Category: The Anarchist’s Design Book

Gluing and wedging the legs into the seat is pretty easy if you don’t have stretchers between the legs. But there are still lots of opportunities to mess things up and get into a bind when you open the glue bottle.

Here’s how I prepare for the glue up so I don’t have many surprises.

First I knock the legs into the seat and pencil around all the tenons – both above the seat and below the seat. The mark around the tenon above the seat tells me about where I should crosscut the tenon before assembly. The mark around the tenon below the seat tells me at what point I should stop sawing a kerf for the wedges.

With the legs still in the seat, I also number each one and mark its position in the seat so the leg’s annular rings run parallel to the grain in the seat. I know that this runs contrary to some sound advice out there. Here’s my rationale:

If the legs are going to shrink, they are going to shrink more in the direction parallel to the rings than they will shrink perpendicular to the rings (that’s the way trees work). So I want to apply a wedge against the annular rings to resist this shrinkage. So the annular rings in my legs run front to back, the grain in the seat runs front to back and the wedge cuts across the legs’ annular rings.

Honest: I am not trying to talk anyone into doing it this way, and I am certain other tactics work. But this is what suits my head at this time.

Then I kerf the tenons with a tenon saw, stopping short of the pencil line representing the underside of the seat.

I gather all the materials I need for assembly and lay them out on the bench. This includes extra wedges, rags, a toothbrush for cleaning up the glue, a cup of hot water, several mallets and hammers and a 1/2″ chisel.

To assemble, I paint hide glue on the inside of one mortise. Then I paint glue on its tenon and drive the leg home. I strike the leg with a 2-1/2 lb. sledge until its stops moving into the seat when I strike it. Repeat for the other three legs.

I clean up any glue on the underside of the seat then flip it over.

Usually, driving the legs into the seat will close up the kerfs I just sawed in the tenons. Instead of trying to wedge the closed kerf and risk destroying some wedges, I open up each kerf with a 1/2″ chisel and a few mallet blows. This reduces wedge failure by about 345 percent.

I paint glue on a wedge and drive it in with my hand sledge. When the wedge stops moving, I stop hitting it.

Finally I clean up all the glue I can find with rags and a toothbrush. I put the chair on a bench and walk away, resisting the urge to fiddle with it too much and make it worse.

— Christopher Schwarz

There’s almost certainly a sort of Reinheitsgebot for chairmakers. If you don’t use hand tools at every stage, you receive one evil eye.

Truth is, lots of chairmakers I know use power tools at some stage of the process. Many use a band saw. Others use an angle grinder to roughly shape their seats. Many use electric lathes. And a few – gasp – use sandpaper.

Me, I’m indifferent to this claptrap. I like to use the tools I like to use. I avoid the tools I dislike. Simple.

So this is how I saddle my seats.

I don’t have an adze. Why? I don’t know; it just never happened. Sure, I’ve tried a few adzes here and there at woodworking shows, but I’ve always started saddling my seats with a scorp (mine is from Barr Specialty Tools). It takes longer than if I had an adze, but I’m happy I don’t have to take care of an additional tool.

So after marking out the saddle I begin by traversing the seat with the scorp. Traversing in chairmaking is not like traversing with a jack plane. You don’t work with the cutter 90° to the grain.

Instead you pull the tool directly across the grain, but you angle its cutter in the direction the grain is flowing in the board. If this sounds odd to you, try it with a jack plane. Say you are traversing a board where the grain directions runs from right to left. The best plan is to push the tool directly across the grain of the board but angle it 30° to the left.

Try it and it will click.

I usually bottom my seats to be about 5/8” deep at the deepest point near the back of the seat. Then I saddle it about 3/8” near the front of the seat.

After I get it as clean as possible with a scorp, I switch to a travisher (mine is from Claire Minihan). Again, I work across the grain with the tool angled in the direction of the grain. I take lighter and lighter cuts as I work. When I can’t refine the surface any more, I switch to a card scraper.

I scrape out the tops of the dawks and try to remove any high spots my fingers can feel. I scrape and scrape until I can’t get it looking any better.

Then, finally, I wrap a piece of #180-grit sandpaper around a cork sanding block and try to refine the surface even more. After I scuff up the surface entirely with the sandpaper, I come back with a scraper and remove the sanding scratches.

The last 15 minutes of the process is me switching back and forth between a scraper and sandpaper, trying to get it as perfect as possible.

Eventually I give up – never satisfied with the final surface. But that’s typical.

— Christopher Schwarz

On Wednesday we will begin to take orders for people who would like handmade copperplate prints from “The Anarchist’s Design Book” made by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Because of the time and expense in offering these prints, however, we are going to offer these only one time.

We will offer all 12 prints for individual sale at $110 each. If you order the complete set for $1,300, they will come in a handmade custom box made at Ohio Book in Cincinnati.

Ordering will be open during February and March. Then, in April, we will close ordering and Briony will start making the prints and they will ship out to you in special protective packaging. Check out this short film on how Briony made the prints.

Each print will be made on cotton rag paper that measures 11” x 15-3/4” (approximately).

I’ve had a set of these prints in my shop now for a year and they are just stunning. Modern printing methods pale in comparison to the clarity, texture and imperfection of a copperplate print.

We hesitated in offering these prints because they are expensive in comparison to the Farrah Fawcett poster you still have from college. But, like a fine tool or piece of handmade furniture, these prints have an intangible quality that I like.

If you’d like to see them in person before you purchase one, please stop by our storefront on our open days on Feb. 11 and March 11. I’ll have the complete set on hand, including the handmade box from Ohio Book.

— Christopher Schwarz

There are two reasons I bore and ream the mortises for a chair before saddling the seat. 1) Saddling the seat removes any spelching made by the drill bit. Or, put another way, I don’t spelch my newly saddled seat. And 2) If I mess up the boring or reaming then I haven’t wasted as much time if I’d saddled the seat.

Like many chairmakers, I use sightlines and resultant angles to bore and ream my mortises for the legs. And I’ve figured out how to do it without any trig. Or numbers. Or words. (OK, scratch the “or words.” The words and explanation are covered fully in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” </blowhard advertisement>.)

With this chair I use the same angles as the staked chair in the book. So use the drawing above to draw your sightlines and set your sliding bevel square (which Roubo calls the “false square,” which amuses me greatly, which wasn’t supposed to be amusing but is).

Bore the 5/8” hole for the mortises, using the sliding bevel as a guide for your bit. I put a backer board under the seat so I can bore straight through without thinking/stopping. When the shavings change color I rotate the brace twice more and pull out.

Reaming is similar. But instead of using the bit as a guide for the bevel square, I use the shell of my chuck. This is why I love the chuck of my Yankee brace. It is a straight cylinder. Some chucks are fancy shaped like a baluster. They’re pretty, but they are no help when reaming.

Ever four turns or so, I pull out and check my angle using a dowel with a tapered tenon on the end. I can’t check my work (easily) using the actual legs because they are all kinds of tapered.

Then I drive all four legs into their mortises, stand back and make sure the whole thing doesn’t look like a bandy-legged goat.

And only then do I start to saddle the seat.

— Christopher`Schwarz

All the legs featured in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” are octagonal or square in section – this makes them easy to make without a lathe. For this chair design, I decided to turn the legs but make the shape simple enough that you could shave them if, again, you are lathe-less in Louisiana.

This shape of leg is a modernized bamboo turning. The top section of the leg tapers and flows into the leg’s tapered tenon. The taper begins 6-1/2″ from the top of the leg and tapers from 1-1/2″ to 5/8″ at the top of the tenon. The bottom section of the leg tapers to 1″ at the floor.

This profile looks nice with the 12.8° taper I use on my tenons. However, if you use a different angle, I’m going to show you how I laid out the leg so you can design it to suit your tools.

First I made the leg blanks into 1-1/2″ x 1-1/2″ x 19″ octagons. I chucked them in the lathe and turned the leg to a straight cylinder (note that after you get the leg dimensions figured out you can skip this step to save time).

Then I marked the length of my tenon (3″) on the leg and turned the tenon very slightly oversized. The tenon starts as 1-1/16″ in diameter and tapers to 5/8″ at the top.

With the taper roughed in I took a straightedge and held it up to the taper and eyeballed where this taper would end at the full diameter of the leg. This guess is about 6-1/2″ from the top. I could have drawn it out in CAD, but I like wood better than pixels.

I marked the cylinder at 6-1/2″ from the top of the leg and then turned the remainder of the top taper to that point. Note that I turned a small groove where the tenon began. This is an important mark when you shave the tenon to its final size.

The rest is easy. I turned the bottom taper from the 6-1/2″ line down to the bottom of the leg. The bottom of the leg is 1″ in diameter. In the photo above I’m looking for humps with a straightedge.

Then I removed the leg from the lathe and used my tapered tenon cutter to shave the tenon to the perfect shape and size. It took only a few turns to do. When I shaved the legs in the tenon cutter I stopped cutting right at the groove I turned in the leg.

Then I sanded the legs (avoiding the tenons) with #180-grit sandpaper and got ready to leg up the chair. That’s tomorrow’s entry.

— Christopher Schwarz