits their audience. So they have to read (or skim) the book, take photos, update their website etc.
All this takes time and – as I said – is completely out of our hands.
John Porritt at the Old Austerlitz Historical Society’s chancel. (Photo by David Douyard.)
by Brian Crawley
On a bracing day this past Sunday – cold enough to move the event from a large unheated barn in Austerlitz, New York, to a little body-heated church – John Porritt gave a talk on his masterful stick chairs. He brought two Welsh antiques he’d found in nearby Hudson, New York, and 20 chairs by his own hand, mostly Welsh-style stick chairs, an English-style forest chair, and several side and children’s chairs. A few he brought over from his workshop, but mostly his friends and customers brought their own Porritt chairs along to show off and share a sit in.
A congregation of chairs. A pride of chairs? A throng.
John views making a chair as a journey. In one sense, the journey is the improvisatory interplay between the wood sourced for arm bows and crowns, then the seat, legs and sticks shaped to complement these. In another, the journey is more literal, actually starting with walking the dog. While John used to find curved pieces in the trees and limbs linemen left cut at the roadside, once they started using chippers, he began to rely instead on himself and his friends spotting roughly right-angled trunks and boughs on their walks.
A “forest” stick chair, more English than Welsh in style.
John spoke of one such tree, a black birch on a friend’s property, which was a sapling when a terrible ice storm in 1983 bent it parallel to the ground. It was held in that position long enough to be set that way. In time it grew upward normally again, and formed, as the trunk grew up and bigger around, two nearly 90°-angled sections that John used some 30 years later in one of his chairs. John spotted a similar ash trunk, pictured below, while on a walk with his dog. (With this one, nobody knows exactly why it grew that way.) During a visit with Chris Williams, Kevin Adams and me a year and a half ago, John had enough helpers on hand to harvest this pair of angled turns. The armbow in his latest completed chair is from this ash. A fire wood, ash dries quicker than most.
John and Chris Williams harvest some promising arm bows.
The advantage of a naturally curved piece is that the grain is continuous and strong along its length. It also allows for (or suggests? requires?) the wide variety of shapes found in vernacular Welsh chairs. You can get continuous grain strength by steam-bending chair parts, but the old chairs John is referencing, and building typically have 1-1/4″ or thicker arms, which can be very hard to bend successfully. And, it requires extra tools and experience – and is outside the tradition.
Woodworkers who make Windsor, or forest, chairs typically employ steam-bending to impose a consistency on the wood, to make a repeatable production form. It is a different aim than allowing found wood to spur design. A person who is looking to make a few chairs for family and neighbors, a side hustle perhaps, hasn’t the same need for a uniform, easily replicable chair. This is the type of person we imagine a 19th-, 18th- and 17th-century Welsh chairmaker to have been.
In the 20th century, John’s commissioned chairs are likewise destined for family, friends and neighbors. One was made to place by the wood stove a friend tends for warmth. It sits deeper than most so she can push back from a just-stirred fire; its fore-edges are developing a rich patina. Another made for a fellow craftsman lacks the “belligerent” finish John often uses — because Tom wanted to distress it himself, by shoving it under the table after dinner to abrade the arms and butt-burnishing the seat. A kitchen chair made for Lydia, who carries on Tom’s work at Monster Machine in Chatham, New York, is armless so that she might more easily spring to stove, sink or counter in the course of a meal.
A use-weathered chair. (Photo by Lydia Curran.)
But John more often builds his chairs on spec. Then the only client to please is himself. A four-stick chair made at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point. John answered one question, as to how much time each chair takes, with: “Far too long! Up to a point I don’t care how long it takes me, because I really want to do it the way I want to do it.” One example of mid-chair change of direction was in the chair with the black birch arm bow, from the tree mentioned above. The two arms were colored with nitric acid and burnished “like crazy” with a chain-mail pot scrubber and a deer’s antler. At first they were square in section, but when viewed with the seat, the shapes didn’t look right to John’s eye. So he visibly softened and rounded the arms with a rasp and scraper to better suit the piece. This had the happy accident of making the short stick tenons a little more visibly worn, with the arms falling away from those high spots, like the thumbprints you can sometimes see on an old, well-loved saw’s handle or plane’s tote.
These arms started square in form, but didn’t look right to John, so he rounded them as work progressed. (Photo by David Douyard.)
Another example: His most recently completed chair is made of soft maple, with ash arms sourced from the tree he is sawing through in the photo above. John said he colored it with a milk paint he made himself from powdered milk and lime. A first thin wash looked good, but a second went on too heavy, so he cut it back to almost nothing. Rather than continue on to a darker color and an aged finish, his wife, Sue, suggested he bring it to the talk as-is. (The final stage of a chair’s journey comes in deciding how to finish it.) John has a keen sense of color, texture and their interplay, developed through long experience in restoring and refinishing antique furniture and tools. His book The Belligerent Finisher(2022, Lost Art Press) goes into detail on those techniques.
He had planned for the chair to have more sticks, five, maybe seven, in the lobster-pot style. But that felt overcrowded when he mocked it up. He liked the fifth stick at the top, but it was too crowded at the bottom. So he removed the bottom half of the stick. Chris Williams saw a photo and loved it. And given the diversity of form in the tradition, Chris noted that Welshmen have done the same thing in the past. So that’s how it stands today.
John’s soft maple and ash chair is the frontmost here of … an assembly of chairs? A flock of them? Or, a muster of chairs. There, that’s the term: a muster of chairs from a master of them. (Photo by Sue Porritt.)
I’m guessing a quarter of John’s audience last Sunday were fellow woodworkers. I recognized some, professional chairmakers includinng David Douyard and Charles Thompson, and hobbyists including Kevin Adams and me. Others I didn’t know, but their questions revealed them. Lay members of John’s congregation were just as involved in the talk. (“Do you find all your own wood?“ ”How long does it take to cure?“ “Why do some have rungs, and some do not?“) The head of the Old Austerlitz Historical Society said they’d never had a talk quite like it. I imagine because John, after a brief introduction, asked for questions rather than give an academic talk. One thought then followed another very naturally, and he had a bevy of chairs nearby to hoist up and illustrate his answers. John’s daughter, Mia, came up from college for the weekend to help lug and place all the chairs, and to sell copies of his book. And we all hung around in the churchyard afterward, until rain started to fall on the chairs that hadn’t yet been tucked away in everyone’s cars and trucks.
Brian Crawley is a woodworker, screenwriter and award-winning playwright.
