Category: The Anarchist’s Design Book

After the busiest Spring on record, I’ve managed to turn down the volume a bit in the workshop and return my focus to the new projects for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” One of the projects I’m most excited about is a so-called Mule Chest.

I’ve always liked the format. It’s a chest with a couple drawers and it is incredibly easy to build with nails and rabbets. (Much easier than a traditional chest of drawers.) Mule chests look great in pine or an inexpensive hardwood. And they go together as quickly as a six-board chest.

In designing my version for “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I wanted to retain its historical simplicity but bring the form into the present day. That meant reducing the ornamentation and adding some asymmetry.

It looks good on paper. And the mule’s skeleton is looking promising as well.

The good news is that if the design looks like crap, it will be easy to bang out another one with different proportions.

— Christopher Schwarz

 

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been woodworking every day for 23 years, failure will find you on a regular basis.

It doesn’t matter if you make a dozen drawings. Build a half-scale model. Remake the seat twice. Remake the legs twice. Or do a careful dry-fit.

All that is not enough.

Above is the latest failed prototype stool for the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” Like my design for the armchair for this book, the stool design is fighting me every step of the way.

This design failed both mechanically and visually. Mechanical failure: The seat cracked a tad in two places during assembly. This is the result of the undercarriage being too complex for a small structure. All 20 mortises were drilled by eye (no drill press). And the combined slight imperfections stacked up to make the undercarriage difficult to assemble and slightly twisted. And if I have trouble assembling this stool, imagine the problems a new woodworker might have who has never built one.

Visually, the rung positions of the stool leave me flat. The lower rungs are positioned so both short people and tall people can use the stool comfortably. The different rung heights accommodate popliteal heights at different ends of the bell curve of people. And by that measure, the stool works quite well.

The top rungs were positioned so you could easily pick up the stool with one hand to move it around. That idea nearly worked. The problem is that the stool swings toward you when you pick it up and might bark your shins.

By focusing on those functional bits, I made myself a stool that’s a bit visually boring.

It’s not a total loss. We’ll use this stool at the storefront until the cracks in the seat get worse (they might not). Then we’ll use it to make a bonfire and roast some weenies.

Back to the drawing board. Luckily, I have about four more stool sketches to explore.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Comments are disabled because I’ve beat myself up enough with this project and don’t need the help of the internet.

Whenever I can manage it, I try to build an experimental chair alongside one of my trusted designs. It gives me a chance to use less-than-perfect wood and see how things that have germinated in my sketchbook look in real life.

This week I started two stick armchairs in walnut – one that will be for sale and a second that might be for fire.

I’m building the experimental chair using the sappier parts of a walnut slab I bought in Lexington, Ky., last month. The board was cut from a street tree, so it’s not like lumberyard walnut. My tree grew fast, out in the open and has some odd coloring and grain, which is typical for a street tree.

The experiment with this chair is the armbow. With a traditional three-piece armbow, the “doubler” – the piece that joins the two arms – has always been a magnet for my eyes. I like the look – it’s traditional – but I’m always looking for ways to make the doubler recede into the overall design of the arm.

After chatting with Narayan Nayar about my efforts to minimize the doubler, he suggested repeating its design elsewhere on the chair. It could be added to the underside of the arm. Or the top of the chair seat. Repetition would make the doubler look more like part of a pattern than an “eye catcher.”

So after some sketching, I decided to use a “double doubler” that has 30° bevels on all edges – one on top of the arms and one on the bottom of the arms. I think I like the way it looks. But I’m going to have to finish the chair to know for sure.

Earlier Experiments
Some experiments work so well they get adopted immediately. A couple years ago I started making my stretchers into double-tapered octagons. Making this shape is a fair amount of work with a plane and a couple cradle blocks on my workbench.

But I loved the double-tapered octagons immediately.

Before embracing the double-taper octagon, I would turn or plane my stretchers into a round shape, usually cigar-ish or with a bulge in the middle. These rounded forms are traditional shapes, but I always thought they conflicted with the facets on the six- or eight-sided legs.

Other design ideas survive on the bench for minutes or even seconds before being chucked into the scrap pile. I try to forget about those ideas before I’m even tempted to write about them on the blog.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I designed this chair for the revised edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” the goal was to make a staked armchair that was decently good-looking but as easy as possible for a new chairmaker to build.

As a result, many of the details of the chair are based on what sort of material is available to every woodworker. For example: The crest rail – sometimes called the “comb” — is cut from 8/4 solid material. I think it looks quite good as-is, but my typical instinct is to make combs from something thicker or to steam-bend them. But 8/4 material is simple to come by. In fact, the entire chair is built from one board of 8/4 oak and seven dowels.

Yes, the sticks start out as dowels that have been selected for dead-straight grain. Again, dowels are not my first choice when designing a chair, but using them removes a barrier faced by many beginning chairmakers. Beginners might not have access to a shavehorse, lathe with a steadyrest or even rived material. The dowels are scraped and shaved so they have a little entasis, but yeah, they’re dowels.

I’ve now built a bunch of these chairs and have (I hope) made almost all the common mistakes this design presents. So I’m ready to teach classes on how to build it (the first class is in March) and complete the chapter on this chair for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”

I’m also ready to push this design in a different direction. My sketchbook is clogged with details related to this chair that I have put off as I refined this single form. My next stick chair will be in black walnut and have significant changes to the armbow, doubler, stick arrangement and crest rail. I hope it’s not a complete fiasco. If it is or it’s not, you’ll find out here.

— Christopher Schwarz