We are thrilled to welcome Welsh chairmaker Chris Williams back to Lost Art Press this summer to teach two week-long chairmaking classes in our storefront. Chris worked with John Brown making chairs for almost a decade, and Chris has continued making chairs in this Welsh tradition ever since.
A class with Chris is about as close as you can get to working with the late, great John Brown.
The two classes run June 5-9 and June 12-16 here in our Covington storefront. Each class is limited to six students. Chris will lead the instruction, with Christopher Schwarz and Megan Fitzpatrick assisting the entire week.
Registration for the classes will open at 9 a.m. March 15 (Eastern) through our registration portal. If the classes fill, we recommend getting on the waiting list as cancellations do occur.
Students will each build a comb-back stick chair using traditional hand-tool methods and American woods under the guidance of Chris Williams. In the spirit of these chairs, students will personalize their chairs with different stick arrangements, undercarriages, arm shapes and combs.
In the end, no two chairs will come out alike – just as it was with antique Welsh chairs and the ones made by John Brown and Chris.
It’s also worth noting that this chair class is unlike many others taught today. There are almost no jigs or specialty tools used. There are no tenon cutters or jigs to guide you as you drill the mortises for the sticks. Chris doesn’t use sightlines or resultants in his drilling. Instead, he relies on simpler, more direct methods.
Instead of jigs, Chris will show you how to make these chairs using mostly a jack plane, block plane and spokeshave, plus a few auger bits. We will use a band saw at times (freehand) to speed up some sawing operations due to the time constraints of the class.
Chris, the author of “Good Work,” has dedicated his life to making these chairs to an extremely high level. If you would like a taste of these methods and this kind of life, a week-long class with Chris will set you on this path.
Also, Chris is an absolute wealth of knowledge when it comes to antique stick chairs, plus he has a thousand stories about working with John Brown and as an independent chairmaker for most of his adult life. The class is about way more than making tenons and sticks, it’s about immersing yourself in a difficult, creative and beautiful lifestyle.
Note, because of the intense nature of these classes, we ask that all students have some prior experience at chairmaking. Students should be confident in maintaining and working with edge tools. This is a class for intermediate and advanced woodworkers.
The class fee is $1,800 per student, which includes the wood and all other raw materials needed to make the chair.
The Veritas Power Tenon Cutters are incredible tools. They are based on the old hollow auger tools, but they are easier to set, maintain and use. They make perfect round tenons, and you don’t have to use a drill to power them. I have used a brace, and my right hand at times, to make tenons.
The tools have a bit of a learning curve. Many people end up with tenons that are slightly off-center. Or worse, wildly off-axis.
I first started using these tenons cutters when I was in my “willow furniture phase” in about 2000, so I have thought about these tools a lot and used them a lot. The following video shows my tips for how to get the tenon centered on your stock.
If you like this sort of hard-won information, you’ll find more of it in my three chairmaking products:
The last cabinet Krenov made at the school, the “Pearwood Drawer Cabinet.” David Welter pointed out that this leg shape, with its tapered and faceted shaping, was a new style for Krenov. “Jim often said that it was curiosity that kept him going,” noted Welter. Photo by David Welter.
The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney. After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney produced the first and definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traced Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program.
While the school [what is now the Krenov School of Fine Furniture]was preparing for his withdrawal, [James] Krenov, too, was making plans for his life after the program. His craft practice had been uninterrupted in his last year, in spite of the turbulent conditions of his departure. He completed three cabinets, even venturing into a new form, a “drawer cabinet” whose interior was occupied by an array of drawers, with little or no open space inside the carcase. As he prepared to leave the school, unsure if he would or could return to the facilities, one student remembers that Krenov spent a sizable amount of time preparing and sawing materials for the cabinets he hoped to make when he returned home. The students, too, helped with Krenov’s move. Along with helping him with the physical move of his materials, the students built him a going-away gift of a veneer press, smaller than the school’s but sized to Krenov’s smaller scale of work.
Erik Owen, a student from the class of ’96, worked with the family to build an addition to the cabin behind the house on Forest Lane, to serve as a small workshop reminiscent of his Bromma basement workshop from Sweden. Into the shop they moved his workbench, a few small machines and his still ample supply of wood, all he needed for the construction of his small veneered cabinets on stands.
The move home was turbulent, and after leaving the school, it would be several months before Krenov would complete a cabinet in this diminutive space. But his family and friends also were careful to help see that Krenov would not have to endure too long a separation from his daily routine, for both Krenov’s and their own sakes. Tina remembers that Britta knew it was time for her husband to retire, having seen his demeanor and attitude with the school worsen, but was saddened to see it happen on terms not entirely his own.
Krenov’s ultimate critique of the school he gave after his retirement, now coming out from under his 20-year tenure, was that it could not bring the students to a place of maturity, both as technically solid craftspeople and capable designers. Krenov had never shied away from helping those students who sought his help, and many of his favorite students had come to the school without any background in furniture. Krenov had delighted at bringing many of those students far past a point of accomplishment that they themselves had thought possible. But he had long used an analogy that he had overheard Arthur Rubinstein, the famed Polish-American pianist, give when addressing the talents of his students.
“For example, you cannot teach a person to be musical,” he told Oscar Fitzgerald, just a few years later. “You can teach them to play, but you can’t teach them to be musical. I was in New York and I came back to my hotel room and they were having the 80th birthday concert by [Arthur] Rubinstein – Carnegie Hall, the whole ball of wax. And they were interviewing him in the intermission and somebody asked him … about the students of that time. He says, ‘Oh, such technicians, such skills. Oh, sometimes I ask one of them, when are you going to make music?’”
Krenov lectures from the bench in his back room at the school in 2002. Photo courtesy of the Krenov School.
In May 2002, Krenov officially retired from the program, after his 20th year at the school. Burns remembers that the last day was cathartic. Knowing that their time as colleagues was over, he and Krenov had a final argument, one that was their last conversation. However turbulent Krenov’s last years had been, the school’s faculty, with the addition of Hjorth-Westh and Smith, would forge ahead without Krenov, and the school continued outside of his presence on staff.
Krenov himself would not retreat, in totality, from the school for a few more years. He returned on occasion in subsequent years to see and advise on student work, suggest or offer up a board of wood for a certain project and, sometimes, to fill his pockets with dowels from the boxes in the machine room. The school’s students, too, would not cease to visit Krenov. Laura Mays, a second-year student in the first year without Krenov in residence, remembers that many of her classmates, even those who hadn’t studied under Krenov, would make frequent trips to the Krenovs’ house for tea and conversation. And alumni, those who had stayed in the area or who returned for visits, would come to their teacher’s home to check up on the aging cabinetmaker. Krenov would even weigh in on some students’ attempts at recreations or reinterpretations of his own designs; as late as 2008, Krenov advised one student, Tom Reid, on his version of Krenov’s “Carved Curves” cabinet, and gave Reid the compass plane he had made decades earlier for his own construction of the cabinet.
Krenov’s departure began the last chapter of his life. In those years, visitors to his home remember his fondness for Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Krenov, with failing eyesight, arthritis, body pains and faltering hearing was moving toward the end of his life, but retirement was never an option for the 82-year-old. From his small world on Forest Lane, he would still host a rotating cast of visitors, friends and well wishers, reach out into the world by phone and written word, and continue to pursue a craft practice by any means necessary.
We’ve reprinted “Ingenious Mechanicks,” Christopher Schwarz’s tour de force on workbenches of yore, with a new cover – and this new printing is now in stock (we’ve been out of the previous one for a few weeks now). The cover’s new die stamp is shown above…but I’ll need you to imagine that image printed atop the brown cloth cover color shown below (which has a much smaller weave than shown in this close-up I pulled off the cover cloth manufacturer’s site).
“Ingenious Mechanicks” is about a journey into workbenches of the past (which deserve a place in the modern shop!) and takes the reader from Pompeii, which features the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench and finally to our shop in Kentucky, where Chris recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs.
These early benches have many advantages:
They are less expensive to build
They can be built in a couple days
They require less material
You can sit down to use them
They take up less space than a modern bench and can even serve as seating in your house
In some cases they perform better than modern vises or shavehorses.
Even if you have no plans to build an early workbench, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is filled with newly rediscovered ideas you can put to work on your modern bench. You can make an incredibly versatile shaving station for your bench using four small pieces of wood. You can create a hard-gripping face vise with a notch and some softwood wedges. You can make the best planing stop ever with a stick of oak and some rusty nails.
And here’s a little inside baseball to explain why I’m asking you to tap into your visual imagination:
Before we have an actual book in house of which to take nice photographs, we…by which I mean Chris…create a fancy mock-up of said new cover with the proper cloth color and texture, dropped behind a transparent .tiff of the cover’s die-stamp.
But Chris is out of town, and I am just too tired after three days of teaching (then thoroughly cleaning the shop after three days of teaching), to figure out how to turn the In Design die stamp file – that has a non-transparent .jpg image in it – into a transparent .tiff (no, the transparency tick box does not come up when I do a “save as” and try to rename my exported .tiff … which is to say please don’t offer me instruction in the comments as to how to do it; I’ve searched Google, tried my available-at-the-moment best, and given up. Did I mention I’m tired?)
We’ll get the image on the store site updated with the new cover as soon as possible.
One of my recent comb-back classes. You’ll notice they have nearly cleaned their plates. This is important.
Sometimes students ask what they can do to prepare for a class in handwork at our storefront. In the past, I’ve told students to sharpen their tools and try to read up on the project or the topic we’re covering in the class.
But I don’t think that’s enough. I’ve been teaching woodworking for almost 20 years, and I’ve watched students who succeed versus those who struggle. Here are some suggestions to consider if you have a class coming up with us or any other hand-tool instructor.
Get in Shape a Bit
This recommendation is for hand-tool classes only. When I have taught machine-based classes, it’s not as much of a factor. During a week-long handwork class, a fair number of people are exhausted by Wednesday evening. And the last two days are difficult – sometimes uncomfortable.
Though we emphasize conserving your energy and show ways to sit down while you work (Roman-style), students are on their feet a lot. If you are a mouse-worker in an office, standing for eight hours in a day can wear you out.
So, wear the most comfortable, lightweight shoes you own (fashion is a low priority here). Plus clothes that move easily (gusseted pants and shirts work with you; not against you). And to prepare for the standing, we recommend getting in decent cardio-vascular shape. That is as easy as taking a 30-40 minute walk each day. This will work wonders for your ability to stand at the bench for the long hours.
We try to keep you well fed while you are here. This is not just because we are nice. We also want you to have the energy to make it to the end of the week.
Diet
Forget your weight-loss diet during the class. You need energy. We have a lot of students who skip breakfast and/or lunch and are absolutely spent by 3 p.m. You need protein and carbs to do the work. It doesn’t have to be junk food. But you need to eat.
Upper Body
We emphasize using your core as much as possible in handwork. But your arms need to be in decent shape to assist with planing and sawing tasks. The best exercise for this is – shocking – planing and sawing. (More on this in a moment.) But if you can’t practice in the shop, try some beginning strength training. You can find many simple tutorials on the internet for this.
A simple stick-making exercise will jump-start your chairmaking efforts.
Practical Practice
Depending on the class you are taking, I recommend some different exercises to try in the week leading up to the class. If you are taking a class on chairmaking or staked furniture, there is a lot of planing. I mean, a LOT of planing.
There is a point at which you learn how to “ride the bevel” of a coarse tool, which greatly reduces the effort required to plane a stick or taper a leg. This is not something you can teach through words. It’s something you have to figure out yourself.
When smooth planing or jointing work, there is a lot of downward pressure required to end up with straight edges and flat boards. With chairmaking the goal is to use minimal downward pressure because you might take 60 or 70 strokes to shape a spindle. So you have to feel where the cutting edge of the tool is, put it to work and try to get the sole out of the equation as much as possible.
Scratching your head? Here’s how to start the process of finding that magic moment.
Take a 3/4” x 3/4” x ~15” stick of straight-grained hardwood. Place a small stop in your face vise. Press the end of the stick against the stop with your off hand. Plane the stick with a block plane set for a rank cut.
Try to make the stick into a dowel. After it’s round, use taper cuts to make it into a magic wand with a pointy tip as quickly as you can. Plane fast. Skew the tool. Try to find a place where the cutting edge is the only thing contacting the work. (It’s not possible, but it’s the goal.)
Do a stick like this each night for a week before class, and you will ace my class.
Also, learn how a cordless drill works – especially the clutch and speed settings and how they interact with the torque of the drill.
This is one way to practice sawing a bunch of dovetails. Read on for a better one.
Saw to Success
Megan’s classes on casework joinery involve a lot of sawing and chopping. Most people seem to struggle with the sawing. Frank Klausz had a straightforward solution to prepare a student to cut dovetails for the first time: 100 lines.
Draw 50 lines that slope to the right (like one side of a dovetail) across the end of the board. Scribe in a 3/4” baseline. Then saw right next to those 50 lines, one after the other. Try to do each one a little better and faster. When done, saw off all those kerfs. Now draw 50 lines the slope to the left, put in a baseline and saw those.
This accomplishes a few things, some of them not obvious.
First, beginners usually own a new saw with freshly filed teeth. These teeth are grabby and difficult to start. About 100 kerfs helps break in the saw.
Many beginners have difficulty starting the kerf. Doing 100 lines one after the other rapidly (it takes less than an hour) teaches you to take the weight of the saw off the teeth when starting. I like to tell students that they should almost hover the teeth over the wood as they begin to push forward.
And the 100 kerfs help you fall into a comfortable sawing stance. Figuring out where your feet should be, how your sawing arm should swing free and that the work should be level to your elbow. Oh and stop trying to choke the saw to death (not a euphemism).
I’m sure I could come up with more exercises, but I’d worry that I’d scare you off. But these simple things will definitely make your week (or weekend) here a lot more rewarding.
— Christopher Schwarz
“If you do what I say, everything will work out fine. Otherwise, put your head here between these hands.”
