For the Crucible Dovetail Templates, I think we’ve finally figured out efficient fixtures for workholding, allowing us to cut more than one tool at a time on the CNC mill…and when I say “we” and “us” I mean our genius machinist, Craig Jackson. So, we finally got in a large-ish batch, and they are now available in our store.
The Crucible Dovetail Template marks out dovetail joints – both the tails and the pins – and allows you to easily and accurately lay out the angled and straight parts of the joint. This template marks out the two most common dovetail slopes, 1:6 and 1:8 (9.5° and 7.1° respectively).
This solid steel template is based on a discontinued version from Woodjoy Tools. We contacted the designer, Glenn Livingston, to obtain his blessing for our tool, and he receives a royalty on every one sold.
Unlike the original, the Crucible Dovetail Template is milled from one piece of steel, which ensures a perfect 90° at the corner. (While this might seem wasteful, all the excess is recycled.) The tool measures 5/8″ x 1-11/16″ x 3″. The angled sections of the tool are long enough to mark out tails in 1-3/8″ stock. The straight section of the tool is long enough to reach fully across two 3/4″-thick boards (for those who gang-cut dovetails). There’s also a handy hang hole, just like on the original.
The Crucible Dovetail Template is made in Kentucky.
Most people who make chairs today make four-legged chairs. There are good reasons for that. Though three-legged chairs were once very common as they are stable on uneven floors (three legged chairs have NO WOBBLE), on a flat floor it is definitely hard to beat the stability of a four-legged chair. Five-legged chairs are an odd occurrence in the world of seating.
Choosing the right number of legs for your chair is mostly determined by what floors you have in your house. On a flat floor, a four-legged chair is the most stable solution. Three-legged chairs are stable on uneven (dirt) floors, but if you still have a dirt floor in your house then you are probably not reading this blog post.
Ten-legged chairs like the one in the picture above serve no real purpose except an artistic one. But five-legged chairs, even though they are not very common, do pop up in the historical record every now and then.
Why Five Legs?
There are two major reasons people add a fifth leg to their chairs, both having to do with tippiness.
A three-legged chair got complaints about its perceived sideways instability. Adding a leg on both sides reduces sideways tippiness.
A four-legged chair didn’t have enough rake to the back legs, causing the chair to be tippy. Adding a fifth leg in the middle reduces backwards tippiness.
A former three-legged chair.
I have had both situations happen in my chairs, and in my opinion adding a 5th leg really helps stabilize it.
People make five legged chairs to fix a problem, not for aesthetics.
I have observed that many people enjoy tipping their chair backwards when sitting. If a chair doesn’t have enough rake, this can lead to the chair falling backwards (a potentially dangerous situation).
Will I Ever Start Using More Rake?
I have made several chairs with not enough rake to the back legs. Call it bad luck or plain stupidity, I recently made another chair that turned out a little tippy.
Though I don’t mind a little tippiness to my chairs, this particular chair was intended for a customer so I decided it needed a fifth leg. Plus, I knew the customer would be happy with the uniqueness of a five-legged chair.
Adding a Fifth Leg to an Existing Chair Note: how to plane a leg and how to drill a mortise is discussed extensively in “The Stick Chair Book” and “The Anarchists’s Design Book“. /commercial /ad
Adding a fifth leg to a chair without stretchers is an easy, straightforward process. If your chair has stretchers, this complicates things a bit but it is not impossible.
For this example we will add a fifth leg to a chair with no stretchers.
Mark the location of the fifth leg on the bottom of the seat. Drill a mortise centred between the current back legs (but add more rake). Plane a leg and shape the tenon to fit the mortise. You can use a tapered joint or not.
Fit the leg and glue it in place; afterwards wedge it from the top. Remove the tenon the next day and clean up the seat.
How to Level a Five-legged Chair Assuming your chair was leveled already, leveling a 5th leg is very easy. You will need five blocks of the same height and a chisel/marking knife. The blocks can be offcuts or scraps. I went into my son’s old wooden building blocks bucket and grabbed five colorful ones.
The chair sits on four of the five blocks.
Set the chair on four blocks. The fifth leg has to hover above the surface so make sure your blocks are high enough or cut some excess material off your fifth leg.
A chisel works fine, a marking knife of a half-pencil work as well.
Grab the fifth block and your chisel or marking knife (a half pencil would work too). With the chisel/knife/pencil lying flat on the block, draw all the way around the fifth leg. This will be your floor line.
Saw the excess off along the line you just created.
Trim the bottom edges to prevent splintering when moving the chair, and you’re done.
The following is excerpted from “Mouldings in Practice,” by Matthew Sheldon Bickford. The book turns a set of complicated mouldings into a series of predictable rabbets and chamfers that guide your hollow and round planes to make anything – anything – that has been made in the past or that you can envision for your future projects.
“Mouldings in Practice” is accessible for even the beginning hand-tool woodworker. It uses more than 200 color illustrations and dozens of photos to explain how to lay out, prepare for and cut any moulding you can draw.
The first half of the book is focused on how to make the tools function, including the tools that help the hollow and round planes – such as the plow and the rabbet. Matt also covers snipes bills and side rounds so you know their role in making mouldings. Once you understand how rabbets and chamfers guide the rounds and chamfers, Matt shows you how to execute the mouldings for eight very sweet Connecticut River Valley period projects using photos and step-by-step illustrations and instruction.
Breaking a moulding down into a series of simple forms results in a smooth execution. When you look at each aspect of a profile, consider the following rules:
Following these rules will make complex mouldings achievable.
The Stick Chair Journal is in the final stages of production and will be released in Fall 2022. We’ve added it to the store so that you can sign up for to be notified when it is available. To do that, visit the store page and click on “Notify Me.” (Note that on the front page of the store, there’s a banner on the Journal (and other items with zero units in stock) that reads “sold out.” Underneath is the “notify me” banner.)
When it’s available (again, not until Fall), there will be two ways to purchase it:
1. Order the softcover version and you will also receive two PDFs: a PDF of the journal and a second PDF of the patterns for the chair in this issue at checkout.
2. Order the PDF of the Journal and you will receive two PDFs: a PDF of the journal and a second PDF of the patterns for the chair in this issue at checkout.
We plan to print 4,000 copies – and when the press run sells out, that’s it (though the PDF will remain available). Unlike with our books, we do not plan to reprint to keep the physical item in stock.
The Stick Chair Journal, will be an annual publication that aims to expand the universe of all things stick chair: More history. More plans. More techniques. Reviews of tools. And Big Thoughts. It is a supplement to “The Stick Chair Book.“
In Issue No. 1, you’ll find:
• A Lousy Way to Run a Railroad: An explanation of what this journal is all about.
• How & Why to Make Hexagonal Parts: An exploration of hexagonal chair parts. How to make them both by hand and with some machine assistance. Plus the design considerations for their visual and actual mass.
• True Grit: A Dirty Job, But Not a Dirty Word: Abrasives in woodworking predate planes and other edged tools. There’s no shame – and there is plenty of historical precedent – in sandpaper.
• The Fat Boy Scriber: An ingenious tool for marking leg lengths and, with an easy modification, marking curves.
• Chairmaking on the Cheap(er): You don’t need expensive tools; here are less expensive and accurate alternatives for cutting tenons, fitting combs and locking in your important angles.
• Comb-back with an Improved Arm: Complete plans and construction information for a new six-stick comb-back chair, with a four-piece, mitered-end armbow and a thin, cut-away profile on the hands.
• Stick Chairs in the Wylde: The road to becoming a good chairmaker is looking deeply at beautiful chairs. We explore a chair that has launched the chairmaking careers of many makers.
• A Vampire Chair: A fabled chair in Tennessee was broken apart to murder its owner. Now that it has been repaired, it’s acting odd.
Thanks to the many people who helped cut parts for and knock together this wee Nicholson bench at our last open house, by the end of the day on March 26 there wasn’t much left for Chris and me to do to get it ready for the opening of the Cincinnati Museum Center’s “Made in Cincinnati.”
Our volunteers (again, thank you!) cut the angles on the front and back aprons, nailed the bench together and drilled all the holdfast holes. All that remained was to install a planing stop, and make and attach a crochet.
Today (yes, two months later), I did one of those things; tomorrow (or maybe Monday), I’ll make the crochet. When Chris returns from his Great Plains adventure (he’s in Omaha right now to fulfill a teaching promise made long ago), we’ll decide how we want to install that. (I’m leaning toward nails, because I don’t know where to find appropriate bolts – ones that were made in the first half of the 19th century, or at least look as if they were.)
“Made in Cincinnati,” scheduled to open July 1, includes a “made by hand section” – an educational display about important 19th-century Cincinnati craftsman, one of whom was Henry Boyd. Boyd was a formerly enslaved person who bought his freedom, and later owned a furniture making business in downtown Cincinnati. On exhibit will be one of his “swelled railed bedsteads” and a re-creation of his shop space, which is where this Nicholson-style workbench will end up. (Also, we have been working on a book on Boyd for the last couple years – we’ll be able to tell you more about that in autumn).
The only annoying thing about installing the planing stop was that because I decided to put it in line with the holes in the top (though one doesn’t need to), I had to chop right through a large, sticky sap pocket, so the shoulder isn’t a clean as I would like…and my chisel is a lot less clean than I would like (or at least it was – paint thinner and my woobie have taken care of it). After laying out the mortise location on the top and bottom, I drilled out most of the waste, then used a 2″ chisel to pare back to my layout lines, working in from both sides. (Thank you to Katherine the Wax Princess for helping me to flip it over…and to Archimedes for teaching me how to flip it back.)
So now, it’s down to the crochet – but no hurry; this isn’t getting picked up until June. (What? That’s only 11 days away?!)
