This lowback stick chair is made using a stash of old Honduras mahogany I have been sitting on since writing “Campaign Furniture.” The mahogany had been sitting for decades at Midwest Woodworking until they closed a few years back. This chair is made from one single board, so the color is consistent throughout all its parts.
This lowback design and my Gibson chair are the two most comfortable chairs I make. The chair offers excellent lumbar support for hours of sitting, relaxing or working. The seat is 16-3/4” off the floor. Overall, it is 28” tall, 28” wide and 22” deep.
The chair is finished with two coats of garnet shellac plus black wax. All the joints are assembled with hide glue and oak wedges so the chair can be easily repaired by future generations.
The chair’s design comes from “The Stick Chair Book” but with some small variations. The arm is made with five pieces (instead of four) to reduce wood-movement). Plus, this mahogany chair features hexagonal legs and old-style hands, which fits in with the wood and its deep scarlet finish.
The chair is $1,600 and is being sold via a random drawing. To enter, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, March 29. In the email, please use the subject line “March lowback” and include your name, shipping address and phone number (this is used for a trucking quote only). The winner will be contacted on Wednesday after the drawing closes.
On shipping: You can pick up the chair at our storefront, or I will deliver it for free within 100 miles of Cincinnati. Otherwise, I can ship it via common carrier to addresses in the continental U.S. This usually costs between $200 and $300, depending on where you live.
I have just finished this seven-stick comb-back chair, in 2,000-year-old bog oak, that is set up for dining or use as in an office. I’m offering it for sale here via silent auction. Details are below. First, some specifics on the chair.
This seven-stick chair is made from bog oak that is 2,000 years old that was excavated in Poland. The seat is 16-7/8” off the floor. The back sticks lean 9° off the seat. And the seat is pitched back about 4° off level. So this chair is nice for both dining and keyboarding. If the buyer wishes, I can trim the rear legs to increase the seat tilt. This will make the chair strike a balance between dining and relaxing.
For this chair, I pillowed the hands much like an old Welsh chair.
The chair is 39-1/4” tall. The seat is 20” wide with 19” between the arms.
All the wood is cut from one tree, but the color and texture varies throughout all the parts, which is part of the charm of this material.
All the joints are assembled with hide glue, which is easily repairable by future generations. The finish is a beeswax and linseed oil blend, which is free of toxic solvents and is also easily repairable.
The wood graduates in color from almost black to milk chocolate.
I’m selling this chair via a silent auction. To bid, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, March 22. In the email, please use the subject line “March chair sale” and include your name, shipping address, phone number (this is used for a trucking quote only) and your bid. There is no minimum bid, and the highest bid wins. The winner will be contacted on Wednesday after the auction closes.
On shipping: You can pick up the chair at our storefront, or I will deliver it for free within 100 miles of Cincinnati. Otherwise, I can ship it via common carrier to addresses in the continental U.S. This usually costs between $200 and $300, depending on where you live.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. The next chair will be sold via a random drawing.
The stretchers are quite low on this chair, which adds to its stability and its old look.
The seat is one single plank. The dark front edge was close to the bark of the tree.
This mahogany is likely older than I am. It comes with baggage.
Next week I teach a class here in building the lowback stick chair from “The Stick Chair Book” to a class of six students. Our lumberyard was low on straight-grained 8/4 red oak that was ideal for chairmaking, and I barely squeaked out enough material for six chairs.
I always build a chair during a class for two reasons. One, if a student commits a fatal error at any point, I can hand them my parts so they can continue. Also, if no disasters occur during the class, I have a chair to sell at the end of the class that can be less expensive (because I’ve already been paid for teaching the class).
But I didn’t find enough oak for me to build a chair. So I went to my cellar and pulled out a gorgeous board of old Honduran mahogany left over from my “Campaign Furniture” book.
I have a small fortune of mahogany down there, much of it from the 1950s to 1970s, that I purchased when Midwest Woodworking in Norwood, Ohio, closed its doors. Some of it is 20” wide. I love working with the stuff, and I know it will make one hell of a stick chair.
But I have misgivings about the material.
Yes, there are environmental problems with using rainforest woods. Plus, there are social ones that not everyone knows about. As someone who deals in wood every day and talks to people in many areas of the industry, I have little faith that all South American exotics are produced by free laborers.
You might be thinking: Wait, this wood was cut 50 years ago. It has done no recent environmental or labor harm. While that’s true, promoting the use of the wood by showing it here doesn’t help today’s situation. Someone might look at the chair and say: Damn. I definitely want to build my next chair out of mahogany. And so they buy some mahogany, which encourages the continued harvesting of it.
Mahogany is beautiful, beautiful stuff, so this is a logical reaction.
So I am telling you all this so you know the caveats I have with this material.
If you do want to make a stick chair using mahogany, I have a good suggestion. Buy sinker mahogany from a reputable seller such as Hearne Hardwoods. Sinker mahogany is stuff that sank in the rivers as it was being transported about 100 years ago or so. It survived underwater and has been recovered, cut and dried. It is gorgeous stuff – I’ve worked with it.
It can smell a little fishy when you cut it, but the smell dissipates quickly, and the finished piece does not smell like a tuna sandwich left out in the sun.
— Christopher Schwarz
The chair will have hexagonal legs, which are great fun to bundle together like honeycomb.
The Veritas Power Tenon Cutters are incredible tools. They are based on the old hollow auger tools, but they are easier to set, maintain and use. They make perfect round tenons, and you don’t have to use a drill to power them. I have used a brace, and my right hand at times, to make tenons.
The tools have a bit of a learning curve. Many people end up with tenons that are slightly off-center. Or worse, wildly off-axis.
I first started using these tenons cutters when I was in my “willow furniture phase” in about 2000, so I have thought about these tools a lot and used them a lot. The following video shows my tips for how to get the tenon centered on your stock.
If you like this sort of hard-won information, you’ll find more of it in my three chairmaking products:
For the last year I’ve been building chairs using slabs of bog oak that are 2,000 years old (according to a carbon dating test) and was harvested in Poland.
Furniture maker Andy Brownell is responsible for starting me down this path. He offered me some scraps of bog oak from one of his commission pieces. After experimenting with it and building a chair using the scraps, I was sold.
Together we bought a large chunk of a bog oak tree. It was the most I have ever spent on a single load of wood. However, don’t be freaked by that statement. Because I work almost entirely with common domestic woods that aren’t highly figured, my lumber bill has always been minimal.
This entry is about my experiences with the wood – good and bad. I’ve worked before with some older bog oak from Denmark, so I have a little perspective. But I am not an expert. Trees, like people, are individuals and are weird.
The hammer test I perform with chair parts.
Strength
My biggest concern with the bog oak was that it wasn’t strong enough to use for a chair. This is oak that has been in a peat bog for 2,000 years and is on its way to becoming petrified. After wallowing in an anaerobic environment filled with turtle poop, is it too weak?
The good news is that the tree we bought was fast-grown oak. Some of the annular rings are 3/8” apart. Fast-grown oak is typically stronger than slow-grown oak. Also, the grain was incredibly straight, except at the butt of the tree. I have never worked with wood that is this rod-straight.
I made some sample chair-sized parts – legs, stretchers, sticks and arms. Then I propped the test pieces up on 4×4 blocks and smacked them with our lump hammer. Hard. They all survived just fine. No cracking, though they dented a little more easily than modern European oak.
Because the parts passed the test, I made some chairs using the bog oak.
Working Properties
The bog oak feels a bit like plowing dirt at times, instead of slicing wood. The wood requires more effort to saw, chisel and shape than modern European oak (which I have a lot of experience with). I also feel like it is more difficult to get a finished surface, but it’s not because of tear-out. It’s because the stuff is dense and resists you.
It smells quite a bit when you cut it with electric machines. And the smell it makes is: bottomland. Mud, dirt and cod poo. But it’s not awful. The worst-smelling wood I ever used was mahogany that had been sunk in the Amazon for 200 years. When you cut it, it smelled like rotten, burning fish that had been injected right into your nose.
The smell goes away quickly. And the finished pieces have zero smell (just like normal wood).
A slab of bog oak that shows the color variation.
Color
Bog oak gets darker as it percolates in the bog. I’ve worked with 4,000-year-old stuff that is almost black. This 2,000-year-old stuff has lots of variation. The wood by the bark is nearly black. The majority of the heartwood is a chocolate brown. And some parts are tan or khaki. And you see that variation all in one board from one tree.
So you have to think about color the entire time, even though the wood comes from the same damn tree. A stick from the bark part of the tree can look radically different from a stick 3″ away.
Downsides and Defects
Wood that has been under ground/water for a long time can have some faults. I find far more structural faults with bog oak than standard European oak. Some of these splits and cracks look like the result of the wood being dried. Other cracks look much older (something killed this tree and sent it into the bog).
When ripping up the stuff, you absolutely have to pay close attention to the end grain and look for splits. Most of the splits I have found are near the pith of the tree, but I have also found some out by the bark.
I reject anything with a split for structural parts (basically all my chair parts). These pieces are fine for boxes or stuff that doesn’t support a human body, but shakes and chair parts don’t go together.
The other odd quality of the wood is that it’s not good for making wedges. I made many bog oak wedges to secure the legs and sticks of the chair. It was poor wedge material. When struck on its end grain, the bog oak was mushy and split easily. (Even though it was strong when struck 90° to the end grain – weird.)
Here you can see the color variation.
The Upside
The stuff is beautiful, even with simple finishes. I use linseed oil and beeswax, and the range of color is extraordinary, from coal black to an olive green. Plus, after five or six chairs, I have found ways to use this color shift to my advantage in the design.
All in all, the stuff is worth working with. The prices I fetch for bog oak chairs make it worth the effort. However, I wouldn’t want to work with it exclusively. It is recalcitrant. And I am always happy to start saddling a chair in modern red oak or white oak after working the boggy stuff for a couple weeks.
Where to get it? There are vendors who specialize in the stuff. I don’t have experience buying from them, so do your research. Andy and I bought our bog oak from M. Bohlke, a long-time local supplier of amazing woods.
