Here’s a tip from Raney Nelson at Crucible Tool. When we make our lump hammers we need to cut the excess wood above the eye after the handle and head have been wedged together. Typical flush-cut saws are too slow for production work. And they are usually so thin that they kink easily.
So Raney took an inexpensive Ryoba saw from the home center and removed the set with a few swipes of a sharpening stone.
Today I had a ton of tenons to flush and decided to do the same to one of our hardware-store Ryobas that is not quite good enough for fine joinery. I removed the set using a DMT diamond stone (the red one). It took about five swipes on each toothline.
I was concerned that the diamond stone wouldn’t work well stoning the impulse-hardened teeth (which are file-hard). The diamonds had no problem with the task. The detail shot shows the amount of metal I removed to remove the set.
The saw works great for flushing tenons. It’s about 11.4 times faster than my old flush-cut saw and powers through oak tenons.
Dec. 8 will be the last open day at Lost Art Press for the year, and we always like to do something a little special for all the people who travel to see us and the locals who support us.
This year, we’ll have a bunch of blemished books at 50 percent off (cash only on those). We hope to have a small quantity of Crucible Lump Hammers (no promises). We’ll be giving away free Chester Cornett buttons. We’ll have our entire stock of books, including the new Christian Becksvoort book “Shaker Inspiration.”
And we will have… a clock.
One of the local stores that our family has frequented for decades has a long-standing holiday tradition we love. Customers are asked if they “want to see the clock.” Those who agree are taken to the back room where there is a clock, of course, but also something else. (Let’s just say you need to be 21 to see the clock, and it’s not porn.)
The storefront is located at 837 Willard St., in Covington, Ky. We will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and we’ll be happy to answer your woodworking questions or even demonstrate any techniques that are flummoxing you.
After you visit us, you might like to have brunch at one of our favorite spots in Covington: Main Street Tavern, Otto’s or Hotel Covington. We’d love to join you, but I’m afraid our bosses are making us work that day. Jerks.
I stumbled across these chairs for sale via Leland Little yesterday, and it was like encountering a beautiful train wreck. I couldn’t stop looking at them.
On the one hand, they nailed all the angles. But on the other hand, white naugahyde.
The only information Leland Little offers is they are “circa 1950” and they are “American.” Yet another thing the world can be angry with us about.
For at least the 12th time this month I’ve looked at the work on my bench and found that the odder it looks, the better.
I’m building a near-replica of a chair on display at St Fagans National Museum of History, and replica work is not usually my bag (or it hasn’t been for a long, long time). At every turn, this chair does the opposite of what I would do if it were my design. But I vowed to stick as close to the original as possible.
Why am I doing this? To attempt get inside the head of the original Welsh maker and perhaps learn something.
Why this chair? A drawing of it appears on the cover of John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs,” and so he must have also seen something special in this chair. I adore it, too, but exactly why I like it is difficult to explain.
I began by making full-size drawings of the chair based on the photos I took during my visit to St Fagans with Christopher Williams. Even from the drawings, I knew this would be an odd ride.
The Undercarriage The seat is unusual by modern standards. Though it’s about 22” wide, it’s only about 13” deep. It’s quite thin, unlike some of the chunky seats you see on many Welsh and Windsor chairs (up to 2” thick). The legs are delicate – just 1-5/16” at the floor – and they taper up to the seat.
The seat’s shape defies classification. It’s like a D-shaped seat that has been stretched with a rolling pin. There’s a big flat area where the four back sticks reside.
The original chair once had stretchers (now long gone) that ran between the front and back legs. It might have had a medial stretcher, but perhaps not. On this version, I’m building the chair as it appears now, without stretchers.
One change I have made to my chair is to lightly saddle the seat. The original seat is as flat as a board. (My saddle shape is based on other chairs from St Fagans.)
The Sticks & Armbow The sticks on this chair are about 5/8” and don’t taper much, if at all. But it’s the armbow that has caused me the most head-scratching. The original’s arms are likely made from a curved branch. Then the two pieces that make the arm were joined by a large half-lap joint.
I wasn’t able to find a branch that works for this chair. So I made an arm with a plank that had some curved grain, but it looked like crap. So I switched gears and tried to make one from compression wood (aka cold-bend hardwood). Fail. So I made two arms using bent laminations. One was a total fail (my fault), and the second was a partial fail. Plus I didn’t like the way they looked in the end – too modern.
So I went to a sawmill in the country and dug through the 8/4 oak to look for a more suitable board. I found one with lots of curve. So last week I finally got an armbow that looked right. Well, “looked right” is not right. The armbow looks like an exaggerated harp, which matches the seat shape. As a result, the angles for four of the sticks were totally wack-doodle. But the wronger it felt, the righter the whole thing looked.
The Crest The crest (sometimes called the comb) was the most difficult shape to reproduce. It is composed of multiple tapering curves. After drawing and drawing, I had to put down the pencil and just grab a rasp to make it look right.
Bemused by the whole experience, I knocked the finished crest in place and walked away to the machine room to put something away. When I returned, I caught the silhouette of my chair out of the corner of my eye and felt the same pang when I saw the original at St Fagans.
It’s then that I saw something I hadn’t seen before. Unlike many Welsh chairs, this one has a lightness and femininity that many Welsh chairs eschew. It’s not a passive chair by any means (sometimes femininity is wrongly equated with passiveness). It still looks like it wants to bite your shin if you mistreat it. But it works. And now I know exactly why.
It’s no secret that Brendan Gaffney and I are obsessed with the life and work of Chester Cornett, a traditional Eastern Kentucky chairmaker who pushed into the world of art with his later chairs he built mostly in Cincinnati.
While Brendan and I have been studying his chairs for some time, we both have developed an odd affection for the hand-painted sign Chester had outside his workshop. The sign is made of bits of thin sheet metal that have been screwed or riveted together. The letters are orange (Brendan found a color photo that has the sign in the background).
If you don’t speak Kentucky, here’s what the sign says:
Handmade Furniture
Maker Of The
Cornett Chairs
We Make Anything
Or It Can’t Be Made
I love the misspellings. “Funiture?” “Chaires?” “Iney Thin?”
Brendan and I have been plotting to make a sign like this for our shop. Today we made a prototype using hardboard, grey primer and orange paint from the home center. After studying photos of the sign, I decided the letters were 5” high and determined the width and height of the sign based on that.
We bought an inexpensive stencil set and stencil brushes from the home center. Then we went to work. The entire project took about an hour.
We’ll hang this sign in storefront’s library. And now I’m going to find some used sheet metal so we can make the real thing. The metal sign will hang in the garden where it will age with the help of the elements.
