“I try to keep in mind that if I dropped dead tomorrow, all of my acrylic workplace awards would be in the trash the next day, and my job would be posted in the paper before my obituary.”
— Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, The New York Times, Jan. 26, 2019
Several people have asked for more construction details on the white oak stick chair I posted on the blog this morning. Many of the components and processes are similar to those in the Staked Armchair chapter I posted on the blog late last year.
There are, however, some important differences. This chair has an H-stretcher that is 12-1/2” from the underside of the seat. The resultant angles of the legs are also different than shown in the chapter. The resultant angles for both the front and rear legs is 22°.
Here is the cutting list:
Hope this helps you design your own chair. With this format of chair, no two chairs are alike.
— Christopher Schwarz
OK, so that’s not going to happen.
When Chris Williams came here in May 2018 to teach his first U.S. chairmaking class, he tried to help me pronounce a few Welsh proper nouns. This is what it sounded like (to me).
Chris Williams: “It’s ‘Blah-blah.’”
Me: “Blah-blah.”
Chris: “No, it’s ‘Blah-blah.’”
Me: “Blah-blah.”
Chris: “Um, no…. It’s….”
And repeat until we retreat to the Old Kentucky Bourbon Bar. I do not have an ear for Welsh, though it’s in my blood and in my brain. I know this because when I visited St Fagans with Chris in October 2018 I could feel the chairs there invade my brain and hands.
Since my visit there, I’ve built a number of chairs for customers, and each one inches toward what I absorbed while there.
The chair shown here might not look like much of a departure from what I’ve been building since 2003, but to me it looks like a different animal.
The legs and seat are thinner. I was surprised by how some of the components of the chairs at St Fagans were more delicate than photos or drawings suggest. These legs are 1-3/8” in diameter, and the seat is 1-3/8” thick.
The undercarriage is low. Stretchers are not de rigueur in Welsh chairs, as they are on American chairs and factory English chairs. But when the Welsh chairs have stretchers they tend to be near the floor. This might be by design or by the fact that the antique chairs have had their legs worn down by use. Either way, that is what I saw.
The wood in this new chair has more figure. I don’t seek out curly wood. In fact, I’ve spent my career sidestepping it. But when you examine the chairs at St Fagans, the seat in particular has a lot of character. This might be by design – seats with interlocked grain are stronger. Or by default – the only bits of wood that big were a bit squirrely
Either way, I embraced interlocked grain with this chair.
I’m not done with the changes to my chairs. I can make only so many alterations with each generation. But I am happy with where things are headed, and I am forever indebted to Chris Williams and the staff at St Fagans for helping me build Welsh, if not speak it.
— Christopher Schwarz
David Binnington Savage died on Friday, Jan. 18, after a hard-fought battle with cancer. David was an artist, writer, furniture maker and designer, and a father figure to me.
“Reluctant to give in, he fought to the end, and continued to talk of Rowden (his workshop and school),” his wife, Carol, wrote to me in an email. “A true artist to the core, he was even inspired by the new spring growth outside his window to draw a design in his notebook just days before passing.”
You can read more about David’s life and work in this profile by Kara Gebhart Uhl.
— Christopher Schwarz
I do not have the gene of a hoarder or a collector. The fewer things I own, the happier I am. So for the last eight years, a pile of wood has made me miserable.
The following is a cautionary tale for beginning woodworkers about getting stuck with the world’s largest horde of mostly useless scraps. Or, as I called it, my big pile of No. 2.
It started with a phone call from a close friend and colleague. An elderly friend of his with Alzheimer’s was selling his tool collection and all his lumber. Both the husband (who was the tool collector) and his wife were afraid they would get taken advantage of when selling the wood. It was many hundreds of board feet of wide cherry and walnut.
Would I take a look?
It was a three-hour drive, but I agreed to go. I called the elderly man before I went, and he got it in his head that I was going to buy all his wood. I honestly didn’t need a splinter of it, but I rented a truck and made the trip.
The wood filled his entire basement. And, as advertised, it was loads of wide cherry and walnut. The problem was that it had been planed to 3/4” and had warped during the last couple decades. As I sifted through the stacks I realized that most of it was No. 2 common (at best). Lots of sap, knots, unusable grain. About 20 percent of the stack was FAS (firsts and seconds).
The deal was all or nothing for the wood. I wanted to walk away, but I felt sorry for this old couple that was struggling with Alzheimer’s (which my grandmother had), and they really just needed this wood gone. So I made a kind offer.
The wife was insulted. She thought the wood was worth several multiples of what I offered.
They agreed to my price. But it was a miserable day because they thought they were getting screwed. And I knew I was getting screwed.
For the last eight years my friends and I have all picked at this pile of walnut and cherry. If you’ve taken a class at Lost Art Press, you probably have worked with some of my No. 2. I’ve given away lots of it to beginning woodworkers who wanted to make mistakes in inexpensive wood. It’s been used as backboards and interior bits in my case pieces.
Today, I loaded up the last 100 board feet of the stuff into a dumpster. Lucy and I are moving out of our house and above our storefront, and there’s no room for this garbage wood.
Good riddance and – I hope – never again.
— Christopher Schwarz