Y’all know how much I love to do videos (truthfully, I’d rather eat a hairball). So at 1 p.m. Eastern on Aug. 22, Megan and I will put on a live webcast from the shop that will transform the way you think about chairs forever (not really, we’re just going to answer some questions and show some techniques).
In addition to answering reader questions about chairs, I will unveil two techniques that have never been seen before on the face of this planet during the last 1,000 fortnights (actually, they’re quite well-known among chairmakers).
I’ll show you how I ream mortises in chair seats using an electric drill plus the Lee Valley standard reamer. Most students ream too hard and too fast, resulting in a cooked reamer and a burnished mortise. I’ll also demonstrate how I sharpen the reamer after every few chairs. This obscure and frequently secreted sharpening technique will literally blow the front of your skull off (OK, you’d probably come up with it yourself eventually).
If you have a question about stick chairs – how they are made, how they sit, the woods used, etc. – please send that question to Megan using email: fitz@lostartpress.com. Please use the subject line: “Megan, I prostrate myself for a morsel of truth” so she can keep it separate from the 600 other pleading emails she gets every day. Please submit your question before the end of the day on Friday, Aug. 20, so we have time to go through them all and write considered responses (really, we’ll just pick the ones we can make fart jokes about).
The livestream will be broadcast here. We will also provide a reminder on Sunday. After the livestream is over, we will archive it so anyone who missed it can watch it.
Also, we are selling a digital version of “The Stick Chair Book” here for $25. We don’t normally release a book like this, but paper shortages have changed our industry. Our next book might be have to be released on papyrus or on Arby’s wrappers.
When I fell in love with stick chairs in the 1990s, I was unable to find a teacher or a book that would help me make them using simple tools and readily available materials.
So I read a lot of books about other kinds of chairs. I took a few classes. And I began piecing things together with research, trial-and-error and talking to a few other people who shared my love of this vernacular form. And after 18 years of building these chairs, I decided to write the book I wish I’d owned in 1998.
“The Stick Chair Book” is intended to be a complete guide to get you going. It explains the different kinds of chairs and how they work, it helps you put together a tool kit of mostly run-of-the mill woodworking tools and it shows you how to use whatever wood you have on hand. That could be stuff from your backyard, the woods, the home center or your lumberyard.
For the last eight years I’ve been splitting and sawing out chair parts from kiln-dried wood. And I’ve been building chairs without a shavehorse, drawknife, splitting brake or hatchet. I’ve nothing against these tools – they’re great. But I grew up making cabinets and tables – and I’m much handier with planes and saws than a drawknife and axe.
The heart of the 631-page book shows how to perform every operation in chairmaking – from saddling the seat to making wedges to cutting tenons – using a variety of simple methods. Make tenons with a block plane, a hollow auger or a lathe.
For me, the most exciting part of the book breaks some very old ground. No two stick chairs are alike, but they share some of the same shapes and parts. After years of collecting photos of antiques and examining originals in Britain, I provide drawings of many of the shapes and options that you can combine into a chair.
The chapter on seats shows you how to lay out 14 different seat shapes. The chapter on legs has 16 common forms that can be made with only a couple handplanes. Add those to the 11 different arm shapes, six arm-joinery options, 14 shapes for hands, seven stretcher shapes and 11 combs, and you could make stick chairs your entire life without ever making the same one twice.
I think anyone can design their own stick chair, but for those who are unsure, I provide complete plans for five original designs that you can make (and sell, if you like). There are two Irish-inspired armchairs, a lowback and two comb-backs – one that is Welsh-based, the other inspired by Scottish Darvel chairs. All are comfortable and fairly simple to build. I include cutting lists and completely dimensioned drawings to make it easy.
There’s also lots of help with finishing, from painting the chairs, to cooking up a soap finish or your own linseed oil/wax finish. And a couple chapters on chair comfort and design to help you design your own comfortable stick chairs.
Plus, as with my other books, there is a good dose of philosophy, history and the occasional weasel joke woven amongst the practical stuff.
About the Early Adopter Digital Package
The printing industry is currently struggling with unheard-of shortages of paper and other raw materials. Though “The Stick Chair Book” was completed and sent to press in June, the paper shortage has us wondering if it will be printed in November or later.
So in the meantime, we’ve decided to offer a special digital package for $25. This download-only product is available to customers worldwide. Here’s what is in it.
A high-resolution pdf of the complete “The Stick Chair Book” – all 631 pages of it. The book contains everything you need to start building these chairs. Plus complete plans for five original designs: two Irish-inspired armchairs, a lowback chair, a Welsh-inspired comb-back and a Scottish-inspired comb-back.
A pdf containing the full-size parts for the five chairs in the book. These 22” x 34” sheets contain every seat, arm, shoe, backrest and comb needed to build the five chairs. The drawings contain all the mortise locations and sightlines needed. This pdf can be printed out at any office supply store or reprographics service. Then you can adhere them to posterboard or thin plywood and have full-size permanent patterns. (Later on this year we will sell these patterns for $20 for printed patterns or $10 for digital ones.)
A pdf of all the construction sheets for the five chairs in the book. These sheets were generated by mechanical designer Joshua Cook and contain a higher level of detail. Each chair has four 22” x 34” sheets that show all the components in a variety of views. If you have an engineering mindset, these plans will be especially useful.
When the physical book is released, this digital-only early adopter package will end forever. At that time, we will sell “The Stick Chair Book” like we normally sell a new title.
So if you want to get started on your own journey into stick chairs, you can start today. You can read more (including the book’s table of contents) in our store.
Last week we reviewed the final page proofs of Monroe Robinson’s “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke,” finished up the diestamp (more on that soon) and sent everything to the printer – that felt good. We had hoped to have this book available for purchase by the end of the year, but it may be early 2022. As Chris wrote about here, U.S. printing plants are shutting down and consolidating, and we are working around significant paper shortages.
In the meantime, here’s a short excerpt from the first chapter, Starting from Scratch, written 53 years ago this week. A lot of the book is like this – excerpts from Dick’s journals (in regular font) accompanied by Monroe’s commentary (in italic font) and photography.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
Dick and Raymond’s J-3 Cub and Elgin canoe, as seen on the first page of chapter 7. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)
August 13, 1968:
Today was a day to clean up my leftovers from the cabin. Saw them to length and split them for wood. A good pile by the time I finished.
I drew up plans for the fireplace and they look very satisfactory to me. Now I must try to figure out how much cement it will take. Yesterday I had sawed a few blocks of wood at both the main and guest cabin. Enough to last a day or two. Today I cleared the drift wood from the landing beach and picked up more big rock to make a beach a pilot would enjoy coming in to.
More small jobs – clean up the canoe paddle and give it a coat of shellac. Sharpen and oil the planes and chisels. Ready to return them to the main cabin.
Dick stacked the large rocks he removed from the beach to start a small jetty on the up-country side of the beach. The photo on the first page of chapter 7 shows Dick’s rock-free beach after he and his brother Jake stacked rocks to create a large jetty to protect their J-3 Cub airplane from the west winds.
I rarely put out the word for crowdfunding campaigns. If I did, that would be about 50 percent of my blog entries. But this one is different. I donated to this cause, and I hope you will consider it as well.
— Christopher Schwarz
From Peter Follansbee: Since Wille Sundqvist passed away in 2018, I have from time to time talked with Jogge about his tools – what will happen to them, etc. It’s a long story but right now the pressing part is that there is an auction in a few days. Ty Thornock has set up a GoFundMe page with the idea that we’ll help Jogge get these tools so he can then do with them what he sees fit. Time is of the essence – if you can help Jogge preserve his father’s incredible legacy, follow the link below. Thank you very much.
The following is excerpted from “Country Woodcraft: Then and Now,” by Drew Langsner. After more than 40 years, Drew has revisited this long-out-of-print and important book to revise and expand it to encompass what he has learned since “Country Woodcraft” was first released.
The result is “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now,” which has been expanded by 100 pages and has been updated throughout to reflect what Drew has learned since 1978. Among many other additions, it includes greatly expanded sections on building shavehorses, carving spoons and making green-wood bowls.
The original book’s text is intact, and the old photos are in black and white. Throughout the book, Drew has added text, which we set in a slightly different font, to explain what he does differently now after 40 years of daily work on the North Carolina farm he shares with his wife, Louise.
In many ways, the book is a delightful conversation between the younger Drew, who is happy to chop down trees with a felling axe, and the older Drew, who now uses an electric chainsaw and band saw to break down stock to conserve energy (and likely aspirin). New illustrations and color photos throughout show how Drew works now.
Before screw vises and clamps became common, woodworkers used a variety of holding devices to secure their material. Some country craftsmen never had manufactured vises. The woodland craftsmen had their brakes and shaving horses, many of local design and all made in the workshop. Craftsmen also had a variety of devices for securing work for planing, chiseling, boring and sawing.
Old workbenches often had a variety of dog holes in the benchtop, and sometimes on the face of the front legs. These holes can be round or square. One or two dogs, set very low, can be stops to hold a board for planing (a). Another pair of dogs can be located at right angles to keep the work from side-slipping. A dog might have a steel cap with teeth cut in it to hold the work better.
A bench hook is a simple device to hold wood for sawing (b). This consists of a wide board or a pair of narrow boards with cleats at each end, but on opposite faces. The cleats are set against the front edge of the workbench. The piece of lumber to be sawn is placed across the bench hook, against the rear cleats. The wood is then held firmly in place with your left hand – if you saw with the right.
A hold-down (c) is used to secure wood on a benchtop for chiseling or mortise work. Made by a blacksmith, it resembles an upside-down L-shaped piece of steel. The leg is dropped into a mortise in the benchtop with the foot pressing hard against the workpiece.
The hold-down leg fits loosely in the benchtop mortises. It tightens by jamming as the heel is hammered against the workpiece.
It’s possible that the first hold-downs were a forked tree branch. Dave Fisher has posted a short video on YouTube where he’s using a naturally grown wooden hold-down. It was very interesting to see this.
(d) miter block (e) miter box (f) shooting board
Furniture makers and cabinetmakers have different types of miter guides used for sawing boards at precise angles. A simple miter hook (d) for sawing square and 45° angles can be made by screwing a small block, cut at the precise angle needed, onto two stepped boards. A variation is a miter box (e). Three flat boards are glued and/or screwed together to make a channel. Carefully sawed cuts at 90° and 45° angles are made through the box walls straight down and slightly into the base board. An aid in making these cuts perpendicular to the sides is to tack a small piece of square stock on top of the channel to act as a saw guide. These are used by holding or clamping the work against the backboards, then sawing within the slotted guides.
The task of planing panel edges to a right angle can be simplified with a shooting board (f). This is a flat plank with a narrow, thinner board glued on top, and a (third) straight back-up board glued onto the thin middle board. The piece to be planed is held on top of the middle board. A plane with sides that are square to the sole is placed on its side, then automatically guided at a proper angle by the bottom board. Shooting boards are nice to use where flat edges are joined together – tabletops, bucket bottoms etc.
Bench Vises
The common adoption of vises is quite recent. Development depended on the screw, which requires precise thread making. Skilled craftsmen could carve a screw and the corresponding nut from wood. Others used a die, similar to the kinds used for threading pipe, only much larger, and with a wooden body. Expert turners could also make a screw on a lathe. A round column was turned. The pitch was marked out at four points with a ruler or divider, and penciled in, spiraling around the column. Next, a shallow saw kerf was made following the penciled lines. The piece was set in the lathe and a skew chisel was used to cut the threads, following the saw cut.
Homemade leg vise. The screw can be from various sources, such as a trailer jack stand.
I once heard a story about an Appalachian woodworker who turned large screws used for cider mills. This man set a small log between two spindles, wound a rope around the log, then commanded his mule to pull the rope as he worked on the rotating log. Maybe this is similar to the tale about being chased by a rolling snake. Eventually, steel screws could be bought from industrial manufacturers. There’s also a needed nut to match the screw. The nut may be even more difficult to make by hand.
A leg vise – basically a variation of a blacksmith’s vise – has the outer vise jaw extended into a leg which rests on the floor where it’s pinned to a guide board acting as a hinge and keeper. As the vise is opened, the guide board is adjusted by relocating a second pin passing through a bench leg. The advantage of this vise is that the jaw can carry a great load, or take heavy pounding, without the screw being damaged or the vise being ripped off the workbench. With this design, the screw is fitted somewhat loosely, which is advantageous for clamping irregular work.
A leg vise is easy to make and handy to have around a farm shop. Vise screws may be purchased from several sources, or parts may be salvaged from an old vise or piece of machinery. It may be possible to adapt the screw from a trailer jack. The wooden parts are usually common lumber. Modern bench vises use a central screw flanked by two spindles that serve as guides for the jaw and a support for the work load. Older vises of this pattern were all wood. The screw might be 3″ in diameter, with two 2″-square guides.
Some deluxe factory-made vises have a ratchet-thread half-nut that can be instantly released for quick repositioning. The solid steel spindles on large vises are a full inch in diameter. On newer vises, the jaws are machined iron castings with wooden liners. Some vises also have a sliding dog built into the outer jaw that can be used in conjunction with another dog inserted into one of the several mortises on the benchtop. These large vises are an investment, but they will provide long, reliable service. Quality vises are marked by massive screws and spindles and generous iron castings. Deep jaws are needed to support heavy or long materials. The wooden liners allow you to work close to the jaws without risk of damaging sharp edge tools.
Estonian joiner’s bench – probably late 19th century. The rigid jaw vise has been retained by some Scandinavian workbench manufacturers.
An interesting built-in vise variation is found on some workbenches in Scandinavia. The design is quite old, and Estonian woodworkers were using similar vises toward the end of the 19th century.(1) Conceptually, it’s a conventional vise turned inside out. A fixed elbow extends from one end of the workbench. The screw and spindles pass through this piece. On the inside a pressure plate and on the outside an end plate maintain alignment. The advantage is that the screw and spindles don’t obstruct the jaw. This results in great holding power for large vertical pieces and for some carving and furniture work. It’s also evident that it’s impossible to hold large material horizontally. The design is excellent for a few woodworkers, limiting to others.
(1) Ants Viires. “Woodworking in Estonia.” Reprint: Covington, KY: Lost Art Press, 2016.
