One of the parts of my next armchair that I’ve struggled with is the shape of the armbow. On my most recent chair, I used a maple arm that was cold-bend hardwood. It’s a sleek look, but I decided that it was too complex for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.”
So I decided to go back to the first stick chairs I built in 2003 and use a three-piece armbow. This form of arm is chunkier, but you don’t need to bend anything, and it can be really strong if you orient the grain so it follows the curve of the arm.
The armbow is 7/8” thick and 2” wide for the most part. Then it swells to 2-3/8” at the hands. Well, swells isn’t the right word. I began expanding the radius of the outside of the arm along the front 4”. How did I do this? French curves.
Then I used a second french curve to make the front edge of the armbow.
This was not all one flash of inspiration. This was four iterations. Draw it on paper. Cut it out in 5mm underlayment plywood. Stare at it until I hate it. Repeat.
I kept doing this until I didn’t hate it.
Then I cut out the arms in some air-dried locust (thanks Brendan!).
I’ve long been obsessed with Welsh stick chairs. But if you’ve known me for more than 5 minutes, you know I’m going to prod the historical record to see what else might be lurking in the dim corners of early homes.
Stick chairs can be found in many cultures. In fact, every culture that researcher Suzanne Ellison and I start investigating has some variant of this chair.
This is no surprise. A stick chair is a logical answer to the question: How do you build a chair quickly with few tools and few materials?
For this blog entry, I pulled some of the photos we’ve collected from Western Europe. What I love about these examples is how the same idea is interpreted slightly differently. Some of these are – to my eye – sublime (even if they are intended for night soil).
Most of my commission work is surprisingly straightforward. People see something on my personal website (christophermschwarz.com) and say: Hey, I’d like you to build that again.
I build it. And I ship it to them.
Sometimes I get a request for something a little unusual. For example, this summer I’m working out the details of a three-tiered campaign chest. And I have a request for some Roorkhee ottomans. But those pieces are based firmly on my existing work.
This year, however, I got a very unusual order for a chair. It went something like this: Build me a chair, but I want it to advance your work as a designer. He gave me some thoughts on the woods he preferred and what he liked about my existing chair designs, but that was it.
I decided to use this opportunity to work out the details of an armchair for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” I took an undercarriage design I’ve been working on for a couple years and refined it some more. Then I made the undercarriage parallel to the floor (instead of the seat), a detail I swiped from Chris Williams’s chairs. I shortened the armbow. Added some spindles. And did a major reshape of the crest rail (sometimes called a “comb”).
The chair looks good. It sits even better. But it’s not the armchair for “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” During construction of this chair, I devised a number of ways I could simplify this design so it would be much easier to build. And ease of building is one of the most important principles in the book.
So I am incredibly grateful to this customer who gave me the huge gift of freedom. And even though I failed to produce the bullseye design for “The Anarchist’s Design Book,” this chair is an important stepping stone to that design.
“Hands Employed Aright” by Joshua Klein
“Slöjd in Wood” by Jögge Sundqvist
“Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology” by Richard Jones
And we are almost done with two streaming videos:
“Spindle Turning for Furniture” with Peter Galbert
“Make a Chair from a Tree” with Jennie Alexander
Luckily, those three books are in the hands of Kara Uhl, Megan Fitzpatrick, Meghan B. and Linda Watts. The videos are in the hands of John Hoffman and others. So I can focus on expanding “The Anarchist’s Design Book” for a late 2018 release.
The expanded edition will include projects that I’d intended to build for the book. But the book would have been so huge that it seemed crazy to add those additional projects. I guess I am now officially crazy.
The expanded edition will include the following staked projects: an armchair, a three-legged stool and a settee. And it will include the following boarded projects: a mule chest, a high settle, a settle chair and a sitting bench.
Note that if you bought the un-expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” you will be able to download the expanded edition for free. (This will be true no matter where you bought the book, whether from us or from our retailers.) There will be no need to buy the expanded edition unless you want more ballast for your ship or insulation for your home.
There is a three-step process for how people – woodworkers or not – approach a typical table.
They run their hands over the top to feel how smooth the finish is.
They run their fingers on the underside of the tabletop, right at the front, to see if it is also smooth.
If there is a drawer, they pull it out to see if it opens smoothly, and to look for dovetails – the mark of quality mid-priced factory furniture.
What annoys me about this ritual – and I’ve witnessed it 100 times – is not the people who look for dovetails. Heck, I want dovetails, too. Instead, what bugs the bejebus out of me is how people are looking for plastic textures and plastic drawer motion in a piece of handmade wooden furniture.
We have been ruined by plastic and its inhumane smoothness. I’ve watched people on a train rub their smartphones like they were rosary beads or worry stones. I’ve seen people pull drawers out of a dresser and feel the underside.
The message is that “smooth” equals “quality.”
That is so wrong.
I refuse to equate quality with smoothness in a universal manner. The “show surfaces” of a piece should be smooth, though they don’t have to feel like a piece of melamine or Corian. Subtle ripples left by a smoothing plane are far more interesting than robotic flatness.
Secondary surfaces that can be touched – think the underside of a tabletop, the insides of drawers or the underside of shelves – can have a different and entirely wonderful texture.
When I dress these surfaces, I flatten them by traversing them with my jack plane, which has a significantly curved iron (an 8″ to 10″ radius, if you must know). This iron leaves scallops – what were called “dawks” in the 17th century – that are as interesting as a honeycomb and as delightful to touch as handmade paper.
That is what old furniture – real handmade furniture – feels like. I refuse to call it “sloppy” or “indifferent.” It’s correct and it adds to the experience of the curious observer.
But what about the surfaces that will almost never be touched? Historically, these surfaces were left with an even rougher texture than dawks left by a builder’s handplane. I’ve seen cabinet backs that had ugly reciprocating-saw marks left from the mill – even bark. To be honest, parts with saw marks and bark look to me more like firewood than furniture.
What should we do with these surfaces?
Here’s my approach: When these parts come out of a modern machine, they are covered in marks left from the jointer and the thickness planer. The boards are usually free of tear-out, bark and the nastiness you’ll see on the backs of historical pieces.
Should I rough these up with an adze and hatchet to imitate the look of the old pieces? Or perhaps just leave the machine marks?
Personally, I find machine marks ugly in all cases. I don’t ever want to see them. So I remove them with my jack plane or a coarsely set jointer plane. The result is that all the surfaces are touched with a plane of some sort – jack, jointer or smooth.
Those, I have decided, are the three textures I want to leave behind.