One of the advantages (or curses) of studying a lot of old furniture is you can feel certain designs tug at you as you work on a piece. This weekend I got a little time to work on this Hall’s Croft chair and I could feel several other similar chair designs tug at my brain.
I love quartersawn sycamore. It’s a junk tree but, when used properly, is beautiful and stable (enough).
First, I abandoned the pine seat and switched to quartersawn sycamore for the seat, arms and crest. The spindles are hickory and the legs are beech. I selected the stock so I could use an oil and wax finish instead of paint or a dark pigmented finish.
I changed the seat profile slightly to make the front corners sharper. I altered the leg shape a bit. But the biggest change is going to be the crest rail. Instead of the “three holey mountains” of the original I’m going to use a different shape I’ve been experimenting with. It uses rived stock that is somewhat triangular in cross-section.
When I offer it for sale, I’ll give the customer both crest rails and let them decide which they prefer. Or they can swap them out when they are feeling sassy.
One of the tropes in journalism is to bring a story full circle in the last paragraph. It’s called the “kicker” or the “kick” and it is supposed to leave the reader amused, saddened or something. The following story has a six-year arc, and today comes the kicker.
It started in 2010 when I received Patrick Leach’s monthly tool list (subscribe here; it’s a thing). In that list of tools for sale, Leach had offered a graphic mahogany layout square that spoke to me. But I hesitated on buying it because of the cost, and it sold to another person.
Sadly, the original square was destroyed during shipment to its new owner, but Leach had taken some measurements for me so I could build one for myself.
That square became the cover image for by book “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” as it summed up a lot of ideas in one shape: it represented an “A” for “aesthetic anarchism,” it was a beautiful and highly functional tool and it was something you had to make for yourself.
According to Leach, this form of square shows up in England occasionally in the batches of tools he purchases and brings to the United States. The squares are fairly consistent in their design (if not execution), and Leach suspects that the square was used as a manual training exercise in English joinery schools.
I have tried to confirm or debunk that theory with no success. But it is the best idea so far.
In December 2010 I published plans for the square in Popular Woodworking Magazine, and you can download a SketchUp file of the square for free here. You can purchase a pdf of my article from ShopWoodworking.com for $2.99 here.
In 2014 I taught my first class in England at Warwickshire College in Leamington Spa. The woodworking program there is headed by Jamie Ward, an extremely capable and passionate woodworker and teacher.
This year Jamie decided to introduce the square as a project for his students to build. Students in their first year built a basic frame and then were offered the layout square as a more advanced project. One of his older students in his evening classes also decided to take on the square.
“(I)t did push their skills a touch so early on,” Jamie wrote, “but they all enjoyed making it.”
You can see photos of the construction process and the nice templates Jamie made via this link. When Jamie sent the photos to me this week I could only smile. An English square that was likely a manual training exercise for joinery students traveled to America and – thanks to happenstance – returned to England to become a manual training exercise.
While picking up some work from Steamwhistle Letterpress, the owner, Brian Stuparyk, said he had a workbench to show me.
Brian’s letterpress shop is where all manner of interesting mechanisms end up, including printing presses, woodworking machines and machinist tools. Recently he received a load of woodworking equipment, much of it barely used.
One of the gems was a vintage Danish Levard workbench that looks like it had never been used. Brian said he found only one small sawcut and a single blotch of glue.
It’s the first time I ever had time to examine a Levard in detail. While being extremely well made (details to follow), I was surprised how lightweight it was. I know I’m biased toward massive French benches, but this seemed like a delicate flower.
So now for the good stuff. First take a look at the jaws for the end vise. The top corners of the benchtop and jaw are inlaid with boxwood, like a moulding plane. It’s an interesting detail. That area of a vise can see significant abuse, but I’d never considered adding boxwood to the jaws.
Also interesting: the underside of the benchtop. Like many European workbenches, the core of the benchtop is fairly thin and banded by thicker pieces. This saves on wood, but it reduces the bench’s overall weight and makes clamping things to the benchtop an occasional pain.
What really interested me was the way they had made the thick dog blocks that were glued to the thin core. To save material, the dogs are fully enclosed on only one side. I can’t think of any disadvantage to their approach.
The vise screws were all well-machined and moved smoothly, like someone cared. Also nice: The steel dogs (actually they were more puppy-sized), were well-made with nicely chamfered corners.
All in all the craftsmanship was excellent. I just think it could use a lot more mass.
Furniture conservator and cabinetmaker Martin O’Brien sent us these intriguing images of low workbenches being used by Spanish woodworkers to build ladderback chairs. And, to add to the multicultural mix, it comes from a book in Japanese.
To me it looks like there are two benches at work here. In the foreground, the guy with the nifty hat is working on spindles. On the bench on the left, the other woodworker is assembling the chair frames.
And it looks like it’s all taking place in a cave.
O’Brien writes:
“One could almost say that it is a cross between a Roman workbench and shave horse. This shop could very well be a cave in Southern Spain. Makes sense that Roman traditions would still have a serious toehold in this region.
“If you need anymore information, I can get the Japanese person who gave me this book to provide some translations. Next time I go to Spain, I’m gonna find these guys.”
I’d love to learn more about these benches. Thanks Martin. It’s fascinating to see these benches in use in southern Europe and northern Europe (Estonia).
While teaching in England in the summer of 2015, Roy Underhill and I had a day off together and headed to Stratford-upon-Avon with his wife, Jane, to check out all things William Shakespeare.
While touring Hall’s Croft, where Shakespear’s daughter lived, both Roy and I became fascinated with a small primitive chair in a corner by some stairs. There was no evidence the chair was anything important, that it had been owned by the family or was even from the 17th century. But it was charming, and Roy and I took lots of photos of it.
We both got the bug to build a reproduction. But Roy beat me to it for this season of “The Woodwright’s Shop.” Check out the two-part episodes here:
While visiting Roy this fall I got to sit in the chair. It is tiny – good thing I don’t have much of a butt. And the visit only strengthened my resolve to build one myself.
With all my furniture commissions complete for the year and all my editing under control (thanks Kara!), I started making the Hall’s Croft chair this morning. I won’t be able to make it out of elm, but I am going to stay true to the size and rough spirit of the original.
It’s an odd feeling to get to start a project without a customer, article or need to satisfy (other than my curiosity). But here we go.
