If you use a tenon cutter on the sticks (or spindles) of a chair, it can be a challenge to cut the tenon so it is perfectly centered on the stick and inline with the axis of the stick. This can be a problem no matter how you drive the tenon cutter – with a brace or with a drill.
This short video shows how I teach students to cut tenons. If you take these steps, your tenons will start to improve immediately. Practice will get you the rest of the way.
Note that there is a way to get perfect tenons every time with a tenon cutter. It involves a lathe and a jig. It’s ideal for making 200 tenons at a time. I’ll show that process some other day.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Shameless plug: This tip is straight from the pages of “The Stick Chair Book.” There are lots of little tricks like this in the book.
An offset and off-axis tenon. A common fault when using tenon cutters.
When I teach chairmaking, many students are hesitant to cut the underbevel on the band saw. It’s a straightforward and safe operation. The only trick is learning how to steer the seat. This short video shows how I go about it. Your first underbevel might look a little rough, but by the third one you’ll be an expert.
No matter how many words I write about reaming holes, my message doesn’t seem to get through. People ream for way too long, which burnishes the hole and cooks the reamer.
So I made this short video that shows how I ream holes and correct ones that are off. I hope this video helps any Baby Reamers along.
When chairmaker Chris Williams became concerned about brash wood, he devised a test to detect it. Put the stick up on blocks and whack it with a mallet.
Brash wood, which is very brittle, will usually snap in two.
I took Chris’s idea and expanded it. I now use “The Sledgehammer Test” to select wood for overall fitness for a high-stress application, such as a chair in a cowboy movie (surely all those chairs were made from brash wood). I perch a sample stick shaved down to the desired size on two 4x4s. Then I smack the middle of the stick with a metal mallet – hard.
If a stick is brash, it will snap in two.
If the grain runs out in the stick by more than a couple degrees, the board will crack along the grain.
And if the species isn’t really up to the task at that size (1/4” balsa sticks), it will self-destruct in a variety of ways.
The results can be comical. Some woods are almost indestructible – a 1/2”-diameter x 26” straight-grain ash stick will bounce the mallet right back into your face. And I’ve been able to break 3” x 3” x 24″ sticks of brash red oak like they were Twix candy bars.
Today I started making an Irish chair out of some European oak. Some of the grain was dead-straight but had some small hairline cracks. Some pieces didn’t have cracks. So I cut some samples to 1-1/8” x 1-1/8” (the finished size in the chair) and hit them with a sledge. For fun, I also took some European oak that I used for the seat that had about 10° of grain runout. I knew it wouldn’t survive the sledge, but it makes for a good video.
You can see the results above.
I have found the Sledgehammer Test to also be an excellent teaching tool. I recently had five professional woodworkers in the shop, and I showed them how to pick and saw wood for chairs. After they selected the wood for their sticks, we submitted the sticks to the Sledgehammer Test. The woodworkers quickly picked up on what the words “dead-straight grain” mean.
I know this test isn’t scientific, but it is practical. Even the Forest Products Laboratory has tested woods for brashness with an impact test – so I don’t think it’s only an excuse to hit things with a sledge.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. Shameless plug: You can read more about the Sledgehammer Test and how to pick wood for chairs in “The Stick Chair Book.“
The latest issue of Quercus Magazine is an important one. In the March/April 2022 issue, Editor Nick Gibbs pays tribute to chairmaker John Brown. It’s a heartfelt, first-person account of his work and friendship with JB, and it fills in a lot of interesting details about their working relationship.
Most importantly, it is an unromantic account, much like Chris Williams’s outstanding book, “Good Work.” As JB’s life recedes into the past, I have watched a lot of mythology get built up around his name, his words and his work.
I never met John Brown, but the people whose stories I trust come from his family, his close friends and his working associates, such as Gibbs and Williams.
As Gibbs writes, JB was a complex character. Occasionally contradictory at times in words and deeds. So Gibbs’s account is very much worth reading. As a bonus, it is beautifully written and is accompanied by essays from Williams, myself and Kenneth Kortemeier.
I won’t spoil it for you. If you are interested, please do pick up a copy.
In addition to the John Brown tribute, the issue is filled with a lot of practical hand-tool information. Some of it quirky, some of it fun. One of the things I like about Quercus is the variety of points of view, both geographically and skill-wise. Oh, and Gibbs likes the written word, so the balance between images and words is my speed.
No, Gibbs didn’t pay me to write this. Nor did he ask. In fact, I’m a little salty with him right now because he is putting me on a future cover. As many of you know, I would rather do naked somersaults down the middle of Main Strasse in Covington with lit sparklers in my butt than have my face appear in print. But I don’t want to be all like “Stop. Don’t. Come Back.”
