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.
I bought this stock tank at Tractor Supply. The stove is from France. Yin and yang indeed.
During the summer my steam box took its last hot breath. The interior bits had rotted away, as had the door and its hinges. I pitched the thing, planning to build a replacement.
Then I thought: Am I really happy with the Earlex wallpaper steamer that powers it? It’s fine for small chair parts, but I probably need an additional steamer to keep the temperature constant when dealing with thick armbows.
I did some math in my head and decided to try something different.
I bought a stock tank – a steel watering trough for farm animals – that measures 1’ x 2’ x 6’. Then I put it on my gas stove in the kitchen to heat the water.
Filling the stock tank at the sink.
Boiling your bits is just as effective as steaming them. On Monday I bent my first two arms (1” x 1-3/8” x 51” in red oak) using the new setup. The tank is bigger than I really need, but I might teach a chair class in the future where we bend the arms.
How did it work? Fine, as expected. The only pain-in-the-butt part was removing the water from the stock tank. This one doesn’t have a drain (yet), so I had to scoop out the water into the sink.
Wally was interested in the operation – too interested. I ended up locking him in the spare bedroom so I didn’t make Wally Stew.
I also had a constant worry that the cats were going to jump in the hot tank, and I’d find three floating carcasses in there. (Actually, I was only worried about Wally. He’s both curious and dumb.)
So for the next batch of arms, I’m probably going to buy a propane camp stove ($150) and do the operation outside.
Bonus: For our next party, I’ll have a great place to chill the beer in the stock tank. And I’ll have additional cooking facilities for making chili (with black beans, not Wally-flavored) as I smoke some ribs.
This stick chair features some of my favorite details on older chairs: low side stretchers (with no medial stretcher), plus faceted short sticks and a newly designed skinny armbow. I’m selling it via a random drawing. Details on the drawing are below. Here are some notes on the chair.
This comb-back chair is set up as a hybrid chair. Its back tilts more than a dining chair, but isn’t a full-on lounger. You can use it for both. The back tilts about 15°. And the seat tilts about 5°. It’s an all-around comfortable chair, though I wouldn’t call it a lounge chair. Maybe lounge-ish.
I love the low stretchers that lack a medial stretcher.
The seat is 16-3/4” off the floor. The overall height is 37-3/4”. Like all my chairs, the joints are assembled with hide glue (that I made) plus oak wedges, so the joints are strong but can be easily repaired by future generations. The chair is finished with a home-cooked linseed oil/wax finish that has no dangerous solvents. The finish offers low protection, but it is easy to repair by the owner with no special skills or tools.
The arm of this chair has grain that follows the curve of the seat. The curved wood was harvested around a big knot.
All components were shaped by hand: rasps, sandpaper and scraper.
Purchasing the Chair
This chair is being sold for $1,650 plus $250 shipping to your door anywhere in the lower 48 states. (I’m 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 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Friday, Sept. 29. In the email please use the subject line “Oak Chair” and include your:
First name and last name
U.S. shipping address
Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)
Shipping options: You are welcome to pick up the chair here in Covington, Ky. I am happy to deliver the chair personally for free within 100 miles of Cincinnati, Ohio. Otherwise, I’ll crate up the chair and ship it to your door for a flat $250.
— Christopher Schwarz
This comb is also a new shape, invented on the fly.
