Category: The Stick Chair Book

This cherry six-stick comb-back chair features some new elements that I’ve been experimenting with during the last six months, including hexagonal legs, a mitered arm bow and splayed back sticks. This particular example is set up as a chair for dining or working at a desk, with a fairly upright back at 11° off the seat.

The back is not a simple arc. Instead, it is two arcs that terminate in a flat at the back of the chair. As a result, I think this chair is particularly comfortable.

The seat is 16-1/2” off the floor, so it is ideal for all sitters. The lumbar support is there, but it has been tempered for sitters who aren’t crazy about lots of lumbar support.

Like all my chairs, this one is assembled with hide glue and wedges. So it will be easy to repair by future generations. The finish is a homemade mix of linseed oil and beeswax and is completely safe – and also easy to renew or repair in the future.

The cherry is from the Ohio River Valley and was split and sawn to provide dead-straight grain on the sticks, stretchers and legs.

This chair is being sold via a random drawing. The chair is $1,400 plus domestic shipping. (sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.) If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 5 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, March 2. In the email please use the subject line “Chair Sale” and include your:

• First name and last name
• U.S. shipping address
• Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)

After all the emails have arrived on March 2, we will pick a winner that evening via a random drawing.

If you are the “winner,” the chair can be picked up at our storefront for free. Or we can ship it to you via common carrier. The crate is included in the price of the chair. Shipping a chair usually costs between $150 and $250, depending on your location.

— Christopher Schwarz

One day in the 1990s, a few of us at Popular Woodworking Magazine were talking to Troy Sexton – one of our contributors – about table saw blades. We asked Troy what blades he liked.

“Thin kerf,” he said. “Always thin kerf.”

One of the other editors scoffed a bit. “Why would you need a thin-kerf blade on your 5hp table saw?”

Troy said: “They save wood. The difference between a 1/8”-wide blade and a 3/32” blade makes all the difference at times.”

I couldn’t agree more. Today I was roughing out the parts for two new chairs from some precious material: bog oak that is between 2,000 and 4,000 years old. I would never buy this material for myself. It’s too rare and unpredictable. But local furniture maker Andy Brownell had some chair-sized scraps from a dining table commission. He generously let me pick through the scraps for pieces that had dead-straight grain and few splits.

I’ve worked with bog oak before. So I was skeptical that I could make a chair from it. But I also trust Andy’s judgment when it comes to wood. So I gathered up enough material to make a chair and headed home.

I started cutting into the oak on Friday and was absolutely amazed. The bog oak I had used years before was lightweight and brash (brittle). That oak was filled with tension, so pieces warped like crazy. And some chisel handles I turned from it broke in short order.

This stuff from Andy is different. It is heavy, stable and incredibly strong. I made some 3/4” x 3/4” sticks and hit them with a sledgehammer (the “sledgehammer test” in “The Stick Chair Book”). The sticks just bounced, as I would expect from straight oak that was cut last year.

Why the difference between this bog oak and the brittle stuff from a decade ago? I can’t say exactly. I am sure that one difference is in how quickly the two oaks grew. The bog oak from 10 years ago was very slow-growth stuff. So there were tons of pores. This new bog oak grew incredibly fast. Some of the growth rings were 1/4” to 3/8” apart. Fast-growing oak is much stronger than slow-growing oak.

The difference might also have been how the material was dried, handled and processed. I have no idea how the bog oak from a decade ago had been dried. But the new stuff came from M. Bohlke Lumber north of Cincinnati. Bohlke specializes in cutting and drying incredible and difficult woods. The Bohlke facility is nothing short of astonishing.

In any case, because of a thin-kerf table saw blade and lots of planning, I was able to squeeze parts for two chairs from the lumber I’d hoped to get one from. I did this by carefully resawing the curved parts from lumber that was 2-1/8” thick in the rough. Even with modern oak from a reputable kiln, resawing can be tricky. Tension in the wood can make the boards warp immediately when sawn through their thickness. And if the wood isn’t completely dry, the boards can curl later on.

This stuff was as stable as resawing MDF. 

Even though everything has been going well so far, I know that trouble lies ahead. All this bog oak is from one tree, which is great. But there is an amazing amount of color variance along the widths of the boards. The wood goes from a charcoal-amber to an almost pitch black. Juggling all those colors means I have to finish the parts before assembly to ensure my chairs don’t look like calico quilts.

Luckily, I have about three times as many sticks as I need for two chairs. Also, when building chairs you don’t need all the wood to match exactly. The wood in the horizontal plane (seat and arms) can be a little different than the stuff in the vertical plane (sticks). And the undercarriage (legs and stretchers) can be another shade without looking wrong. Light hits a chair differently than it hits a cabinet.

With all these variables with the material, I decided that the chairs’ designs shouldn’t be an additional one. The two chairs I am building are designs I have built many times, so there won’t be any surprises when it comes to angles or how the chairs’ forms will look. 

But I am sure there will be other difficulties ahead I can’t foresee.

— Christopher Schwarz

Since the publication of “The Stick Chair Book,” I’ve received many complaints that some of the tools I use in the book are expensive or there is a wait list to receive them. Most notably, the Veritas Tapered Tenon Cutters, Veritas Tapered Reamers (Large) and Veritas Power Tenon Cutters. Also, people gripe about the expense of scorps and travishers.

My goal with “The Stick Chair Book” was to keep the tool kit as small as possible, without asking readers to make the whole chair using only a pocketknife.

So the criticism stung a bit because I thought my tool list was quite reasonable.

During the last six months, I have tried out a lot of new tools and methods to see if I could make the tool list even cheaper and more accessible. Many of these experiments were expensive failures. (Don’t buy the Lumberjack tenon cutters. Just don’t. Anyone want to buy a set of Lumberjack tenon cutters?)

But I have had a few “a-ha” moments, which I am going to share here. Here is the first of several ways to reduce your tool bill.

Rule-breaking Tenons

Aside from the legs, almost all of the rest of the joints in a stick chair can be 5/8” in diameter. I’ve used the Veritas Power Tenon Cutter (the 5/8” is $99.90) for many years and love it. There can be a wait to buy these, and some people consider them expensive.

As an alternative, I decided to investigate plug cutters, which are used to make wooden plugs and sometimes tenons using a drill press. Most plug cutters warn you to use the tool only in a drill press. But I thought there was a way to make them work in a brace or handheld electric drill.

I was right. All you have to do is taper the end of your stock so it fits inside the mouth of the plug cutter. Then you can easily shave the tenon with a plug cutter that’s powered by a drill or brace.

To get the tenons perfect, you need your stock to be held level in a vise. And you need the tool to also be level. Plug cutters don’t come with levels installed on them. But you can epoxy an inexpensive bubble level (they are less than $1 each) to your drill (or the chuck of your hand-powered brace) to do the job. 

A premium 5/8” plug cutter is $26. You can get utility ones for a few dollars. If you want to make it easy to taper the end of the stock consistently before cutting the tenons, also buy a chamfer/deburring cutter ($10). These are normally used to chamfer the ends of steel bolts, so they do a fine job on wood.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Yes, I know you can make the 5/8” tenons with a block plane alone. I consider it a tedious technique when I have 16 sticks that have to be tenoned perfectly on both ends.

I don’t have to go into the spade bit business. 

After my Feb. 7, 2022, post about how awful the new Irwin Speedbor bits have become, a couple readers suggested I try the WoodOwl spades. I didn’t know that WoodOwl made spade bits and had never seen them for sale.

So I purchased some from Hardwick & Sons and tested them up against my NOS (new old stock) Speedbors that were fresh from the package. And I tested them against some of the new, frustrating Irwin Speedbors – the ones missing their rim spurs.

The 5/8” WoodOwls cut just as fast as my trusty old Speedbors. They are exactly the same size (.635” diameter at the rim spurs) and weigh one-third less. Though the WoodOwl bits are made in China (not Japan), the machining is excellent, both on the bit and bit’s shaft. 

So, problem solved. Don’t buy the Speedbor’s for chairmaking. Buy the WoodOwls. 

The only open question is how good the steel is in the WoodOwls. I’m building a chair right now and should have that answer soon enough.

This two-bit drama reminded me of a Crucible tool I had worked on for a while and then set aside. I was trying to come up with a bit extension that didn’t wobble and held bits firmly, especially when you pull out of the hole. The Bosch bit extender is the best in the market, but it still wobbles more than I like.

So I built a prototype of a bit extender that is promising. Now designer Josh Cook and I are chewing it over to see if we can make something accurate, useful and inexpensive.

— Christopher Schwarz