Here’s a short video that shows how to use the Crucible Chairpanzee to work with photographs of furniture to create simple drilling settings for the compound-angle mortises.
In the video, I show how to convert a chair’s “rake” and “splay” into “sightline” and “resultant” angles using the Chairpanzee. Why would you want to do this? It makes the drilling much easier.
If you have only the rake and splay, then you usually use two sliding bevel tools to drill the mortise – one for rake and the other for splay – and have to obey both tools as you drill. It’s do-able, of course, as I worked that way for years.
By using trigonometry (or the Chairpanzee) to convert things to sightline and resultant angles, you have to obey only one sliding bevel tool. It makes drilling compound angles as easy as possible.
Here’s the video:
There are other ways to use the Chairpanzee. You can use it to design new chairs, stools and tables from scratch. I’ll make a video showing that process sometime in the near future.
The Chairpanzee is available in our store for $16 plus $4 domestic shipping anywhere in the United States.
One of the (many) barriers to making staked furniture or chairs is wrapping your head around the compound-angle geometry. And then figuring out how to execute it at the bench.
The new Crucible Chairpanzee ($16 plus shipping) does the trigonometry for you, allowing you to translate rake and splay into sightlines (which create your layout lines) and resultant angles (which is the setting of your sliding bevel).
This allows you to easily design new pieces of furniture with compound angles and to replicate angles from existing pieces of furniture from photos.
The Chairpanzee is a clever sliding calculator that is printed and assembled in the United States. Here’s how we use the Chairpanzee on a chair design (though it can be used for tables, stools or any other piece of staked furniture).
To calculate the “sightline:”
1. On the underside of the seat, draw a line connecting the two front leg mortises (as shown above). This is the baseline.
2. Move the calculator’s slider to the desired splay angle in the top window.
3. Next to the lower window, select the desired rake angle. The number shown in the adjacent window is the sightline angle.
4. Draw the sightline angle on the underside of the seat using a protractor. The 0° on the protractor should be directly on your baseline.
5. Repeat steps 1 through 4 for the rear legs.
To calculate the “resultant:”
6. Confirm that the calculator’s slider is set to the desired splay angle in the top window.
7. Next to the lower window, select the desired rake angle. The number shown in the adjacent window is the resultant angle.
8. Set your sliding bevel tool to the resultant angle and place it directly on the sightline on the underside of the seat.
9. Drill your mortise. Keep the drill bit perfectly parallel to the blade of the sliding bevel.
The Chairpanzee is available for immediate shipment. We hope that some of our retailers will also carry this product for our international customers.
In the coming week I’ll post a video that shows how it’s used.
One of the many “COVID chairs” I’ve built during the last seven months.
With woodworking schools opening across the country, we are asked almost every day when we will resume classes here. Here’s the deal.
We plan to wait until there is a safe vaccine for COVID-19. There are several reasons for that decision.
Classes here can be physically strenuous because of the handwork. Students sweat, huff and puff a lot as they saw, plane and chop. Doing that work with a mask is misery, and the heavy breathing is ideal for spreading the virus.
Our workshop is compact. Keeping people at a safe distance is difficult, even with small classes.
Our students come from all over the world. Some of our students are older and therefore more vulnerable to the virus.
My mother and Lucy’s mom (both local) are both particularly vulnerable to the virus, and we see them several times a week.
If anyone got sick (or worse) at one of our classes, Megan Fitzpatrick and I would never forgive ourselves.
As soon as a vaccine is readily available, we will open our doors for classes and a long-overdue open day. If you want to be among the first people informed about classes, the best way is to subscribe to our blog. Simply enter your email in the box near the top right of this page by the headline: “Subscribe to the blog via email.” You won’t get spam. We don’t sell people’s addresses or have sponsors/advertisers. You’ll just get an email every time there is a new entry.
We look forward to having some new faces around here. I know Megan must be sick of me and my prattling on about chair design and marsupial trivia.
Until then, stay safe and we hope to see you soon.
One of my biggest struggles so far with “The Stick Chair Book” is that I can’t build a chair the same way twice.
When I start to build a chair, I have plans and patterns. But it takes 5 minutes for those plans to get pushed aside. I pick up a stick for the stretchers and note the arrow-straight grain. Thanks to that, the stretchers don’t have to be a full 1-3/8” square; I can go smaller. The wood for the arm, however, is some fast-growth stuff and feels a little weak. I should beef up its thickness.
It goes from there. I get an idea for how to make the gutter between the saddled seat and spindle deck crisper. Yeah, I’m going to do that on this chair. The person who will get this chair has a round back, and he likes to lean back in chairs – hard. I’ve watched him do it. This chair needs an extra medial stretcher. And I’m going to pitch the back sticks an extra 5° backward to discourage him from tipping back on the chair’s back legs.
Soon, the chair looks nothing like my drawing. But it’s the right chair.
So how do I explain this process to the readers of the book? My plan is to present the chair plans as drawn for an average-size person with a mid-range BMI (body-mass index) and typical popliteal height. Basically, someone who doesn’t exist outside a Pringles’ consumer group study in Ames, Iowa.
And then say: OK, now you (the builder) need to think about the sitter. Are they short? Lower the seat height to avoid cutting off the bloodstream in their legs. Do they have a tall back? You need to increase the length of the back sticks to cradle the shoulders. Do they have long arms? Consider lowering the arm height by 1/2” or so. Do they have a massive hinder? Add stretchers. Wedge them. Widen the seat.
And on and on.
Also, do what I do. Build your first chairs using cheap wood – poplar and red oak in my case. Poplar for the seat and arms; oak for the other parts. Build them without fussing. Hell, don’t even saddle the seat. It might cost you a day of work and $30 in wood. But it will give you $1,000 worth of answers. Especially when you (and the person it is intended for) sits in it.
Then cut the stupid thing up and use the parts for stools. Funny, I’ve built a lot of stools.
The original price was $550; the sale price is $250 plus $15 shipping anywhere in the United States. We have about 500 copies of the book in stock. Once it is gone, it is gone forever.
Measuring 12-1/4″ wide x 17-1/4″ tall by almost 2-1/4″ thick, “Roubo on Furniture” is the largest and most luxurious book we have printed since Lost Art Press was founded in 2007.
The text is printed on #100 Mohawk Superfine paper, the finest domestic paper available today. To match the fine paper, the images and plates are printed in full color at a linescreen few presses can achieve.
The result is a level of detail and clarity rarely seen in a modern book.
The book’s signatures are sewn, casebound and reinforced with a fiber tape that will ensure the binding will outlast us all. The hardbound boards are covered in a beautifully printed pattern with a cotton cloth cover on the spine. The spine is then debossed in gold and black.
The entire book comes in a custom-made slipcase covered in a complementary-colored cotton cloth.
You can read all about the contents of the book here. And here.
While we are discontinuing the deluxe edition, we will continue to offer the standard “Roubo on Furniture” ($57) for as long as we possibly can – just like the rest of our books. Our goal is that the information will always be available.
Why Sell Off the Deluxe Books? When we went to press with the deluxe version of “Roubo on Furniture,” we wanted to give it a price tag that was reasonable for a book that is over the top in quality. The initial printing quotes put the retail price at $1,000. The only way to get the price lower was to double the print run to 1,000 and take a smaller profit on each sale.
We decided to drain the bank account and take the risk. For the most part, things worked out. We sold about 400 copies, which inched us into the black. But during the last few years, sales haven’t covered the costs of storing the books.
Most publishers would pulp the books, or sell them to a discount bookseller. Instead, we’re going to put them on sale for woodworkers.
The deluxe “Roubo on Furniture” is the nicest book I’ve ever worked on. I still pick it up every week or so to look something up, and I am thrilled by the crisp printing and the beautiful binding. I don’t regret what we did.
And I hope you don’t ever regret missing out on this.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. This offer is available for U.S. customers. If you live outside the U.S., we recommend you use a mail-forwarding service, which can receive the book and ship it to you much more economically than we can.
