The Lost Art Press storefront will be open – as per usual – on Oct. 12, and the topic of the day’s free lecture will be a (hopefully inspirational) look at my favorite stick chairs – and not just Welsh ones.
For the last 16 years I’ve collected photos from auctions and old books that guided my understanding of staked chairs and assisted me in designing my own versions. This presentation will tour the highlights of my image collection and will be an open forum for you to ask questions about the designs as well.
(Before you ask, I cannot post this presentation on the internet. Many of these images are copyrighted; publishing them would violate those copyrights. So if you want to see the pretty pictures, you’ll have to visit.)
The presentation will begin at 2 p.m. and will last about an hour.
We open our storefront to the public on the second Saturday of every month, and it runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Yes, we will sell you a book or a tool during that time, but most of our energy on those days is devoted to answering woodworking questions, demonstrating techniques and drinking coffee. You are welcome (even encouraged) to bring your family, your dog or any bit of woodworking you are struggling with.
Our neighborhood is also an outstanding place to eat brunch on that day. We recommend Otto’s, Commonwealth, Coppin’s and Libby’s (to name a few). We also recommend you stop by the Covington Farmer’s Market (9 a.m. to noon) at the approach to the Roebling Bridge. Great baked goods, salsa and produce.
In our competitive society, the winners get to name the things. This is true with battles, large social movements and even furniture styles.
I think there is value in trying to think of these issues from the perspective of others – the losers, if you will. When growing up in Arkansas, some teachers taught us about the Civil War. Others taught us about the War of Northern Aggression.
If you think divergent taxonomy couldn’t apply to furniture, I disagree. About 15 years ago I worked with a guy who studied Kentucky Style furniture. When I suggested that the pieces looked like Western Shaker furniture with some simple inlay, he became testy.
“The Shakers,” he said, “were a weird religious cult and shouldn’t be remembered or celebrated. It’s cult furniture.”
Ouch. But it made me think.
So while on a walk this morning I devised alternative names for popular historical furniture styles. I know that some sensitive readers will think this list is political. It’s not. Trying to see things from another person’s perspective is an intellectually honest way of examining your own beliefs.
See if you can recognize your favorite furniture style in this list:
Colonizer Furniture
Fundamentalist Furniture
Mall Stall Furniture
Zealot Furniture
Farmer Furniture
Industrialist furniture
Hopeless Idealist Furniture
Slave Owner Furniture
Poverty Furniture
Royal Excess Furniture
Marketing Department Furniture
Historical Revisionist Furniture
War Furniture
Table Saw Furniture
Patronage Furniture
Desperation Furniture
Social Climber Furniture
Price Point Furniture
These are probably not good book titles. (Though I’d buy the books. Peter Follansbee said this about my library: “It looks like you buy any book with the word ‘furniture’ in the title.”)
During my 23 years of working in group shops, I’ve seen a lot of oddball behavior. Most of it is run-of-the-mill laziness – never emptying the dust collector, putting your rotting food waste in the bench room garbage cans and never ever returning the router wrenches to their designated nail. (Honest, I once found the wrenches on the back of the toilet.)
The weirdest thing I’ve observed, however, is straight-up duplicity when it comes to tools.
Ever since I could afford good tools, I’ve bought them. And I make no apologies for spending more than $6.37 on a block plane. When you own nice tools and work in a group shop, however, people give you crap. They’ll sing the praises of the plastic-handled Greenlee chisels they bought in a dollar bin at a meat market in Tijuana. Or the paring chisel they made out of a bumper of a Ford F-150. Or the prybar made from the springs of the aforementioned F-150. Or the tack rags they cooked up themselves.
These are all true examples.
What I’m here to say is that most of these guys are blowing hot air. When they needed a bevel gauge that held its setting, they were the first to snitch my Vesper bevel from my tool chest.
And so today, as I was hanging up a new (actually very old) Plumb 16 oz. hammer for shop use, I thought about the most-borrowed tools in my chest. These are the tools that the cheapskates borrow constantly.
I can’t think of a higher endorsement.
My Chris Vesper sliding bevels and squares. People rail against the prices but they greedily swipe all of my Vesper stuff. I am constantly returning his tools to my chest (and I’m now thinking about a lock).
My Starrett 6” and 12” combination squares. Sorry that your plastic home center combo square sucks a trailer hitch.
My Lie-Nielsen smoothing plane. Wait, I thought you said that all handplanes could be tuned to an equally high level?
My Tite-Mark gauges. I guess you wanted a clean baseline for those dovetails.
My 16 oz. hammer. You might as well borrow my underwear, you savage.
My Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw. Is your Dozuki’s blade still bent?
Sterling Toolworks Dovetail Marker. I thought you marked your dovetails by eye….
Blue Spruce 16 oz. round mallet. Ah right, round-head mallets are for carvers.
Veritas Shooting Plane. I thought it was too expensive and just a toy?
My card scraper. Again with the underwear!
I could go on, but you get the point. Good tools cost money. And they are apparently worth the ridicule when you borrow them.
I’ve built three chairs during the last three weeks and, in the words of “Sesame Street,” “one of these things is not like the other.”
The first two chairs are right out of the forthcoming “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” and are for customers and to show my students what a finished chair can look like. But when it came time to build this third chair last week, I didn’t have a plan for it.
I stared at my parts for a bit and then did what I tell all my students: Work with what you got.
I had a partial seat with some odd mortises bored into it from when I was demonstrating how to calculate compound angles without trigonometry. The armbow was a leftover – the lesser son of a batch of five oak arms I made when roughing out some parts. The legs had some defects that had to be removed by tapering the legs more than usual. And I didn’t have sticks or a crest.
If this were a cabinet, I’d draw up a careful plan in CAD to ensure that the oddball parts would fit into a cohesive whole. But when building an outlier of a chair, sketches don’t help me much. It’s all by feel. (And sometimes I get the feeling I should dump the parts in the grill.)
The legs looked to me like they needed some stretchers – they were thinner than usual. But I didn’t feel it needed a full H-stretcher. So I used an old undercarriage design where you put stretchers between the front and back legs only. Nothing goes left to right.
I know: What the heck? Why would someone do this? Here’s my take. Stretchers that run front to back help brace the undercarriage when some naughty boy tips the chair onto its back legs.
So what does the medial stretcher (which runs left to right) do? I use that stretcher to put the whole undercarriage in tension so I can use legs with more rake and splay than usual. The legs of this experimental chair, however, don’t have as much splay as on my typical designs. So I omitted the medial stretcher.
On the sticks, I decided to put five long sticks in the back and omit two of the short sticks. It used exactly the same amount of raw material as a regular four-stick chair. Why did I do this? I like the negative space created by the gap between the short sticks and long sticks. I used to do this on chairs many years ago and felt like revisiting it.
The five-stick back is just as comfortable as the four-stick back. No, the center stick doesn’t violate your spinal column.
The crest is also a step backward. I tried four different crest rails – they are like trying on chapeaux whilst at the haberdasher, said me, never. After some struggles I conjured up an old crest design that added to the hourglass shape of the chair.
After the whole thing was together I showed it to Megan Fitzpatrick and my wife, Lucy. I was afraid I’d made a dog’s dinner. They both said it was one of the nicest chairs I’ve made.
Today I finished it up with satin lacquer. This oak has a beautiful grey cast and the lacquer (which is more water white) will preserve that color. An oil and wax finish would obliterate the grey cast with their amber tendencies.
In all, I can say the chair is a wonderful sitter (for both tall and short people). I’m a bit bemused that I used long-discarded design elements to finish it up. But that is what these parts demanded, I guess.
The chair is now sold. This chair doesn’t have a home, and so I’m selling it as a prototype – $800 plus actual shipping costs. If you are interested in it, send me a note through my personal website.
There are a handful of spots left in three of my classes – all of them in exotic locales (i.e., not Covington, Ky.). Here are the details:
There is one spot open in my class in London next month on building an American Welsh Stick Armchair. The class runs Oct. 21-25 and is being held at the London Design & Engineering UTC, Docklands Campus. The class is being held immediately before the London International Woodworking Festival, also at the London Design & Engineering UTC. This would be an epic woodworking vacation.
Immediately after the festival (Oct. 28-30), I am teaching a class on a Staked High Stool, a short course that is designed to introduce woodworkers to compound-angle joinery and staked construction. The course is three days, so we’ll be going much deeper into the topic as this is typically a two-day course. There are five spots open in that class.
Down in Florida, my class on building a Japanese Sliding Lid Box at the Florida School of Woodwork has a few spots open. This is a two-day class (Feb. 22-23) so you’ll have plenty of time for the beach.
My 2020 classes at the Lost Art Press storefront are all sold out, but we still have some spots open in other classes. You can see those classes and what is available here.
Apologies for the commercial post on a Sunday morning. I don’t teach much, and I get nagged quite a bit about it. So I want to make sure everyone knows when there are spots open.
