Nearly all vernacular chairs use straight (not tapered) cylindrical tenons throughout.
Before I owned a tapered tenon cutter and reamer, I used a 1”-diameter auger to make the mortise in the seat, and I shaved the tenons on the legs to size with planes. This requires great care.
You can greatly speed the process by using a plug cutter in a drill or a brace to cut the tenons. These inexpensive tools ($16 to $38) are widely available. They are supposed to be used “only in a drill press,” but you can use them safely in a handheld drill or brace as long as you first taper the tip of your tenon.
I make this taper with a jack plane. First I drill a shallow 1”-diameter hole in the center of the end of the leg to act as a target to work toward. Then I use a coarse-set jack plane to waste away the top of the leg until the tenon cutter just barely fits over the tip of the leg.
Next I level the leg in my vise, and I level the tenon cutter (I use a bubble level I epoxied to my drill’s body). Then I drill. It makes a nearly perfect 1”-diameter tenon (0.995”). The tenon has a shoulder, which I like for mechanical reasons. I like to lock the shoulder against the underside of the seat and lock the tenon in the top of the seat with a wedge. But you can plane away the shoulder if you like. Here’s a short movie that shows the tenon-cutting process.
I haven’t built a four-stick chair for a long time. Not because I don’t like the form, but because I have been focused on chairs from “The Stick Chair Book.”
But as I sorted through the load of beautiful bog oak I got from fellow woodworker Andy Brownell, I realized something. I could squeeze two chairs out of the material. But barely. So thanks to some creative cutting I wound up with parts for both a six-stick chair and (squeakily) a four-stick chair.
Because I was unsure about the material (its stability, strength, color), I decided to begin by building a chair form I could make while sleeping.
This four-stick chair is made from bog oak that is between 2,000 and 4,000 years old that was excavated in Poland. The seat is 16-3/4” off the floor. The back sticks lean 15° off the seat. And the seat is pitched back two fingers off level. So this chair is very nice for both dining and relaxing – a tough wire to walk.
All the wood is cut from one log, but the color and texture varies throughout all the parts. As a result, the surface finish was a huge challenge. No matter how much effort I threw at getting perfect surfaces, some areas just refused to cooperate (such as the front tenon on the left hand). So there are small areas of this chair that are imperfect, though the form as a whole is completely sound.
The wood is stunning – almost impossible to capture in photographs. It varies from a dusty charcoal to an English brown oak to areas that have a faint olive cast to them. I’ve spent about an hour just taking in the colors on the chair’s surfaces.
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.
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 9. In the email, please include your name, your shipping address, your 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.
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.
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.
As long as I avoided all the small splits, the bog oak was incredibly robust.
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.
Because of resawing, one shoe became two.
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.
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.
A cheap chamfer/deburring cutter prepares your stock for the plug/tenon cutter.
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.
The plug cutter makes a perfect tenon. You just have to taper the shoulder into the tenon to clean things up.
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.
