Lately, I’ve been thinking, “Why not grab some of this internet sponsorship cash?” And so we have taken on a sponsor – the Malodorous Rubber Mallet Co. I’ve agreed to use the company’s mallets in social media photos and will be impartially reviewing the mallet against all other mallets ever made in this dimension (and others) in the coming weeks.
All I can say at this point is that this mallet is so good that you can smell it coming. It offers the Perfume of Percussion. The Whiff of Whacking. The Bouquet of Beating.
This week I’ve thrown myself into production for Crucible Tool along with help from Megan Fitzpatrick and Brendan Gaffney. Today, Megan and I finished up 600 card scrapers and sent them to the warehouse. They should be for sale by the end of the week – so take this as fair warning.
We have a new jig for machining the scrapers in a CNC mill. This speeds the process and eliminates the abrasive polishing of the edges. That’s a win for everyone’s lungs (and fire suppression equipment). Abrading metal blows. And burns.
Speaking of abrasives, during the last month, we’ve redesigned the way we make hammer heads to reduce – and almost eliminate – the abrasive grinding processes to make the heads for our lump hammers.
I know that some of you simply want your hammers and don’t care about how they’re made. If that’s you, know that we should have a batch of hammers for sale next week. You can now go back to your cat videos.
For those interested in how your tools are made, here’s what we’ve been up to. When we started making the hammers we machined the heads and then had five abrasive processes to finish them. We used three grits on the flat faces and two on the striking faces.
With the magic of changing the tool paths, we’re down to one abrasive process. We’re hoping to eliminate that one as well and just have a little power buffing.
The heads won’t look different to the naked eye. All the facets are the same. The striking faces are the same dome shape. But the surfaces look a wee bit different under a loupe. I think they look better.
Note: After five minutes of hard use, all our hammers look about the same.
All these changes will make the heads easier to make. And it’s safer for the machine operators. So thanks for your patience (like you had a choice).
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Before you email John and Meghan: No, we’re not working on dividers. That tool has been suspended until it can be redesigned.
I try not to call my chairs “Welsh stick chairs” for several reasons. I don’t live in Wales. I don’t have access to the craggy timbers used for the seats. And I don’t have hedgerows where I can harvest sticks, armbows and crest rails.
You might also be thinking: “Yeah, and you’re not Welsh – Herr Schwarz.”
My opinion: I don’t consider blood to be the sole requirement to become a member of a community. People can be accepted into – or rejected from – a community despite their DNA. I’ve got a fair amount of English, Welsh and Irish blood (47 percent), but that gives me no claim to the Welsh stick chair – or any other.
I’m an American. I’ve lived here my entire life. And my design aesthetic, wood choices, tool selection and goals are typically American (for better or worse).
And so I’ve decided to describe my chairs as “American Welsh Stick Chairs.” To my mind, this fits in with the long American tradition of taking furniture forms from the U.K., Europe and elsewhere and adapting them to our tastes and our timbers.
We took U.K. styles such as Jacobean (1603–1625), William and Mary (1690–1730), Queen Anne (1702–1760), Georgian (1714–1830) and Neo-Classical (1750–1830) and taught them an American accent. This continued into the later 19th century with both the English Victorian and Arts & Crafts styles.
When all those styles landed here, we altered them to suit us. (Note: This is not a uniquely American practice. Locals have always played with imported styles.) In many cases (but not all) Americans tended to simplify the styles. We removed ornamentation. We used local woods (or exotics).
In my heart, I think that’s what I’ve done with my beloved antique Welsh stick chairs. I use New World woods, because this is what is available. Getting timbers with swirled grain for the seat is a struggle for me (so far), and so I use what I have – street trees, mostly. But they don’t compare visually to the Welsh ones.
Because I have access to dang-straight wood, I make my sticks, legs and stretchers so they follow the straight grain. A old Welsh chairmaker might have used a branch for strength in these cases, and the branch might have had some wiggle to it.
I’ve also tried to lighten the older forms, which I consider both an American trait (historically) and a modern one (in general).
And so for me, the term “American Welsh Stick Chair” fits. “American” because it was made in the Americas. “Welsh” because that’s the tradition it was derived from. “Stick” because sticks. And “Chair” because I don’t make love spoons.
Welsh stick chairs turn up in some of the strangest places, including the Hudson Valley of New York.
Today on my drive home from Fine Woodworking LIVE (the event was wonderful), I was invited to stop by the shop of John Porritt, a woodworker who trained in the U.K., has made many traditional chairs and now lives and works in a small town in Upstate New York.
While a lot of Porritt’s work is in the restoration of old chairs and tools, he also builds new English and Welsh chairs using traditional methods. In fact, John Brown praised one of Porritt’s Welsh chairs in one of his Good Woodworking columns in 1995 (which is about as good as it gets for chair praise).
Porritt’s shop is scenically located behind his 1700s-era house and tucked next to a swift-running stream. It’s an old barn with a big front door, one window and plenty of space for Porritt’s band saw, workbench and all the old wood he brought over from the U.K. when he and his American wife moved to New York in 2008.
In addition to being stocked with impressive stacks of old wood (some of it 300 years old), Porritt’s shop is full of chairs he has built and collected over the years. I could write a blog entry about each of these chairs – Porritt has fantastic taste in vernacular chairs – but I didn’t have time to take notes as he described each one.
So you’ll have to settle for some shallow descriptions that I hope are accurate.
One of the first chairs he showed me was this vernacular American Windsor. We see few to none of these sorts of chairs in the Midwest, so it was a delight to look it over. The wide sweep of the chair’s crest made it quite comfortable. The saddling of the seat was unusual. It’s wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was nothing my buttocks had felt before – the seat’s pommel was longer than is typical.
Also fascinating is this chair. It is remarkably similar to some of the earliest known English Windsors that were advertised for sale in 1725. The seat and the way it is saddled is astonishing. It has been heavily sculpted above and below to create a seat that looks like it is thin and has been bent like a modern Eames chair. But it’s a solid piece of fairly thick wood.
Inside Porritt’s house is his favorite chair, a Welsh stick chair that presses all of my buttons. The legs are slightly curved outward. The armbow is made from a branch that was resawn and then scarfed together with a long diagonal joint. The seat reflects the shape of the armbow. And the undercarriage is similar to some chairs I’ve seen at St Fagans.
But it’s the overall effect of the chair that is what’s lovely. Porritt says it’s the last thing he sees every night before he goes to bed and it makes him happy.
Back in the workshop, this little Welsh chair is also a looker. The rake of the spindles, the shape of the arm and the details of the crest are some of the highlights of the chair. (You’re going hear a lot more about this chair in the future as I purchased it from Porritt.)
Here you can see two of Porritt’s chairs on either side of his wood-burning stove in his shop. His chairs sit very well and harness a lot of the details of Welsh chairs that I love. His chairs reminded me a lot of Gareth Irwin’s chair that I saw in my visit to Wales last year.
Here’s another Welsh chair that is on the small side. I immediately assumed the chair had once been a comb-back and had suffered a comb-ectomy. Porritt said he was 90 percent certain that was not the case. He’d found bits of the original red paint lodged in the top of the chair’s sticks. The patination on this chair was quite lovely.
Finally, this Windsor chair that Porritt thinks was made by someone who also made ladderbacks. Porritt says many of the chair’s details, including the shaved components and the way the spindles were made, suggested a ladderback chairmaker had produced this chair.
I took a lot more photos, but I need to get to sleep. I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about Porritt in the coming months – he gives talks to organizations and schools on his craft – and we might even be able to lure him to Covington to teach a class next year.
This weekend I’m at Fine Woodworking LIVE and, to be honest, it’s a tad weird. After being in the other camp for 22 years, it’s disconcerting. I feel like I’m crashing their party.
It’s all in my head. Everyone here is as sweet as milk, and I’m sure it will go fine. (Unless the FWW staff tells me I was brought on to be Christian Becksvoort’s manicurist and astrologer during the event.)
The drive today through Upstate New York was stunning – I got to see Spring occur in reverse. And it reminded me of a fateful drive I took on the same highway 13 years ago when John and I were starting this yet-to-be-named publishing company.
We were racking our brains for a good name for the company. I’m averse to naming things after me. I don’t have a big enough ego to shoulder that load. So “Hoffman & Schwarz Ltd.” was right out. Plus, it sounded like a German audio equipment company.
One of the other contenders was “Tried & True Press” (this was before Tried & True finishing products – I hope). It’s a good name, but I was taught to avoid clichés like the plague.
Another: “Said & Done Publications.” I like this one, but it didn’t have any connection to woodworking. If you’d like to have it, it’s yours.
“Straightedge Publishing.” The problem with this name was it could also be the parent company of a skateboarding magazine. Or a publisher of books for people who don’t consume alcohol or drugs.
And then there was “Sawset Redemption LLC.” (OK, I’m lying and I’ve had two beers.)
In any case, 13 years ago I remember muttering to myself during that long drive when “Lost Art Press” just popped out of my mouth. Nervous that I would forget it, I grabbed a pen and a business card and wrote the name down while using my steering wheel as a desk. This is illegal to do in 36 states, FYI.
So. Good day.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. If you are at Fine Woodworking LIVE, please do stop by and say hello. I’ll be the guy in the Prism Conference Room scraping Steve Latta’s corns.
This weekend I’m at