This three-legged comb-back chair is available for sale and immediate shipment. SOLD
The chair is based on several Welsh three-legged comb-back chairs I have inspected that have a distinctive square-shaped arm and seat. This particular iteration is set up for lounging, with back sticks that lean about 16° off vertical. The seat height is 17”, with the overall height of the chair at 39”. The seat is 16” deep x 20” wide and nicely saddled.
Three-legged chairs are common vernacular forms found all over the U.K. and Europe, but many moderns suspect they are unstable. After building and using many three-legged stick chairs, here’s the real deal: When you sit in them, they are stable. You can even tilt back on them on the rear leg (fun!).
The only time they are unstable is when you are not sitting in the chair and you try to lean on the ends of the comb, which are unsupported. That’s when the chair wants to tip.
Construction Details
The legs, sticks and comb are made from dead-straight red oak that was both rived and sawn to yield the straightest, strongest parts. The seat is poplar. And the four-piece armbow is made using slippery elm. The interlocked grain and strength of the elm is what allows the arms to curve 93° and still be strong.
The chair is $1,100 plus actual shipping via common carrier. This is a little less than usual because of the three legs. Shipping typically runs between $100 and $225 depending on where you live. Delivery within 100 miles of Cincinnati is free – or you can pick it up at our shop in Covington, Ky. If you are interested in the chair, send an email to fitz@lostartpress.com. Ask all the questions you like, but the first person to say “I’ll take it” gets it.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. I have four more chairs in various stages on the bench. The next one is a 16-stick comb-back.
Two of our new sliding bevels, plus a early design prototype that Josh Cook printed out.
As a chairmaker, a small sliding bevel is essential to my work. The tool guides most of the joinery. It also is a companion when I explore historical chairs to understand how they work.
When we completed work on the Crucible Type 2 Dividers, designer Josh Cook and I wondered if we could adapt that tool’s ingenious tension/locking mechanism for a sliding bevel. The answer is yes. And thanks to tool designer and machinist Craig Jackson, we have a bevel in the works that exceeds any expectations I had for the tool.
The Crucible Sliding Bevel is unlike any other sliding bevel I know of. It locks the blade position so tightly that you have to be quite strong to get the blade to move off your desired setting. And if that’s all it did, I’d be happy. But it does something else, too.
Thanks to Craig, the Crucible sliding bevel has dual controls that allow you to do some helpful things. The screw up by the blade controls the rotation of the blade. It works like the adjustment mechanism on any sliding bevel. You can use it to lock the blade, loosen the blade or set the tool’s tension so the blade rotates but with some effort.
The second screw near the back of the tool is used to adjust how the tool’s blade slides in its slot. You can use these two screws to control separately the rotation and the sliding of the blade. That means you can:
Lock the rotation of the blade and then slide the blade to a different position in the body of the tool.
Lock the blade so it won’t slide, but it will rotate.
I know this might sound complicated, but it’s not. Much like the dual controls on the Tite-Mark, my favorite marking gauge, these become second nature within a couple minutes. Also good to know: You don’t have to use the dual controls. You can simply use the control at the pivot point to work the tool – bringing in the second control only when necessary.
Some of the many tool bodies that we experimented with. The colors in the backgrounds of the engravings is marker or metal dye – just experiments. The No. 11 is because this tool is our 11th tool.
Some Specifications
We are making the bevel in alloy steel with a 4″ blade, which is my favorite size. The blade is 3/32″ thick, so it is impossible to mangle. The body of the bevel is 11/16″ x 3/4″ x 4-3/8″ and weighs a nice 10 ounces. The bevels are being made in Kentucky. The control screws are the same size as the screw on our dividers (so perhaps we’ll make a screwdriver soon).
One of the other nice things about this tool is that it is extremely easy to assemble and disassemble. So we will offer a 7″ blade that fits in this tool’s body in early 2022.
So when will these begin selling? We are waiting on a large steel order. The production fixtures have all been constructed and the programming is complete. Depending on when the steel arrives, there is a chance we will offer the first batch right before Christmas.
And the price? This is the most complex tool we’ve made so far at Crucible, and there is a lot of milling to make the custom parts. The retail will be $200, and I think the tool is worth every penny. (As always, if you’re feeling salty about the price, I encourage you to give small-scale domestic toolmaking a go. I love it, but sheesh – making stuff is hard.)
I don’t know if we have enough margin in these tools to offer them through our foreign and domestic retailers. But a few months of production will give us that answer.
In the coming weeks I’ll make a video that shows how the bevel operates.
— Christopher Schwarz
In the end, we went with an understated logo, which matches the look on our other tools.
We have – once again – upgraded our audio equipment and will take it for a spin at 3 p.m. (Eastern) Saturday, Nov. 20. On this livestream, Megan and I will answer questions on any topic, and I will demonstrate on my Roman workbench how I shape short sticks and long sticks for my chairs.
You will be able to watch the livestream here on the blog or directly on Vimeo at this link. We also hope to port it to some other platforms to make it easy for everyone (more that later).
To ask a question, just send an email to Megan. Please use the subject line: “livestream” and email it to fitz@lostartpress.com. Here are some quick tips on asking questions:
Multi-part questions are difficult to handle on a livestream.
We probably can’t handle questions such as “Please tell me everything y’all know about <insert broad topic here>.”
The shorter the question the more time we have to answer it.
Make sure it’s a question. It’s difficult to give an answer to a statement or observation.
If you can’t tune in on Saturday, you can watch the video on Vimeo.
The traveling version of the “Anarchist’s Tool Chest” atop my full-size version.
In Autumn of 2019, Nicole Spagnuolo emailed to ask if I’d like to record a video for The Wood Whisperer Guild. “Sure!” I said, forgetting – in my delight and honor for having been asked – that I vehemently dislike being on camera. We decided on a smaller version of Christopher Schwarz’s “Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” Then COVID hit, so travel was difficult and ill-advised, and it all rather slipped my mind.
About two months ago, Marc Spagnuolo reminded me, so we scheduled the shoot for Nov. 8-12 with Todd Tidwell, the videographer for the Guild, who would drive up from Texas (that’s a haul!). I blithely said something like, “I’ll prepare parts as if for a cooking show – several versions of things in different stages – to help move things along. I think it will take three days.” Then I forgot again…because apparently the mere thought of a camera pointed at me makes me lose about 20 IQ points.
I remembered a week before – thank goodness – and after a panicky visit to my lumber stack in the cellar, found I had just enough sugar pine from which to prep most of the the parts. But this was the absolute dregs of stock I’ve accumulated over four years of classes. Lots of having to cut around knots and be on the lookout for surface checking, and deal with twist and cupping. There’s a reason I hadn’t used these pieces already: too much of a pain in the ass. But needs must. And I had not a stick extra – so no prepping additional parts ahead of time.
For the lid pieces, I had to pilfer from a leftover class kit (I now have two-thirds of a tool chest kit sitting in my basement at home). And after messing up a part or two as the cameras were rolling, I had to steal from the skirt pieces of an almost-finished full-size tool chest that’s currently sitting in our machine room. (I guess I’ll use the skirt pieces in my basement to finish the chest in the machine room…which will leave me with a set of carcase panels.) Oh – and I didn’t remember to order hardware or paint until the last minute. (Thank you Orion Henderson/Horton Brasses for having the hardware I wanted in stock, and for shipping it quickly!)
So even though I couldn’t do it cooking-show style, I figured that would add only a day. So: four days; no problem.
I forgot that once the cameras fired up, I’d lose an additional 20 IQ points. Plus we all know the joke about open glue bottles, right? Pop that lid, and there goes 40 points. With 66 dovetails to glue up for the carcase, two skirts, dust seal and interior tills, and four mortise-and-tenon joints, well, I had the bottle of Old Brown Glue open and ready to grab the entire time. So now I’m down about 80 points. Every day.
With two cameras pointed at me, I found myself losing words I commonly use. “What are those valleys between saw teeth called again?” “What’s that tool you place at the end of a nail then hit it to sink the nail deeper? “Mullet…that’s a hairstyle…can it really be the right word for the offcut used to test the fit of a tongue-in-groove joint?” Sigh.
But most embarrassing? I cut shovetails. Even when I was starting out, I never cut shovetails. Mobius strips, yes (that is, I’ve flipped a pin board side to side instead of end to end more than once, and ended up with pins in opposite directions). But now I have. On camera. Marc has ocular proof of my shame. (Just after that mistake, we broke for lunch so I could get over it…and as I walked outside, a bird pooped on my head.)
They’re called “shovetails” because in order for this geometry to work as a joint, you have to shove them together then add nails.
In the end, it took a full five days…which is what Marc and Todd anticipated. They’re much smarter than am I – even though they’re around cameras all the time!
In the end, the tool chest looks pretty good (if I do say so myself). Now here’s hoping that Todd has enough not-stupid video of me – or can splice enough together to make me look pretty good, too. Thank goodness for skilled editors!
But despite my self-consciousness (and camera-and-glue induced stupidity), it was a lot of fun to record. Thank you to Nicole and Marc for asking me to do it (I feel truly honored!), and to Todd for his grace and kindness all week. And special thanks to Chris for letting me take over the shop (and for longer than I anticipated), and to both him and his family for tiptoeing around all week.
Tool rack for pointy tools, and saw rack. There are also two 3″-deep tills inside, with enough room underneath for bench planes and other floor-stored stuff.
– Fitz
p.s. This one is about 15″ tall, 18″ front to back and 38″ long. Chris offered plans for a slightly different size/interior in SketchUp years ago; here’s the blog link.
If you have been waiting to buy some Soft Wax 2.0, Katherine has just put up a big batch for sale in her etsy store.
For the photo above, Bean made his second-ever trip to our machine room (hence the unflattering lighting on his magnificent fur coat). He was so interested in all the new smells in that building that this was the only photo Katherine was able to snap.
Notes on the finish: This is the finish I use on my chairs. Katherine cooks it up here in the machine room using a waterless process. She then packages it in a tough glass jar with a metal screw-top lid. She applies her hand-designed label to each lid, boxes up the jars and ships them in a durable cardboard mailer. The money she makes from wax helps her make ends meet at college. Instructions for the wax are below.
Instructions for Soft Wax 2.0 Soft Wax 2.0 is a safe finish for bare wood that is incredibly easy to apply and imparts a beautiful low luster to the wood.
The finish is made by cooking raw, organic linseed oil (from the flax plant) and combining it with cosmetics-grade beeswax and a small amount of a citrus-based solvent. The result is that this finish can be applied without special safety equipment, such as a respirator. The only safety caution is to dry the rags out flat you used to apply before throwing them away. (All linseed oil generates heat as it cures, and there is a small but real chance of the rags catching fire if they are bunched up while wet.)
Soft Wax 2.0 is an ideal finish for pieces that will be touched a lot, such as chairs, turned objects and spoons. The finish does not build a film, so the wood feels like wood – not plastic. Because of this, the wax does not provide a strong barrier against water or alcohol. If you use it on countertops or a kitchen table, you will need to touch it up every once in a while. Simply add a little more Soft Wax to a deteriorated finish and the repair is done – no stripping or additional chemicals needed.
Soft Wax 2.0 is not intended to be used over a film finish (such as lacquer, shellac or varnish). It is best used on bare wood. However, you can apply it over a porous finish, such as milk paint.
APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS (VERY IMPORTANT): Applying Soft Wax 2.0 is so easy if you follow the simple instructions. On bare wood, apply a thin coat of soft wax using a rag, applicator pad, 3M gray pad or steel wool. Allow the finish to soak in about 15 minutes. Then, with a clean rag or towel, wipe the entire surface until it feels dry. Do not leave any excess finish on the surface. If you do leave some behind, the wood will get gummy and sticky.
The finish will be dry enough to use in a couple hours. After a couple weeks, the oil will be fully cured. After that, you can add a second coat (or not). A second coat will add more sheen and a little more protection to the wood.
Soft Wax 2.0 is made in small batches in Kentucky using a waterless process. Each glass jar contains 8 oz. of soft wax, enough for at least two chairs.
