A reader found an error in the full-size patterns for “The Stick Chair Book.” Here’s the fix.
The plans for the Six-stick Comb-Back were scaled down slightly by the printer. None of the other five patterns are scaled down – they are correct. We’re not sure how this happened, but oh well. The patterns for the six-stick chair show the seat at 19” wide instead of 20”. The other parts on that page are also scaled down slightly.
The fixes:
Ignore the error. The slight scaling won’t change the chair much. I’ve made chairs with narrower seats with no problem.
Download an unscaled pattern for free via this link. Get it printed out at your local reprographics firm. And next time you’re in town I’ll buy you a coffee or beer to make up for the added expense.
Use the seat pattern for the lowback instead. It is the same size and shape. The legs are in the same place. The spindles on the seat are the same space apart (3” on centers). The only thing you’ll have to do is step off one more spindle on both sides of the spindle deck.
I have met only one magical being in my life, and his name is Jögge Sundqvist.
I’m not joking. I first met Jögge when he was teaching a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, and I was amazed at his ability to charm almost anything. There were the students, of course – they had signed up for the experience. But Jögge also had a curious power over the wood in his hands, his tools and even color. Everything he does looks so simple, and yet it has an almost magical quality to it.
Perhaps we were also under his spell, but we jumped at the chance to translate Jögge’s book “Slöjd in Wood” into English. This interesting and beautiful book is not just about carving spoons, or making bowls or peg racks. It’s a different way of looking at the craft and the world. It is a direct connection to the same world that created the vernacular stick chairs I’ve been in love with for most of my life. It’s not something you can conquer by buying fancier tools or making jigs.
In fact the only path forward is to turn off the machines, pick up a branch from the forest and sit down with a knife. In time, you will find yourself becoming “not uncrafty.”
— Christopher Schwarz
The following is an excerpt from “Slöjd in Wood” by Jögge Sundqvist.
This cutting board is based on ones I saw in Norway. One side had a decoration painted on it and faced outward when it hung on the wall. The other side was the real cutting board and unpainted. A cutting board gets tough treatment. In frequent contact with water, it swells and shrinks again and again, so the wood changes in volume.
A cutting board with a glue joint cracks sooner or later. If you use a single board from the outer part of a straight-grown trunk, where the annual rings are of more or less of equal length, it warps to be slightly convex on the cutting side and is stable.
Cutting board with heart side down. You cut food on the heart side. This side is convex when it has dried, so the water drains off. It also sits steadier on the table than the bark side. The bark side of the board becomes the decorated side.
Material A blank from straight-grained birch or common alder. Ash, maple or beech are also good. Make sure that the blank isn’t twisted.
Cutting boards are good to make from leftovers from other projects. For example, when splitting out stool seats from a half log, you can use the remaining outer parts for cutting boards.
Hew away thick parts with an axe. Smooth both sides with a drawknife in the shaving horse, or with a scrub plane at the workbench. Make sure the blank isn’t twisted, and is evenly thick. It can be slightly cupped. Seal the end grain with glue and dry the board for a couple of weeks.
Drill holes for hanging or for a handle. Use a brace and auger bits. When the tip of the bit has come through on the backside, stop, turn the blank over and drill from the other side. This avoids tearout and splinters at the edges. If you want to make a handle with a larger hole, use a fret saw to saw out the shape. Clean inside the hole using a knife with a narrow blade.
Use your legs and body to give power to your planing. Good ergonomics make the result even better. Cross-grain wood can splinter. You must either clean-cut with a flat gouge or lift the plane to stop the cut and work from the other direction.
Plane the surface with a smoothing plane or use a sharp drawknife. It is when you flatten the surface that you realize the importance of a quality, straight-grained and knot-free blank. Even so, planing a wide board can be a difficult task. Think of all the slöjd makers throughout history. Rise to the challenge!
Saw and carve the overall shape. Clean-carve all end-grain wood using the can opener grip. Chamfer the edges carefully. On the bark side, chip carve a cool pattern and paint with a thin coat of oil paint. Now you suddenly have something spectacular to cut your vegetables on.
I get asked a lot about starting and growing a small business, mostly from woodworkers who want to make the leap from corporate life to a diet of hot dogs and crescent rolls. So this post is mostly about business, with a little woodworking thrown in.
Right after I quit my job at Popular Woodworking in 2011, I was making about $10,000 a year from Lost Art Press. To make ends meet, I was teaching, freelancing and hustling. I think I was on the road about 18 weeks that year.
Then John and I got some great news. F&W Media (owner of Popular Woodworking) wanted to carry our entire line of books. And bam – F&W immediately became our largest customer.
Things went great for about a year, but then F&W missed a payment. The company was supposed to pay our invoices within 30 days. So John called F&W’s buyer to see what was up.
“Oooooh. Sorry. Meant to tell you that we switched everyone to 60 days,” the buyer said.
Sorry, but no, John explained. F&W’s buyer relented and said: “We’ll keep you on 30 days because of our close relationship.” Meanwhile, F&W placed another huge order of books.
But F&W hadn’t relented. They’d lied. After 30 more days, F&W was behind on multiple invoices. John called the buyer.
“Oooooooh, sorry. Management decided to put everyone on 120 days. No special treatment. Sorry.”
John demanded payment, and we stopped filling F&W’s orders until we could decide what to do.
In the meantime, trouble was brewing elsewhere.
When we sell our books to our retailers, we ask that they sell them within $3 of our retail price. That $3 wiggle room means that Highland Woodworking can knock $3 off the price and say our books are “on sale.” Lee Valley Tools has some flexibility with the currency transaction to Canadian dollars. And Tools for Working Wood can price our books at $27.68 so it looks like they use a magic pricing formula (maybe they do).
But you cannot sell our books for 50 or 70 percent off. (FYI, if you think this is price fixing, it’s not. It’s called Minimum Advertised Price and was approved by the Supreme Court about 2007.)
But that’s exactly what F&W started to do. They had “blowout” sales where they would knock 50 percent off a book’s price for a week.
We told them to stop. They apologized. Then they did it again.
John at our warehouse in Indianapolis. He is really quite ill in this photo.
I got the news of the sale while I was teaching a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. During lunch, I called F&W from Marc’s gravel parking lot. I told them we were done and to send all our unsold books back to us. We would pay the freight.
When I hung up, I thought: This is the phone call that will put us out of business.
I was wrong. Our other retailers noticed the skirmish with F&W and increased their orders with us. Some ordered more books. Others added titles they hadn’t carried before. By the end of the year, we were back in good shape, and I think I took home $20,000 from Lost Art Press that year.
Two lessons: Big business will try to bully you. They will try to decide when to pay you. They will decide how your pricing should work. They will ask for special treatment compared to your smaller customers.
Don’t give in. Once you start treating your customers differently, you are in for a world of drama and deceit. Whenever we get asked for special treatment, I simply remember what Jennie Alexander always said: “’No’ is a complete sentence.”
The second lesson: Pay your vendors on the day you get their invoice. When someone drops off work they did for us, they leave with a check. When an invoice arrives, John pays it the same day.
Vendors remember this. And if you’ve wondered how we kept so many of our products in stock during the pandemic shortages, you now have your answer.
My friends with MBAs roll their eyes when I talk this way. They argue that LAP should use the 30 days between when we get an invoice and have to pay it to invest our cash and make a little extra.
After I first wrote about Roubo-style workbenches in 2005, I was often asked: “Why do you hate the Euro-style workbench so much?”
The answer is that I don’t “hate” any style of workbench, chair, cabinet or chamber pot. The only things I truly despise are flimsy, mass-manufactured versions of workbenches, tools, chairs, pants, door knockers, toilet-seat covers or cabinets.
Poorly made, disposable goods are a drain on our world. I have nothing good to say about them.
Now when it comes to issues of taste, it’s not a matter of hate or love. There’s what I like, and there’s what you like. I respect and admire a lot of furniture that I would never, ever put in my home. Things like high-style, 18th-century American furniture, or a large swath of royal stuff that is beautifully made but leaves me dead inside.
When I respect something but wouldn’t own it, I’m going to bust its chops. Tease it. Make gentle fun of it. And so I should probably print the following sentence like a government health warning for cigarettes in every book I write.
Warning! Fancy, high-style, breeches-spats-and-Tally-Ho furniture will be admired – but mocked – for being a little bit too far up its own butt cheeks.
And, to be fair, it doesn’t bother me at all when people mock the furniture I like. Plain. Boring. Awkward. Weird. Odd. Ugly.
Sure, I see that. Bring it on.
With the publication of “The Stick Chair Book,” I’ve been asked: “Why do you hate Forest (Windsor) Chairs so much?”
I’m certain you can now predict my answer to this question.
I adore well-made Forest Chairs. I dig their weird, bulbous turnings. Their convoluted seat shapes. Their tarted-up carvings and backsplats. Their… oh you get it.
Dec. 13 is the last day place an order in our store and be reasonably assured that it will arrive before Christmas. We have almost everything in stock except for card scrapers. That is a Christmas Miracle after the last 20 months of uncertainty and shortages.
Now some unfortunate news: The price of steel has gone up twice since we introduced the Crucible Lump Hammers. And we are to the point where we either have to lower the quality (nope), discontinue the product (nope) or raise the price.
The price will increase on Jan. 1, 2022. I’m not sure how much it will go up because we are waiting on a quote for our custom-turned and drawknifed handles.
We don’t like to raise prices, but we also like staying in business. If you want to buy them at the current price, you have until Jan. 1.
