Lost Art Press

Lecture: ‘Anyone Can be a Chairmaker’

Posted on by fitz

One of our local treasures, the Baker Hunt Art and Cultural Center, hosts a free lecture series in its Scudder House ballroom, and the speaker on August 13 is Christopher Schwarz. His subject? Chairmaking, of course!

“Not long ago, most households in Kentucky had the basic tools and skills to build their own furniture. If you raised crops or animals, you needed a few tools to keep things working. Plus you had time during the winter to make a table or a few chairs.

“Today, a skill like chairmaking seems entirely too difficult to do without special training. Chairs have a lot of crazy angles and difficult joints. But we know that farmers and laborers made them all the time. How?

“For the last 22 years, furniture maker Christoper Schwarz has studied the furniture made by everyday people – what academics call “vernacular furniture – which is ignored by most museums. By studying older pieces and building new versions of them, Chris has found the clever ways in which farmers and other non-professionals did complex trigonometry and precise joinery using basic tools.

“In this presentation, Chris will show off a 300-year-old chair made by a farmer and the clues it offers as to how it was built. And then he’ll use those clues to assemble a basic chair on stage.”

The lecture is from 6-8 p.m.; a cash bar is available. While the event is free, seating is limited, so registration is required. The Center is located at 630 Greenup Street, Covington, Ky., 401011.

Mind Upon Mind: Making Armbow Miters

Posted on by Kara Uhl
Illustration from “The Stick Chair Book: Revised Edition” by Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s note: Our Mind Upon Mind series is a nod to a 1937 Chips from the Chisel column (also featured in “Honest Labour: The Charles H. Hayward Years”), in which Hayward wrote, “The influence of mind upon mind is extraordinary.” The idea being there’s often room for improvement. To that end, we’ve asked you what else you have thought of, tried out and improved upon after building projects from our books. To submit your own idea, email kara@lostartpress.com. You can read more about the submission process here.

Today’s pick is from Nick Stanchenko. Thanks, Nick!

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

After a few chairs, I decided I was ready to try the armbow miters, as illustrated — but not really explained — in “The Stick Chair Book.” (Turns out, I wasn’t quite ready.)

The first challenge was getting the angles to match. This is easy with a router and a dovetail bit, but unfortunately I had sold my router a year ago to focus more on hand tools. After a bit of head scratching, here’s what I came up with:

Clamp the two parts together, draw an angled line using a bevel gauge and cut in one go.

This kind of worked, but wasn’t super accurate. The saw tends to pivot a little after the top part is cut through. Oh well. Time for another approach:

Make an angled block. Then clamp it to each of the mating parts and refine them with a wide chisel. (The lap joint itself was cut with a saw and flattened with a router plane.)

This time, I had a perfect match and rushed to glue up. Bad idea! Glue gathers in the sharp corner and prevents the parts from coming together tightly. In fact, the whole assembly slides around as you try to clamp it. It was devastating, but obvious in hindsight.

I removed the clamps, let the glue dry, scraped it off and trued all the surfaces again. Now what?

“Pinch dogs” would have been a great solution to hold the joint in place. But I couldn’t remember what they were called, and I don’t think they are sold where I live anyway.

Here’s another method to keep the parts from moving: Pin them!

When chiseling, you might chip a corner as I did here. Don’t panic. Just bevel or round over the damaged edge, which is on the underside of the armbow.

I found a regular pin more or less satisfactory, although you can also drawbore it (i.e. offset the holes by a tiny amount) to pull the joint together more tightly.

Now the glue-up:

Much better.

Finally, I present to you the resulting joint after a bit of clean-up with a spokeshave, a rasp and a card scraper. (OK, it’s the best of the four I’ve made so far.)

The cool part is that a stick will go through where the pin is, so there will be no trace of it left. Well, it does not really matter, but it feels nice.

Good luck!

— Nick Stanchenko

p.s. Needless to say, pinning will also help with non-mitered lap joints.

Apply Now for a Chairmaker’s Toolbox Scholarship Class Here

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Scholarship applications are now open for six spots in a special comb-back class in our Covington, Kentucky, workshop Sept. 15-19. The class is offered through The Chairmaker’s Toolbox, a non-profit organization that provides education and support to those who have been historically excluded from the craft.

The six students will spend five days building and finishing a vernacular comb-back chair using lots of hand tools and occasionally the band saw. The scholarship covers full tuition, all materials, and breakfasts and lunches during the week. (Housing and transportation are the responsibility of the student.)

Full details and the application are here. The deadline to apply is July 6, 2025. People of all skill levels are encouraged to apply.

This is the fourth year I have taught this class, and it’s one of the highlights of my year. The classes are intense, but they’re filled with good food, camaraderie and the occasional moonwalking lesson.

The “goose girl” statue in our Main Strasse neighborhood.

Our workshop is in the inner city in an old German neighborhood. The shop is an 1890s German barroom. As a result, you don’t really need a car once you get here. You can walk anywhere you want to go (including Cincinnati, which is right over the Roebling Suspension Bridge). Covington itself is a diverse, open and accepting community.

A lot of students come here with odd ideas about Kentucky (Will there be plumbing? Will people be riding horses?) I guess you’ll have to come find out for yourself.

You don’t need all the tools to take the class – some students show up with just a tape measure and a lot of enthusiasm. And that’s more than enough. We have plenty of chairmaking and general woodworking tools here we can loan you.

If you aren’t going to apply for the scholarship, please consider passing along this information to someone you know who might be interested.

— Christopher Schwarz

LAP Open Wire: June 14, 2025

Posted on by fitz
Chris is working on some bends for an upcoming seating project.

Update: Comments are now closed. Thanks for entertaining us on our drive!

Got a woodworking question? Then today is you’re lucky day: It’s time for Open Wire! You have until 5 p.m. Eastern to pose your question in the comments section below, and we’ll respond – hopefully with a informed and useful answer…but no promises. (And it’s possible your fellow readers will have answers, too – and perhaps you’ll have an answer for someone else).

Chris and I are driving to Northern Indiana to pick up a thing…so if you’re wondering why I’m answering many of the chair questions…I’m not. I’m the amanuensis on those. But I’ve you covered on many of the not-chair questions.

– Fitz

p.s. The remaining Open Wire dates for 2025 are August 9, October 25 and December 13.

Make a Table or Stool – Construction & Design

Posted on by meghanlostartpress

The following is excerpted from “The Essential Woodworker,” by Robert Wearing. In our opinion, “The Essential Woodworker” is one of the best books on hand-tool usage written in the post-Charles Hayward era. Wearing was classically trained in England as a woodworker and embraced both power and hand tools in his shop and in his teaching. The book is filled with more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations by Wearing that explain every operation in a hand-tool shop. His illustrations are properly drafted, drawn in perspective and masterfully clear.

Design brief: Before commencing on any design other than a copy a design brief must be prepared. A design brief is a collection of all the data relevant to the construction and use of the article and the design is based on this information. The brief can best be produced by writing down as many questions as possible about the job, and then by experiment, research, measurement or judgment, find the answers to these questions. For example, questions about a coffee table might include the following:

Where will it be used?
Who will use it?
How many people will use it?
What will it carry?
How will people sit at it?
What will be its top shape?
How high will it be?
What will be its basic constructional form?
What will be the finish?
What wood is preferred or is available?
Will the top have any special finish?
Will a shelf or rack be required?

Design sketch
The answers to these practical questions will give the worker the length, the width and the height required. From these three figures a number of design sketches may be produced and the best one selected (Fig 90, for example).

Working drawing
From the design sketch it will now be possible to build up a working drawing. For items of coffee-table size a full-sized drawing is an advantage; larger items must of course be drawn to scale. These full-sized drawings can be drawn on decorator’s ‘lining’ (ceiling) paper. Before making a start the following table of ‘finished sizes’ should be consulted (Fig 91).

The sawn sizes are those used by the timber yards when sawing logs into boards. The finished sizes are those to which the sawn boards can be planed, either by hand or by machine. This figure is both the maximum which can be obtained from the sawn board and also the size marketed as a planed board. In planning component sizes these sizes should be kept in mind in order to use wood with the greatest economy. A reduction of thickness of 1mm (1/16in.) may afford a considerable cost saving.

The working drawing (side view) (Fig 92) is built up as follows. Draw the ground line (A) then draw the top of the table (B). Consult the finished sizes and draw in the top thickness (C). Mark this off to length (D). Consider the overhang and draw in the outside edge of the legs (E). Consult the finished sizes again and draw in the leg thickness (F). The top rail (G) is drawn in next, wide enough to give a good joint but not wastefully wide. This can be made narrower if the extra support of a stretcher rail is given. The end (width) view can be similarly drawn. To save space this can be superimposed on the front view (shaded area). When a proper mortice and tenon construction is to be used (as in this example) the length of the tenon must now be ascertained. This is easily done (Fig 93) by making a full-sized drawing on graph paper. Finally the inside edges of the legs can be tapered below the joint. This design retains the simplicity of an all-right-angle construction.

To obviate frequent reference to a drawing in the early stages it is convenient to produce a cutting list (Fig 94) and to work solely from this in the early stages.

Finished (i.e. final) sizes are used in the list, which avoids allowances being added at several stages in the work. Unfortunately, although there are only three dimensions there are many more names for them, e.g. length, height, width, depth, broad, thick, and so on. The three to be used are length (the distance along the grain), thickness (the smallest dimension) and width (the intermediate size). Width and thickness are often the same size.

To avoid confusion components are often lettered, as in the first column. The remaining columns are self-explanatory except for the blank one. A tick here signifies that the component has been sawn out. A cross tells that the piece has been produced to size and is ready for marking out.