The once-in-15-years sale ends on Aug. 31. That is the final day you can save 40 percent on 13 of our titles, including many of our most popular books. Every item that is on sale can be seen here.
Also good to know: Aug. 31 is the last day you can purchase the “Build a Stick Chair” video at the introductory price of $50. After that date, the price will be $75.
For those of you who have purchased books during the sale, thank you. The sale has reduced a lot of our excess inventory that we hoarded during the pandemic. With any luck, we will never have to do this again.
We’ve heard from a lot of customers during the last two weeks that they have taken advantage of the sale to complete their collection of our “anarchist” titles. Or purchased books for woodworking friends and family members. A lot of you bought hats (sorry we are now all out of those).
I’ll post one more reminder right before the sale ends. But for now, let’s get back to talking about woodworking.
Join author (and Lost Art Press copy editor) Kara Gebhart Uhl at noon on Sept. 10 at Blue Marble Books for a book reading, related activities for kids and book signing.
Kara will be discussing her book “Cadi & the Cursed Oak,” as well as “the importance of stories – your favorites, the ones that are passed down in your family, the ones you hope to write, the sad ones you don’t know what to do with, the silly ones you share all the time,” she says.
Blue Marble Books – a beloved Greater Cincinnati bookstore founded in 1979 – is located at 1356 S. Ft. Thomas Ave., Ft. Thomas, Kentucky 41075.
Chris and I will be there to celebrate with Kara – hope to see you there!
This six-stick comb-back chair continues my exploration of this form. It’s based on an antique Welsh chair in my collection and is made in American black walnut.
The chair is one of the four shown during the filming of our new video about how to build stick chairs, so you will see your chair a few times as it comes together in the background of the video.
I am selling this chair via a silent auction. Instructions on purchasing the chair can be found near the bottom of this blog entry. Here are some more details about its design and construction.
This particular chair is set up for general use. The back is fairly upright at 12° off the seat. And the seat tilts at 4°, giving the chair an overall tilt of 16°. The seat is 16-3/4” off the floor to accommodate both short and tall sitters, and the chair is 38-3/4” high overall.
All the straight components of this chair were sawn or split out to be as strong as possible. The arms are made from four pieces of black walnut. All of the chair’s major joints were assembled using hide glue, so repairs in the (far) future will be easy. The chair is finished with a non-toxic soft wax, a blend of beeswax and raw linseed oil that my daughter cooks up here in our shop. The wax is an ideal chair finish. It is not terribly durable, but it is easily renewed or repaired.
How to Purchase This Chair
This chair is being sold via a silent auction. If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Friday, Aug. 26. In the email please use the subject line “Chair Sale” and include your:
First name and last name
U.S. shipping address
Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)
Your bid
After all the emails have arrived on Aug. 26, we will pick a winner that evening.
If you are the “winner,” the chair can be picked up at our storefront for free. Or we can ship it to you via common carrier. The crate is included in the price of the chair. Shipping a chair usually costs about $250 to $300, depending on your location. (I’m sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.)
Figure 14.27. Normal wood, left, breaks across the grain with ragged tearing of the longitudinal fibres; this piece of oak was very difficult to break requiring great physical effort, clamps, benches and bearers to clamp against. At right, the brashy oak snapped like a “carrot” in my hands with little effort.
Jones has spent his entire life as a professional woodworker and has dedicated himself to researching the technical details of wood in great depth, this material being the woodworker’s most important resource. The result is “Cut & Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology.” In this book, Jones explores every aspect of the tree and its wood, from how it grows to how it is then cut, dried and delivered to your workshop.
Jones also explores many of the things that can go right or wrong in the delicate process of felling trees, converting them into boards, and drying those boards ready to make fine furniture and other wooden structures. He helps you identify problems you might be having with your lumber and – when possible – the ways to fix the problem or avoid it in the future.
“Cut & Dried” is a massive text that covers the big picture (is forestry good?) and the tiniest details (what is that fungus attacking my stock?). And Jones offers precise descriptions throughout that demanding woodworkers need to know in order to do demanding work.
For the first year or two of working wood in the 1970s, I didn’t come across the term brash wood because the craftsmen I worked with called the condition “carroty” or “carrot wood” and I assumed, being young and naïve, this was the normal name. The woodworkers around me, on finding some particularly weak stick would say things like, “It’s rubbish; the stuff just carrots off in your hands.” It was an apt description because a brash break in wood is visually slightly similar to a carrot broken into two half-lengths.
Brash wood has a variety of related names including brashy, brashness and brashiness. Other names for this condition are brittle heart, carrot heart, spongy heart, brash heart and soft heart. Natural brashness or brittleness develops in the living tree caused by the way a tree grows and the stresses it experiences in life. In every case brash wood is weak wood and it unexpectedly snaps across the grain under a load normal wood of the same species would carry with ease.
Brashness often develops in association with cross shakes discussed in section 13.3.3. In another instance, it develops in exceptionally slow-grown ring-porous species where the tree lays down a high proportion of soft spongy and weak spring growth, and a low proportion of denser stronger summer-growth wood. Ring-porous species with unusually narrow year-on-year growth rings are one possible feature to look for to identify brashness; the result of this growth pattern is the wood is also likely to be exceptionally light for its species, and this may indicate potential brashness. Fast-grown conifers tend to lay down a much greater proportion than normal of weaker, lighter spring wood than they lay down in denser and stronger summer wood, and this, too, is brashy. Juvenile wood is frequently brashy, especially if it has grown fast with widely spaced growth rings. Unusually dense reaction wood in coniferous trees, known as compression wood, is often brash, and this type of wood should not be used in furniture, but carvers and turners may find uses for it (Hoadley1, 2000, p 99-100). Shield (2005, p 133) discusses brittle heart or brashness being the result of growing stresses within plantation-grown Eucalypts. He notes that growth increments develop tensile stresses in their length with each successive new growth increment developing slightly more tensile stress than the previous year’s growth. To compensate for this the tree develops longitudinal compression stresses toward the tree’s core. Finally, an artificial cause of brashness is induced when wooden artefacts are subjected over time to high heat “such as wood ladders used in boiler rooms.” (Rossnagel, Higgins and MacDonald, 1988, pp, 43-44.)
The lesson for woodworkers is brash or brittle wood is not appropriate for load-bearing structures, e.g., floor joists, floorboards, table or chair legs and rails etc. The safest thing is to not use it at all except perhaps for purely decorative items such as small carvings or other non-critical parts. Secondly, materials other than wood might be better choices for shelving, steps, ladders and so on in high-heat environments including forges, boiler rooms, certain areas within commercial kitchens, glass-blowing workshops etc.
Despite having lived in Kentucky for 30 years, I’ve never visited the South Union Shaker Village in Logan County, Kentucky. I’ve driven past it more than 100 times – easy. But when Megan and I were headed to Nashville last week, I resolved to tap the brakes, turn off I-65 and visit the colony.
Like the other Shaker sites in Kentucky and Ohio, the South Union Shaker Village doesn’t receive the attention of the East Coast colonies. And that’s too bad. These western colonies are filled with gorgeous architecture and beautiful furniture.
All that remains of the South Union Village are a handful of buildings, but the site’s founders and conservators have managed to collect an impressive number of furniture pieces (especially firewood boxes) and display them in a restored environment.
If you are ever in Western Kentucky, you should definitely stop for a few hours to visit the village.
The trip reminded me that Megan had been working on a book about the Western Shakers (I’ve been helping with the photography) that came to a stop when the pandemic closed up all the museums and access to private collections. I hope this visit will help rekindle our efforts to shine a light on all the amazing Shaker furniture and buildings that have been mostly ignored by people in the wider world.
The short video shows some of the highlights from our visit.
