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On Wednesday we will begin to take orders for people who would like handmade copperplate prints from “The Anarchist’s Design Book” made by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Because of the time and expense in offering these prints, however, we are going to offer these only one time.

We will offer all 12 prints for individual sale at $110 each. If you order the complete set for $1,300, they will come in a handmade custom box made at Ohio Book in Cincinnati.

Ordering will be open during February and March. Then, in April, we will close ordering and Briony will start making the prints and they will ship out to you in special protective packaging. Check out this short film on how Briony made the prints.

Each print will be made on cotton rag paper that measures 11” x 15-3/4” (approximately).

I’ve had a set of these prints in my shop now for a year and they are just stunning. Modern printing methods pale in comparison to the clarity, texture and imperfection of a copperplate print.

We hesitated in offering these prints because they are expensive in comparison to the Farrah Fawcett poster you still have from college. But, like a fine tool or piece of handmade furniture, these prints have an intangible quality that I like.

If you’d like to see them in person before you purchase one, please stop by our storefront on our open days on Feb. 11 and March 11. I’ll have the complete set on hand, including the handmade box from Ohio Book.

— Christopher Schwarz

There are two reasons I bore and ream the mortises for a chair before saddling the seat. 1) Saddling the seat removes any spelching made by the drill bit. Or, put another way, I don’t spelch my newly saddled seat. And 2) If I mess up the boring or reaming then I haven’t wasted as much time if I’d saddled the seat.

Like many chairmakers, I use sightlines and resultant angles to bore and ream my mortises for the legs. And I’ve figured out how to do it without any trig. Or numbers. Or words. (OK, scratch the “or words.” The words and explanation are covered fully in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” </blowhard advertisement>.)

With this chair I use the same angles as the staked chair in the book. So use the drawing above to draw your sightlines and set your sliding bevel square (which Roubo calls the “false square,” which amuses me greatly, which wasn’t supposed to be amusing but is).

Bore the 5/8” hole for the mortises, using the sliding bevel as a guide for your bit. I put a backer board under the seat so I can bore straight through without thinking/stopping. When the shavings change color I rotate the brace twice more and pull out.

Reaming is similar. But instead of using the bit as a guide for the bevel square, I use the shell of my chuck. This is why I love the chuck of my Yankee brace. It is a straight cylinder. Some chucks are fancy shaped like a baluster. They’re pretty, but they are no help when reaming.

Ever four turns or so, I pull out and check my angle using a dowel with a tapered tenon on the end. I can’t check my work (easily) using the actual legs because they are all kinds of tapered.

Then I drive all four legs into their mortises, stand back and make sure the whole thing doesn’t look like a bandy-legged goat.

And only then do I start to saddle the seat.

— Christopher`Schwarz

All the legs featured in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” are octagonal or square in section – this makes them easy to make without a lathe. For this chair design, I decided to turn the legs but make the shape simple enough that you could shave them if, again, you are lathe-less in Louisiana.

This shape of leg is a modernized bamboo turning. The top section of the leg tapers and flows into the leg’s tapered tenon. The taper begins 6-1/2″ from the top of the leg and tapers from 1-1/2″ to 5/8″ at the top of the tenon. The bottom section of the leg tapers to 1″ at the floor.

This profile looks nice with the 12.8° taper I use on my tenons. However, if you use a different angle, I’m going to show you how I laid out the leg so you can design it to suit your tools.

First I made the leg blanks into 1-1/2″ x 1-1/2″ x 19″ octagons. I chucked them in the lathe and turned the leg to a straight cylinder (note that after you get the leg dimensions figured out you can skip this step to save time).

Then I marked the length of my tenon (3″) on the leg and turned the tenon very slightly oversized. The tenon starts as 1-1/16″ in diameter and tapers to 5/8″ at the top.

With the taper roughed in I took a straightedge and held it up to the taper and eyeballed where this taper would end at the full diameter of the leg. This guess is about 6-1/2″ from the top. I could have drawn it out in CAD, but I like wood better than pixels.

I marked the cylinder at 6-1/2″ from the top of the leg and then turned the remainder of the top taper to that point. Note that I turned a small groove where the tenon began. This is an important mark when you shave the tenon to its final size.

The rest is easy. I turned the bottom taper from the 6-1/2″ line down to the bottom of the leg. The bottom of the leg is 1″ in diameter. In the photo above I’m looking for humps with a straightedge.

Then I removed the leg from the lathe and used my tapered tenon cutter to shave the tenon to the perfect shape and size. It took only a few turns to do. When I shaved the legs in the tenon cutter I stopped cutting right at the groove I turned in the leg.

Then I sanded the legs (avoiding the tenons) with #180-grit sandpaper and got ready to leg up the chair. That’s tomorrow’s entry.

— Christopher Schwarz