Category: Campaign Furniture

One of the most influential chairs of the 20th century was built and designed by an anonymous craftsman in Roorkee, India.

Whoever built the first “Roorkee” chair in the late 1890s was trying to supply the military forces of the British Empire with a lightweight camp chair that could be taken to pieces in a few minutes and could adapt to any terrain, no matter how rugged.

The simple Roorkee chair was a huge military success. But what is even more incredible is how this chair with no fixed joinery influenced modern designers all over the world for the next 60-plus years.

Kaare Klint, the founder of the Danish Modern furniture style, made slight changes to the Roorkee to create the famous Safari chair – a form that is still in production today. Le Corbusier saw the Roorkee and reimagined it in chrome and black leather to create the Basculant chair. Marcel Breuer created the Wassily chair. Wilhelm Bofinger made the Farmer’s Chair. And Vico Magistretti developed the Armchair 905 in 1964. All are direct descendents of the simple Roorkee.

After building more than 25 of these Roorkee chairs for customers and teaching this class to woodworkers all over the world, I’ve teamed up with Popular Woodworking Magazine and ShopWoodworking.com to produce a three-and-a-half hour DVD on all aspects of making this historic-but-almost-forgotten chair.

The Roorkee is one of the most comfortable chairs you’ll ever make – the loose conical mortise-and-tenon joints adapt to your body, creating a solid exoskeleton of thick leather and dark wood. The tilting back curves to cradle your shoulders and pushes against your lumbar to make it easy to sit in for hours. And the simple construction will make you wonder why you ever feared chairmaking.

In this DVD we take you through all aspects of construction. We start with rough sapele and create the legs, stretchers and back using a lathe and a few simple hand tools. (Note: This is a great project for beginning turners and the DVD assumes you have never turned anything.) We make the conical joinery using simple and inexpensive tools. And we introduce you to leatherwork, starting from the cow and ending up with a nice place to sit.

Even if you’ve never built a chair, you’ll breeze through this project. Most of my students have never built any seating. Advanced woodworkers will broaden their skill set with tips on hardware installation, leatherworking and even finishing.

The DVD will be released on Jan. 23, 2015, through ShopWoodworking.com. The DVD will be $29.99, or you can download the video for $24.99. It also will be available through Shopclass on Demand.

I’ll post more details on the DVD when it’s available. In the meantime, check out all these blog entries I’ve written about this great chair during the last few years.

— Christopher Schwarz

Christopher Clarke Antiques has released its latest catalog of campaign furniture called “An Officer’s Room,” which you can download for free from the company’s web site here.

Sean and Simon Clarke were extremely generous and helpful as I was researching English military and travel furniture for my book “Campaign Furniture.” The brother’s catalogs are a wealth of information on campaign furniture and include lots of original research into the makers and patents that are important to the style.

This catalog is no different. I’ve read it through twice – especially the section on the Fenby patent chairs, which I am researching now so I can reproduce them.

If you like campaign furniture, this catalog is a free little treat for you. By the way, all of the pieces in the catalog are for sale, in case you are also a furniture collector.

— Christopher Schwarz

You can now watch two episodes on Roy Underhill’s “The Woodwright’s Shop” on campaign furniture that we taped earlier this year by following this link.

Use the arrows below the main screen to scroll over to the episodes you want to watch.

One of the episodes is an introduction to the style and a demonstration of cutting lapped full-blind dovetails. The second episode shows my strategies for fitting inlaid corner brasses and campaign pulls.

I wish we would have demonstrated something additional: Roy trimming my hair. All I can think while watching these episodes is: Get a haircut, hippie. And a job.

The pieces shown in the episode are also featured in my book “Campaign Furniture,” which is available in our store and through our retailers. We are almost sold out of the the first edition of this book and we will be returning to press to print the second edition shortly. So if you are one of those people who collects first editions, consider yourself warned.

— Christopher Schwarz

After building 27 Roorkee chairs myself and teaching students to build 35 more, I’m ready to make a DVD to share the turning, joinery and leatherwork necessary to build one of these campaign-style chairs.

I’ll be filming the DVD at F+W in about a week. I don’t have a release date for the project, but the company is fast – very fast – at editing these videos and bringing them to market.

This weekend I’m prepping all the parts to make two chairs so we have parts to work on that are at all different stages of the construction process. This prep work is probably overkill because I can now build one of the these chairs in about two days. But I was a Boy Scout and we learned to “be prepared” (in my troop that meant “be prepared to have your tent urinated on by bullies”).

One of the fun aspects of this project is I’ve asked Jason Thigpen at Texas Heritage Woodworks to hand-stitch stitch the arms for this matched pair of chairs, which are going to a customer right after Thanksgiving. Jason makes a lot of cool stuff, including shop aprons and tool rolls. I plan to order an apron from his as soon as I wear out my current one.

The DVD will be aimed at the general woodworker who has never turned or done leatherwork. We’ll be using only one turning tool to make all the chair parts on a midi-size lathe. The leatherwork will be done with basic hand tools – mostly a utility knife and a rotary punch.

And we’re definitely going to cover finishing with shellac and wax – I’m going to make the case we should show how to do it with an inexpensive HVLP system.

If you can’t wait for the DVD, the complete instructions to build the chair are covered in my latest book, “Campaign Furniture.”

— Christopher Schwarz