Want plans for a good Roorkhee chair? Look no further than the October 2012 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. My plans for a traditional Roorkhee Chair – leather and all – are there, along with construction notes and hardware details.
I have to give a huge thank you to Greg Miller in Australia, who helped guide me through the construction and design process of this incredible chair. My chair didn’t end up exactly like his, but I couldn’t have done it without him.
Some details:
— You can download the SketchUp drawing of the chair here.
— You can download the issue of the magazine here.
— Read more blog entries about Roorkhee chairs here.
During my travels, I’ve met lots of vegetarian woodworkers. And their No. 1 complaint about the woodworking industry is how sheep must be slaughtered to lubricate hand woodworking tools.
Yes, the mighty paraffin/home canning industry has tried to provide an ethical substitute called Gulf Wax – the tofurky of the tool-lubrication world. But nothing compares to slick, silky rendered sheep guts.
Like many meat-eaters, I dismissed these complaints at first. But after some beers thought, I had a revelation.
And that’s why today I am urging the mutton tallow industry to unite with the liposuction community to give us “no-kill mutton tallow.”
Think of it: Sheep could be fattened as per usual. Then, when sufficiently obese, their fat could be safely removed using liposuction and then rendered into tallow, leaving the sheep both unharmed and sexier (to other sheep – not me).
Mutton tallow could then fill your nostrils with the smell of “hot lambchop” without the nagging guilt that some sheep had to die so your handsaw could mindlessly butcher trees with less friction.
So please, sign the petition below stating that you support “no-kill” mutton tallow. Because the next glob of sheep fat that you smear across your tool could have come from a sheep in your town.
System is not work, but is simply a law of action for reducing work. It does not require special executors, but permits few to accomplish much. It loads no man with labor, but lightens the labor of each by rigidly defining it. Hard work begins when system relaxes. System never, under any circumstances, interferes with variations in human action, but includes them. Elasticity is not a quality of system. Comprehensiveness is.
System is the result of two rigid laws: a place for everything and everything in its place, and specific lines of duty for every man… .
In many shops half the things are everybody’s business and never done; the others are nobody’s business and half done.
— James W. See, “Extracts from Chordal’s Letters” (American Machinist, 1880)
“Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” has been out a while now, so once you’ve digested your copy, go get at some oak and let us see what you came up with. Hopefully summer will let go soon, so the heavy work of busting open a log won’t seem so daunting. I know I have cut back on what I have tackled during the heat and humidity.
Here is a stool sent in a while ago by reader Larry Barrett:
Here’s what Larry had to say:
“Attached are a few photos of joint stools, carved boxes and chairs – all made thanks to things I have learned from you both, either via your new book, Peter’s blog or classes with Jennie. I have a good sized black (or maybe red) oak and a chestnut oak on the ground so there may be more to come.”
We’re thrilled to see this sort of work, so keep them coming. If you are working your way through the joint stool book, send me some stuff. We’d love to see it.
— Peter Follansbee, one of the authors of “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree”
If you have a tool that generates heat – and who doesn’t? – then you know the power of regular lubrication.
But with lubrication comes the loss of your source of lubrication.
How many times have you said the following to yourself:
“My plane sole is so hot and hard to push that I need to wax it up with some copious globs of paraffin. But gosh, I cannot find my block of paraffin. I wonder where I put it?”
And so, like the prison movies that inspired “soap on a rope,” Lost Art Press brings you: Love Wax. Yes, it might look like a simple piece of Gulf Wax from the local Kroger that has been crudely hacked into a heart shape and then bored with a Forstner after a couple beers and then stamped with the Lost Art Press shop mark and then threaded with some leather left over from a run of Roorkhee chairs, but it’s not.
It’s your never-lose lubrication solution.
Put the adjustable leather strap around your neck. Nice. And when that plane sole gets too hard for your pretty little arms to push, cup your hands around the ergonomically designed piece of specially impregnated love wax. It’s waiting right there, next to your heart.
And with long strokes, rub the love wax on the the rough, too-hot-to-handle sole. Rub some extra in the corrugations in the sole – if you’re coo-coo enough to have them.
And there, isn’t the pushing all the easier now? We thought so.
