Category: The Anarchist’s Design Book

You can now download a free pdf of my Staked Armchair project if you have purchased a copy of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” This download is given on the honor system. If you already own this book, no harm will come to you by clicking the link below.

If, however, you have not purchased “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” you will suffer a curse that involves an Aldabra tortoise with multiple felony convictions.

Here’s the link:

ADB Staked Armchair

The design for this chair is regulated by the lumber industry. When I design a piece of furniture from scratch, such as this chair, I look carefully at the materials available to the workaday woodworker. For example, asking you to buy 12/4 spalted sapele for the crest is a bit silly. This chair can be built with one chunk of 8/4 red oak and some 5/8” dowels from the home center. Nothing fancy.

In short, I try to design my pieces around common lumber sizes so that the design can be built in both Los Angeles and Baltimore without too much fuss.

For many years, I wished that I didn’t impose restrictions like this on myself. What if I designed a project based on my desires alone, and I could use whatever crazy materials I wanted? I tried that approach for a while and it was uninspiring. For some reason, I prefer to work within strict limitations of what wood species are available, what lumber sizes are common and how few operations/tools are required.

This is my sport. And projects like this bring me a little satisfaction.

The wood for this chair is less than $50 – way less than $50 if you are frugal. You don’t need a drawknife, steambox, shavehorse, froe or hatchet to make this chair. Instead, you need mostly furniture-making tools plus a scorp and travisher to saddle the seat. The wood is from any lumberyard. You can build it with hand tools. But if you have a band saw you’ll find the work goes faster.

It sits remarkably well for an all-wood chair. I’ve had these chairs sitting around the shop for the last several months and lots of people have sat in them and offered feedback. The No. 1 comment: I didn’t expect this chair to be this comfortable.

The trick is the geometry, of course, plus knowing your way around the lumbar region of the human body. The armbow is designed to support the lumbar (a fact that surprises most sitters) with the crest rail hovering slightly above the curve of your shoulders.

The seat is lightly saddled to avoid casting your buttocks like a Jell-O salad. And the “hands” of the armbow are set back from where you would expect them on an armchair by a couple inches. This small change affects how your forearms interact with the chair – for the better in my opinion.

So if you’ve ever wanted to build a Welsh stick chair, this chair is an excellent introduction to the form. If you are into Windsors, this chair has a few lessons, but you are going to need some more estrogen to get the job done with the feminine baluster turnings (this is only my opinion; many people of sound mind love Windsor chairs).

So download the chapter – at the peril of the highly disturbed tortoise if you don’t own “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” And think it over. Chairs aren’t so hard. Even I can build them, and I’m just a journalist who grew up in Arkansas.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Anyone who complains about typos will also get a visit from the tortoise.

When I took my first class in making Welsh stick chairs in 2003, the instructor asked if we wanted to trace his seat and arm templates.

It would be fair to say that John (the other guy in the class) and I freaked. We quickly grabbed cardboard, paper and pencils and began tracing all the templates. I still have those templates down in the basement, but I’ve never used them.

When I returned home from the class, I took a good look at the templates and realized that almost everything about the templates could be described with rectangles, squares and simple arcs. The rest could be easily sketched in with French curves.

Since that realization, I’ve always made my own templates. And I would rather show you how to make your own templates instead of providing a silly gridded drawing or something that had to be blown up 478 percent on a photocopier and then printed on a plotter.

Here are the tools you need:

1. A big sheet of paper (I use cheap newsprint sheets). You also can draw these templates directly on thin MDF.
2. Trammel points with one end being a pencil.
3. A yardstick
4. Drafting triangle
5. Pencil

Draw the Seat
Most of my chairs use a D-seat, which looks like a more complicated shape than it really is. It’s simply a rectangle with a half-circle attached to one edge. To make the seat, first draw a rectangle that is 20” wide and 6-1/2” high. Draw a centerline though the rectangle’s 20” width.

Set your trammel points to a 10” radius. Scribe the half-circle arc where the centerline intersects one edge of the rectangle. That’s it.

All of the other parts of the chair – the arms, doubler and the crest all evolve from the seat shape. So, I’ve shown the seat in the illustrations to make this clear.

Make the Arms
The arms for my stick chair are 2” wide and start about 4-1/2” back from the front edge of the chair. Here’s how to lay them out. Start with the seat plan you just drew. The first arc is a half-circle with a 10” radius – just like the seat. Scribe that. Then adjust the trammels to describe a 12”-radius circle and scribe that on your paper.

Now add 2” x 2” squares to the front of your arms to make them longer and to match the shape of the seat. The illustration above shows this clearly.

Now you have the basic shape of the armbow. You can alter this shape to suit yourself. I decided to widen the arms at the front and add a curve to the front area of each arm. This part of the armbow is called the “hands.”

Create the Hands
I made my hands 3” wide at the front. Then I wanted the additional 1” to flow into the original arm so the armbow ended up 2” wide at the back.

This is the only difficult part of the exercise. I used French curves to create this irregular curve. You also could draw an ellipse, but using French curves is faster (for me). Then draw the arc at the front of the hands. It can be a simple arc or an irregular curve. Your call.

The Doubler
The “doubler” is a piece of wood that beefs up the armbow and helps strengthen any short grain. It has the same basic shape as the armbow but is only 12’ wide. Scribe two the arcs – one at a 10” radius with the second at 12”. Then use your yardstick to create endpoints that are 12” apart. Use these endpoints to connect your two arcs.

The Crest
The crest begins just like the doubler – by scribing a 10” arc. Then set your trammels to draw an 11-1/4” arc. Use your yardstick to create endpoints that are 10-1/2” apart. Join the two arcs using the endpoints as a guide.

All the text above is much more difficult to follow than by simply studying the drawings. Everything flows out of the 10”-radius arc that is the back edge of the seat. Once you get that in your head, everything else is easy.

After you make your templates, you can transfer them to MDF or hardboard. Cut them out and smooth the edge with files and sandpaper. And put them in a safe place. While templates are easy to make, remaking lost ones is a grumpy affair.

— Christopher Schwarz

 

Since June, I’ve been working on a book-publishing project that has ripped up my insides. I can’t talk about it yet – maybe in the next week or so – but the fallout has been odd. Each day, after 10 to 12 hours of editing, processing photos and designing book pages, I have been coming home to write like a madman until I fall asleep on the couch.

As a result, I’ve finished two chapters for the expansion of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and have just three more to go. Today I finished designing the pages for the short chapter on the Staked High Stool and now offer it up for a free download for people who already own the “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”

You can download the chapter via this link:

ADB-Staked High Stool

At this stage, I’m operating on the honor system. If you own the book, please download the chapter. If you don’t own the book, know that I have instructed a hedgehog with Comic-Con breath to gnaw your danglies at some point in the future.

You can order the book via this link and save yourself an embarrassing trip to the ER.

Note that this chapter is not polished. There are typos. The construction drawing is not the crazy beautiful copperplate etching from Briony Morrow-Cribbs. It’s just my working drawing. But the information is there. I hope you like it.

— Christopher Schwarz

I have accused the red oak species, Quercus rubra, of being a weed. It is overused in kitchen construction here in North America, it has a barfy pink cast when finished with modern film finishes and it is usually flat sawn to show off its least-attractive grain orientation.

For this chair, and for many of the projects in “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” I embraced red oak because it has three other characteristics that trump the ones listed above. It is cheap. It is widely available. And it is strong.

So the real trick with red oak is how to con it into looking like something other than a full-overlay bathroom cabinet door at Desperation Acres Phase II.

Here’s how I gave the species a makeover for this chair.

Don’t Settle for Flat Sawn
The seat of the chair is a combination of rift and flat-sawn woods. The more-attractive rift material is at the front of the seat, which is more noticeable. The wide cathedrals of the flat-sawn stuff is at the rear where your farts will make it smell better.

The legs have their quartersawn faces facing the viewer. The armbow is 100-percent quartersawn so it shows off its medullary rays.

The spindles have dead-straight grain, so you aren’t going to see many (if any) ugly cathedrals. Just straight grain lines and some medullary rays. The crest is flat-sawn but the bevel on the front pulls the grain into a smile shape. That’s distracting (in a good way).

Also, there’s just not a lot of wood in this chair, so its form is somewhat dominant compared to the wood’s figure.

Select for Color
Red oak has a lot of color variation. That can be caused by where the tree grew or if it is a subspecies in the red oak family. So with the exception of the sticks, all the wood for this chair came from a single tree. And all the sticks were selected carefully for color.

Avoid the Modern Film Finishes
About a decade ago I had to build some cabinets for a customer’s suburban home. And I had to match the finish on the home’s existing red oak cabinets. I found that by using modern waterborne finishes or some modern lacquers that were more water-white, I could mimic that depressing pink cast in many kitchens.

Avoiding this color is easy. Use old-fashioned finishes that add a red or orange cast. This chair is finished with organic linseed oil and beeswax. While this finish will require maintenance, the low sheen also helps obscure its Quercus rubra roots.

And if all else fails, paint the stuff and tell everyone it’s rare English brown oak.

— Christopher Schwarz