To develop a good eye for chairmaking (or spoon carving or alligator wrestling), you need to study as many chairs as possible. Do it until your eyes glaze over.
Here’s a set of nice “Spinnstuhls” compiled by Rudy Everts in Bavaria. These so-called sewing chairs are from southern Germany and the Alps. These chairs are interesting to me in several ways. Some have a traditional undercarriage for chairs from this region – radical rake and splay, legs that taper to the floor, battens to thicken the seat – but some do not.
Check out the bent legs on a couple examples. A good guess is these came from a bent section of the tree, perhaps a branch or from the root section of a trunk.
Also, the variety of uppercarriages is fascinating. Some are joined, some look sawn from solid and some look bent.
Look through the gallery. Zoom in. Class dismissed.
If you didn’t get a chance to purchase one of the Crucible curved card scrapers, you can make your own with a dry grinder and an existing card scraper. It takes about 30 minutes.
Download and print out the following template. It’s a hand-drawn version of Chris Williams’s scraper, which is where our design started.
Cut it out and affix it to your card scraper with the help of spray adhesive. Or make a cardboard template and trace its shape on your scraper with a permanent marker.
At your grinder, set the tool rest to 0° – parallel to the floor. Dress the wheel of your grinder (we use an #80-grit wheel, but a #60 or #100 will also do) so it has a slight convex shape. This convexity in the wheel makes the scraper easier to shape.
Get a bucket of water and put it by the grinder.
(Hey wait, where are the step photos? I’m in a hotel room that’s 400 miles from my shop. You are going to have to use your imagination.)
Place the scraper on the tool rest and start grinding the excess metal away. Don’t work on one part of the scraper for more than a few seconds. Keep moving around the perimeter. After 10 or 15 seconds, try to pinch the scraper with a finger and thumb. If….
… you can pinch the scraper with no pain, continue to grind.
… your fingers reflexively jump away, cool the scraper in your water bucket.
… you smell bacon, also cool the scraper in the water bucket.
Once you have ground down to your line, you will have become pretty good at grinding flat shapes – congrats. Now you need to remove the grinder marks from the edges.
Use a block of wood to hold the scraper at 90° on a coarse diamond stone and stone the edges. Remove all the scratches from the grinder. Then move up to a #1,000-grit waterstone (or soft Arkansas) and then up to a polishing stone. Then you can proceed with normal scraper-sharpening procedures.
This is exactly how I made all of our prototypes. I promise that you will become emotionally involved with your scraper after putting all the work into it, and you might not ever want to buy one of ours.
You can now purchase the Williams Welsh Card Scraper in the Crucible store. It is $20 plus shipping and is available for immediate shipment.
The scraper is named after Chris Williams, a Welsh chairmaker who first showed us this shape in 2018. While there are many custom scraper shapes out there for specialty work (especially scraping mouldings) Chris’s scraper was the first shape we’ve seen that is ideal for scraping both flat and curved surfaces.
We think it’s a huge improvement compared to the typical square-cornered rectangular scraper sold today. Here’s why:
The gentle curves of its cutting edges mean that you don’t have to bend the tool with your thumbs to scrape a flat surface – the curve is built-in. That makes our scraper much easier to use. (Side note: many woodworkers with arthritis who cannot use a rectangular scraper report that they can use our scraper.) Here are the tool’s other features.
It is made from 1095 spring steel that has been hardened and tempered to a Rockwell (C) hardness of 48 to 51. This hardness makes it easy to turn a hook with a standard burnisher (though carbide is always the superior choice for a burnisher) and the hook lasts plenty long.
The faces are polished and blued for rust-resistance.
The scraper is cut to shape using waterjet – both for precision and to preserve the hardness of the steel. Then the tool’s edges are hand ground and polished in Nicholasville, Ky., to make the tool easy to set up and maintain.
The scraper comes with a magnet, which acts as a heat sink while scraping, making the tool comfortable to use for long periods.
The tool is supplied with a heavy paper envelope that is perfect for storing the scraper, protecting its edges while it’s sitting in your tool chest or cabinet.
Sharpening the Williams Welsh Card Scraper is as simple as sharpening a rectangular tool. (We’ve prepared a tutorial here.) In fact, I think our tool is a bit easier to sharpen than a flat-edged scraper, especially when stoning the edges.
Like all Crucible tools, the Williams Welsh Card Scraper is made entirely in the United States with domestic materials. You can purchase one here.
Note: In the next day or two, we will release our new card scraper over at Crucible Tool. In preparation for the release, I am preparing a lot of instructional material, including a video and a photo tutorial of how I sharpen a card scraper. You might find this helpful. You might not.
I’ve never met two people who sharpen their card scrapers using identical methods. As a result, there is more misinformation about sharpening card scrapers than sharpening any other woodworking tool. And that is saying a lot.
The following technique is based on 20 years of daily practice and a decade of research into historical methods. I won’t bore you with the spreadsheets and the bibliography. Instead, I’m going to explain the process using as few words as possible.
For those of you who learn using video information, I’ve also made a short film that will be released soon.
Step 1: Remove any Existing Burr or Hook The first step for me is always – always – to burnish the faces of the scraper to eliminate any existing burr or hook. The burr could be the result of manufacturing. Or it is the remnants of the hook on the tool you’ve been using.
Place the scraper down flat near the edge of the workbench. Press the burnisher dead flat on the scraper. Press down – hard! – and glide the burnisher across the face of the tool. Five or six good strokes will do. Repeat on the other three faces.
Step 2: Stone the Narrow Edges To get perfect 90° corners, use a block of wood as guide and stone the long edges of the tool. Shift the block of wood around so you don’t wear a groove in your stone. Use the sharpening stone that you use to begin your typical honing process (a #1,000-grit waterstone or a soft Arkansas oilstone, for example). Seven or 10 strokes should be enough to stone away any extra metal. (Note: There is no need to hone the short ends of the scraper as these don’t cut.)
If, however, this is a new scraper, you might need to stone the edges on a coarse stone for a few minutes to ensure the edges are dead 90° to the faces and consistent. Future stonings will go faster once the tool is set up.
Repeat this process with the block of wood on a polishing stone, such as a #5,000-grit waterstone or a hard Arkansas oilstone. Look closely and continue the work until the edge is consistently polished. The first time you do this on your tool it might take a few minutes. Subsequent sharpenings will require only 10 strokes or so.
Step 3: Burnish the Faces Wipe a little oil on the scraper and the burnisher. Place the scraper flat on the bench again and repeat the same burnishing process you used to remove the burr. Remember: Use hard downward pressure (yet the burnisher should still glide across the face of the tool).
This burnishing polishes the face of the scraper (much the way a hard bone will burnish soft wood) and push a little steel up on the tool’s edge. This step improves the durability of your hook and makes the hook easier to turn.
Step 4: Burnish the Edges Secure the scraper in a vise with one edge upright. Wipe a little oil on both the scraper and the burnisher to make your work easier. Hold the burnisher parallel to the floor and burnish the edge with moderate downward pressure (a bit less than you used on the faces). Five or six smooth strokes will do.
Tilt the burnisher about 5° to the right and burnish one corner of the scraper with five or six smooth strokes. Run your fingers up the scraper to feel if you have turned a hook. The hook is slight and subtle, much like the burr you turn on the backside of a chisel when sharpening it.
If the hook is not there, repeat with more strokes with the burnisher tilted at 5° to the right until a hook appears. Try adding more downward pressure to see if that helps.
When you have a hook, tilt the burnisher 5° to the left and repeat the burnishing process for the other corner. When you have two good hooks, flip the scraper over in the vise and repeat Step 4 for the second edge.
Clean the scraper with an oily rag and get to work. To improve the longevity of your burr, store the tool in a cardboard or paper envelope. The hook is as fragile as the edge on a paring chisel.
Peter Follansbee’s fantastic and sprawling tome on early American woodworking is now available for pre-publication ordering here. The book is $49 and will ship in May. Customers who order before the publication’s release date will receive a free pdf of the book at checkout.
“Joiner’s Work” took eight years for Peter to complete, and it shows. Not only does it cover a lot of haircuts and wardrobe changes in his step photos, it also covers an enormous swath of Peter’s work. For the last eight years, Peter has been documenting his work at the bench and the many variations and iterations of the typical pieces from a 17th-century joinery shop.
As a result, Peter illustrates not just one joined chest, but more than a dozen variations, all with different carving patterns, slight joinery variations and different arrangements of rails, muntins and panels. It is a visual feast and I spent many hours just digesting the carved panels.
If you’re new to 17th-century furniture, here’s what you need to know: It’s neither dark nor boring. Instead, it’s a riot of geometric carvings and bright colors – all built upon simple constructions that use rabbets, nails and mortise-and-tenon joints. Even if you don’t fancy yourself a period furniture maker, there is a lot in here to learn.
If you like green woodworking, “Joiner’s Work” is doctoral thesis on processing furniture-shaped chunks of lumber from the tree using and axe, froe, hatchet and brake. If you are into carving, Peter dives into deep detail on how he festoons his pieces with carvings that appear complex but are remarkably straightforward. And if you love casework, “Joiner’s Work” is a lesson on the topic that you won’t find in many places. Peter’s approach to the work, which is based on examining original pieces and endless shop experimentation, is a liberating and honest foil to the world of micrometers and precision routing.
The book features six projects, starting with a simple box with a hinged lid. Peter then shows how to add a drawer to the box, then a slanted lid for writing. He then plunges into the world of joined chests and their many variations, including those with a paneled lid and those with drawers below. And he finishes up with a fantastic little bookstand.
Construction of these projects is covered in exquisite detail in both the text and hundreds of step photos. Peter assumes you know almost nothing of 17th-century joinery, and so he walks you through the joints and carving as if it were your first day on the job. Plus he offers ideas for historical finishes.
What Peter doesn’t provide, however, is detailed construction drawings of each piece with a cutting list and list of supplies you might need. As you quickly learn in the opening chapters, the size of the projects (and their components) are based on what you can harvest from the tree.
There’s immense flexibility in this method of work. But to help keep you oriented, Peter provides pencil sketches (made by the wonderful Dave Fisher) that explain the anatomy of each project, plus rough sizes that will help you plan out your work in the woods and at the workbench.
If you are accustomed to CAD renderings, this will feel unfamiliar. But if you are brave, I think you’ll find it a freeing way to build these pieces (which frankly look weird when built using contemporary precision techniques).
Throughout the book you’ll have the voice of Follansbee to guide you. If you’ve ever heard him speak, you will instantly recognize the rhythm of the language and the dry humor. We took great pains to retain Peter’s voice in this book (I think we succeeded).
“Joiner’s Work” is a massive tome, coming in at 264 pages in an 8-1/2″ x 11″ format. The text and full-color images are printed on coated #80 paper. The pages are bound to create a permanent book. We sew the signatures then glue and tape the spine with fibrous tape. The pages are then wrapped by heavy hardbound covers that are covered in cotton cloth. The whole package is wrapped in a #100 dust jacket that is coated with a supermatte laminate to resist tearing and long-term wear.
And, of course, all of this is done in the United States.
