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:
1-Seat 1-3/8 x 16 x 20
4-Legs 1-3/8 x 1-3/8 x 20
2-Side stretchers 1 x 1 x 20 (stretchers taper to 5/8 through-tenons at the ends)
1-Medial stretcher 1 x 1 x 18 (stretcher tapers to 5/8 blind tenons at the ends)
1-Crest 1-3/4 x 5 x 15 (curve cut from solid)
2-Arms 3/4 x 7 x 22 (cut from solid)
1-Doubler 3/4 x 5 x 16 (cut from solid)
7-Dowels 5/8 dia. x 36
Hope this helps you design your own chair. With this format of chair, no two chairs are alike.
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.
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.
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.
For better or worse, my chairs tend to flirt with stretchers. Should the chair have them or not?
While common sense might dictate that all chairs should have stretchers between their legs for added strength, the historical record disagrees. Early chairs were just as likely to skip the stretchers.
Why? It’s anyone’s guess. Chairs with stretchers are almost certainly more durable. The legs are less likely to come loose when someone kicks them inadvertently or drunkenly. But chairs without stretchers are far easier to repair if a leg does become loose.
Chairs with stretchers are certainly more complex and require additional time to build. But they offer another opportunity for the maker to embellish the chair with turnings, balls and tapers.
Stretchers are a good place to put your feet. But they take a beating from feet and can look like dog crap in short order.
For me, however, stretchers can grant me a good night’s sleep.
This week I’m building a couple of Welsh stick chairs in some crazy curly white oak. This particular design, one I’ve developed through 15 years of flailing, doesn’t use stretchers and looks just fine to my eye. That is, until it doesn’t.
The front legs of this design use a 16° resultant angle to set the legs’ rake and splay. The back legs use a 22° resultant angle. While reaming the front legs I grabbed the wrong bevel gauge. As a result, the front legs are splayed out more than expected. And the legs rake forward more than expected.
When I finished the job, I knew it was wrong. But when I assembled the chairs and put them on the ground, I was happy with the additional rake and splay. It made the chair look rakish and splayish.
I sat on the chairs to see if they were solid. They felt fine, but I asked some friends to sit in the chairs and I watched the legs. They moved too much for my taste. I lost confidence in the chairs as-is.
So I started making stretchers for both of the chairs. This added two hours of work to the job, but it set my mind at ease. It made me wonder: Is this how stretchers were first invented? Perhaps an ancient chair without stretchers flexed just a little too much and the builder thought: I have to put some sticks in there to fix that.
