All my books sold through Lost Art Press will be signed by me.
All my books that you buy through Lost Art Press will be signed by me through 2024.
It takes a few hours of my time each week, but we are thrilled we can offer this small personal touch now that we have our fulfillment center up and running in Covington, Kentucky.
We also will offer the PG-13 “Sharpen This” sticker when you buy “Sharpen This.” (Our bestselling product of 2023.
This personal-touch stuff is what we have always wanted to offer our customers, but we were hobbled by our efficient but inflexible fulfillment center in Indianapolis.
More personal stuff on the way (no, you won’t be able to buy my underwear).
— Christopher Schwarz
All copies of “Sharpen This” come signed by the author and with this free sticker.
One of the more difficult bends I make. This is for a Welsh chair I measured at St Fagans.
I love using Cold-Bend Hardwood for the bent parts of my stick chairs. During the last 10 years I have basically a 0 percent failure rate with the stuff (the only failure was my fault – more on that in a bit).
When I steam-bend arms, I typically lose about one-third of my bends.
People think it’s expensive. I disagree. Each chair arm costs me about $100 in material. But there is almost no time involved in making the bends. Today I opened a new pack of Cold-Bend Hardwood, sliced it to size and bent three chair arms (by myself) in less than 45 minutes.
When I steam-bend an arm, I have to find and purchase some suitable material (that takes time). Rive it out (more time). Then slice it, steam it and bend it. And then 33.33 percent of the bends fail during the bend or during drying.
If you live in a forest and have the space and time, steam-bending is ideal. When you live in the city, have no land and every minute counts, Cold-Bend Hardwood is the way to go.
Note the holdfasts that secure the form. And the extra length sticking out the front of the bend. And the calm atmosphere….
My Tips Below
Before you even order the stuff, build your bending forms because you need to bend the stuff within a few days of its arrival. The packaging will get damaged in shipment. The plastic will get a tiny hole in it. And your stuff will dry out.
Do not let it sit around. Assume the plastic is letting out moisture.
Order stuff that is overlong by about 18” to 24”. You need the extra length to provide leverage as you make the bend. If you won’t do this, you’ll need to use a bending strap with a long handle to give you leverage.
That extra length is the difference between a cakewalk and a desperate slog.
Order stuff that is the correct thickness for your bend. You cannot joint and plane this stuff. It will explode in your machinery. You can’t rip it on the table saw (crosscuts are OK). Again, it will self-destruct.
There are only two ways to dimension the stuff when it’s wet: the band saw and abrasion. After it is dry you can machine it and shape it with hand tools. But until then: band saw and sanding only.
I fasten my bending forms to the end of my bench with holdfasts. The holdfasts pass through both the form and the benchtop. Simply clamping the form to the benchtop rarely goes well. The form comes loose during the bend.
Allow some extra length at the beginning of the bend. This extra length (cut away later) will allow you to screw a batten across the arm and remove it from the form to dry.
I had one arm crack during a bend when using Cold-Bend Hardwood. The reason was simple: I had waited too long to make the bend, and the stuff had dried out. The fresher the stuff is, the easier it is to bend. I cannot emphasize this enough.
If you are wondering how the stuff is made and how it works (it’s like magic), the company’s website has all that information. If you are wondering if other companies make the stuff, the answer is yes. There’s a place in Amish country in Ohio that makes its own, but they don’t sell to the public. They make the bends for you. I also knew a couple chairmakers in Middletown, Ohio, that made the stuff in their chair factory. They have disappeared. And there are companies in Europe that make it. Google “comp wood” or “compression hardwood” for more details.
The 5/8″ Trident, Drill Extension and Stick Chair Spindle Bushing.
I keep telling myself that modern spade bits are not great, but they’re OK. But I am lying to myself. Anytime I use a NOS (New Old Stock) Irwin spade I am shocked by how good the old ones are compared to the modern stuff.
During the last few chairmaking classes I taught, the modern spade bits could barely make it through one chair before becoming useless. And the cutting geometry was so poor that you had to push with all your might to get them to bite.
So until I find a good (I’d settle for decent) brand of spade bit, I’m looking elsewhere.
But here’s the deal: The bit is resharpenable ($8 to $14 for the job), and it cuts with far less effort than a spade. The Trident comes insanely sharp and plowed through all the mortises for four stick chairs without complaint. And it was still razor sharp at the end.
The Trident in use.
There is a little more fussing around when drilling the mortises through the arm and seat with the Drill Extension. You have to detach the bit and extension to drill the mortise in the seat. But after drilling mortises for one chair (that’s 26 mortises), it became an intuitive operation. So the plusses way outweigh the minuses.
The biggest surprise with the equipment was the little plastic Stick Chair Bushing. It centers the bit in the mortise through the arm. I laughed when I saw it. “Yea right, I’m not using that.”
I fricking love it, and it will reduce errors with students.
Speaking of students, I’m going to switch over to this drilling system for classes. I’m tired of watching students struggle with sub-par spade bits. And I’m tired of smelling the smoking wood as some of the spades have to practically burn their way through the wood after four or five holes.
I am happy to recommend this gear for all makers of stick chairs. I only wish we had a manufacturer of spade bits that did as good a job as BB Custom Tools. Nice work, Kyle and Patrick.
The tour at the High Wycombe Chair-making Museum begins almost the moment you arrive. You ring the bell on the front door. Robert Bishop answers and welcomes you into a room filled with chairs, tools and photographs. You sit down, and bam – he begins telling you a story.
You are hooked. And for the next two hours you live out the trials, highs and lows of the chairmakers of High Wycombe.
The Chair-making Museum is unlike any museum I’ve visited. Yes, there are amazing original objects from High Wycombe’s past. There are documents laid out everywhere on the tables for you to examine. The walls are covered in tools and historical photographs.
One of the many displays of original tools.
You could easily spend an hour just looking at the materials. But then you’d miss the delightful tale of High Wycombe as told by Robert Bishop.
Robert is an accomplished turner, and his work is sold in the galley upstairs from the museum. But he’s also a historian of the people who produced 4,700 chairs a DAY in this beautiful valley in the Chilterns (about 28 miles outside London).
What is most delightful about Robert’s presentation is that it is told from the perspective of the people who made the chairs and owned the chairmaking shops.
He begins in the beech woods surrounding High Wycombe and explains the day-to-day life of the “bodgers” who harvested the stands of lumber to make legs and stretchers for the chair shops. Robert doesn’t offer a romantic view, which we’ve heard before. Instead, it is a purely practical explanation of the work as told by the bodgers to Robert.
It’s the tale of a fascinating micro-economy. The bodgers were accomplished green woodworkers who could turn a billet into a leg in about 3 minutes on a pole lathe. They were efficient. They helped their fellow bodgers. And they lived in town.
Robert’s stories spanned the history of 19th-century High Wycombe. He tells about the life of the 11-year-olds pressed into work at the chair factories – detailing their duties and the things they learned before they turned 17 and were sent to work at the bench.
He recalls the beginning of the chair industry in High Wycombe – acting out the voices of the main characters. Then tells the tale of shops who defied the High Wycombe chairmakers (it isn’t a good end). And explains the details of how difficult it was to get chairs to London for sale.
I don’t want to spoil too much of the story. Even if you have no particular interest in chairmaking, Robert tells a great tale.
But for chairmakers, there are interesting delights in the details.
The collection of Windsor chairs is well-curated. Robert has picked out good examples – chairs that the V&A Museum in London should display (but they don’t). He has a gorgeous Forest Windsor – an early chair that (of course) I fell in love with.
Aside from the chairs, there are the tools. Robert has two working lathes acquired from local bodgers – a pole lathe and a treadle lathe. Both in perfect working order. There’s a tool chest filled with tools from a chairmaker. Plus walls of tools that Robert has himself collected from area chairmakers.
I was struck by so many things during the visit. Here are just two details to consider.
The bending form used to bend saplings into arms over seven days.
Bending wood without steam. Robert showed photos of how bodgers would make bent armbows using a beech sapling and a form. Each day the sapling was bent a little more on the form and held in place with pegs. By the seventh day the armbow was fully bent. Then a batten was affixed to the armbow to hold it in place while it dried. Robert had an example there with the bark still on it.
A nice shavehorse that Robert acquired from one of the last bodgers at High Wycombe.
Note the teeth on the top and the bottom of the billet.
2. An English shavehorse with bite. Many of the tools in the museum were acquired directly from the bodgers as the trade wound down in the 20th century. Robert acquired the shavehorse of one of the last working bodgers. It is your typical English horse, but the jaw features iron teeth that hold the work. Obvious, yes, but also amazing.
I can’t say enough good things about the tour. It is worth the journey from London and the 4 pounds. After the tour, I had to catch a train back to London to meet my family for dinner, so I couldn’t pick Robert’s brain or have dinner at the Bird in Hand.
But maybe you can.
A highly recommended day.
— Christopher Schwarz
The forest chair in the collection. So nice (replaced legs).
Two curved-back armchairs in bog oak, by Andy Brownell.
Over the last year, Christopher Schwarz and I have been making our way through the last of the bog oak boule we split between us. To date, it’s been used for tables, sculpture and a bunch of chairs. As I wrap up my final two chairs from this ancient and preserved tree, Chris has been kind enough to help let the world know these two pieces are for sale.
The price is $2,800 a piece, or $5,000 for the pair, plus shipping for anyone living outside of a 150-mile radius of Cincinnati. Here’s a quick run-down on these two chairs:
They’re both made from the darkest parts of a bog oak tree sourced from M. Bohlke Lumber, originally imported from Poland. We had a sample of the tree sent to a lab for radiocarbon dating; it’s 2,175 years old. One of the chairs is exceptionally dark, almost charcoal-like in some areas.
The design is modified from the curved-back armchair from Chris’s “The Stick Chair Book” (Lost Art Press).
The most obvious design change is the addition of a medial stretcher to the leg assembly. I think this addition not only gives the chairs additional strength, it also makes them feel more grounded and balanced with the upper part of the chair. All the undercrriage parts are joined with through-tenons.
The legs are hexagons, rather than octagons, and gradually taper to round at the top.
The seat has curved sides, rather than straight ones in the original plan. I find this to be a nice visual complement to the curves in the arms.
The underside of the seat has a curved bevel with a recessed edge to make the seat appear thinner.
I’ve pinned the back ends of the arm supports to their supporting sticks for extra strength.
The backrest is made from sequential bent lamination to create a consistency in grain and color across the entire part. The curved profile is intentionally heavier towards the top.
All of the edges have a heavy roundover for maximum comfort.
