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.”
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.
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.
Whenever I finish an important project, I feel I should give a cheesy “acceptance speech” like you see for awards programs (“I’d like to thank all the world’s mentally defective sea turtles…”). Though my speech (said quietly to myself) always thanks certain tools and fellow woodworkers.
Were I a wanker, I would post photos of my latest chair and say things like: Check my new design, brh. Then a series of acronyms – FISKET and YAMLO. Then the hashtags – #gravycouncil #billyraycoochierash #sponsored.
But that’s not fair. Every piece of furniture is the culmination of the designer’s experiences, influences and previous work. We’re just the blender that takes these ingredients and frapps the frothy result. And so I try to acknowledge these influences whenever possible.
For this chair, the most obvious inspiration is the later chairs of John Brown, author of “Welsh Stick Chairs.” In learning more about the life of John Brown, I discovered Christopher Williams, who worked closely with Brown on these chairs to refine and lighten the historical examples. (We are bringing Chris back in 2019 for at least one – maybe two – more incredible classes on building his chair.)
Chris’s chairs are very dramatic (and I say that in the best possible way). I don’t have the stones to use the rake and splay he does on his legs. So I started with an 18th- or 19th-century Welsh chair shown in a Shire booklet on Welsh furniture that was written by Richard Bebb.
Here’s where some of the other elements of the chair come from. The raised spindle deck is a design feature I’ve been playing with for a year or more. I developed it out of frustration, really. I have always tried to get a crazy-crisp gutter between the spindle deck and the seat. And I’ve never managed to make myself happy. So by raising the spindle deck, I get that sharp shadow line I want.
The armbow is a typical three-piece bow. On historical chairs, the thicker section usually has a decorative detail on its ends – a bead, ogee or some such. I decided to use a 30° bevel to repeat the bevel on the underside of the seat and the underside of the “hands” of the armbow. Nothing earth-shattering.
The “hands” of my armbow aren’t from any particular source that I am conscious of. Many Welsh chairs have rounded hands, something I wanted to avoid. But I wanted the hands to get wider so the armbow didn’t look static, like a steam-bent armbow. So I used a French curve to accelerate the radius on the armbow until the hands were wider. Then I used a French curve to add a slight arc on the front of the hand to tip my hat to the rounded hands of historical chairs.
I beveled the front of the underside of the hands at 30° so the sitter had something to do while listening to a relative drone.
The crest rail is smaller than I usually make – only 1-3/4” tall. I did this so that it will be easy for other people to make this crest if they don’t have access to thick stock or steam-bending equipment. This crest is cut easily from solid material. The front of the crest is – surprise – a 30° bevel, repeating the other bevels on the chair.
The finish – black over red milk paint – is a process developed by Peter Galbert.
I am sure that there are other influences running through this design that I’m not conscious of. But I am told we have to cut for a commercial break.
According to my notes, this is my fourth attempt at building an armchair for the expansion of “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” And to be honest, I don’t know how many sketches I made of this design – probably 80 to 100.
Some of my designs failed for technical reasons. Others were too complex to ask of a first-time chairmaker. This design, however, presses all the right buttons. It is built with off-the-rack lumber using a toolkit that doesn’t require many specialty tools.
The wood is kiln-dried. You don’t need a shavehorse, lathe, steambox or even a drawknife. It’s built using standard timber sizes you can find at any lumberyard. The crest rail, for example, is sawn out of workaday 8/4 red oak – nothing special or expensive.
After gluing up the chair this afternoon, I made a set of detailed wooden patterns so I can replicate the design. These patterns will help me do two things: write the chapter on the chair and teach three classes in 2019 on building it.
Indeed, after a few years off, I’ve decided to teach a few classes in 2019 – one at our storefront, one in Indiana and one in the United Kingdom. I’ll post details on the classes and registration when they become available this fall.
I’m eager to share the design for this chair. Even if you don’t want to take a class with me (there are only so many squirrel jokes a person can take), I’ll be publishing the complete plans for this chair. They will be available for a free download for anyone who has purchased “The Anarchist’s Design Book” from us or any of our retailers.
Those plans probably won’t be available for another year – at least. I still have to build four or five more projects for the expansion. But this chair was the most difficult design, and I’m glad it’s behind me. Well, almost behind me. I still need to paint it.
Sometimes I get asked if I use dowels for the spindles in my chairs. And sometimes I answer: “Sometimes.”
Dowels can be a crappy way to make a chair, just like lumberyard wood can be a crappy way to make a seat. Or cow tongue can be a crappy way to make a nice goulash.
For me, it all comes down to how the material is cut and dried. I cannot always get rivable material for my chairs, and so I will cut it out on the band saw, making sure the grain is arrow straight through the thickness and length. This wastes a little wood, but once you get good at picking stock at the lumberyard (hint, look at the edges), you can find dang straight stuff.
And if I can find dowels (home center dowels even! For shame!) where the grain is arrow straight, then what’s the harm? I will dry them, compress the ends and shape them with a gunstock scraper to taper them – just like its rived cousin.
I know this ain’t pure, and the Greenwood Gods are frowning or whittling out a spear to chuck my direction. But I think this is a pragmatic and valid path to build a folk chair. If you select your stock with care – in the forest or at the home center – and your understand the material, you can build a chair.
Don’t let your limitations stop you from making a chair. Work with what you have. If you can get a log, get a log. If you can’t get a log, get straight stuff.
Today I went to Home Depot to check out their selection of 5/8” oak dowels. I pulled out all 30 and rolled them on the floor, looking for defects and poker-straight grain. (Yes, you will get Evil Eye for this.) I found eight dowels that were either completely straight or had long straight sections. I need only six to build a chair.
I bought them. This saved me about three hours of shaving.