We have a decent-sized batch of Crucible Type 2 Dividers up in the store today, ready to ship. This is the batch we managed to get done before an end mill decided to go supernova in the mill (no one was hurt, thank you for asking).
I use these dividers every day. Above is a snapshot of me adjusting them one-handed to transfer mortise locations to a chair seat.
The bonus with this batch is it contains Megan Cooties. We had to sharpen these by hand before sending them to the warehouse. Cooties are no extra charge.
I don’t think this is what they meant by wet, green wood. But it works.
Most of my chairs are made with kiln-dried hardwood from the lumberyard. Its moisture content is usually at equilibrium with my shop – just like a good flat woodworker would want.
But I know and respect the wet/dry construction methods used by Jennie Alexander and other chairmakers who use moisture content to strengthen mortise-and-tenon joints. (An oversimplified explanation: A wettish leg mortise shrinks on a dry tenon rung to lock the joint.)
After much flailing about and experimentation, here is how I now imitate that process with wood that is kiln-dried.
Let’s say the joint has a 5/8” (.625”) mortise, which I drilled with a spade bit. I then make the tenon about 15 thou oversized (.640”). This size tenon is too big to enter the mortise.
The oversized tenon, before compression.
Compressing the tenon.
The same tenon after compression with soft-jaw pliers.
So I compress the tenon with soft-jaw pliers. By using a firm grip on the pliers and rotating the tenon, I can compress it to just under 5/8” in diameter (.620”). This tenon will easily fit into the mortise.
Then, when I add hot, wet glue and put the joint together, the tenon swells up to (nearly) its original size, locking the joint.
I know this is true because I’ve done a lot of experiments where I have cut apart sample joints. Plus, I have made a lot of chairs this way. But here is a simple experiment you can try, which is more decimal.
First, some facts. The common woodworking glues (both PVA and hide glue) are about 40 percent water. I use liquid hide glue for almost all of my joinery, plus a little PVA here and there. (Note that there are waterless glues out there, especially polyurethane glue. I haven’t experimented with these glues, so I have no opinion on whether they would work.)
So when I take the compressed (.620”) tenon and dip it in some warm water for a second or two, it swells. (This is much like steaming out dents in pieces of wood with a wet rag and steaming clothes iron.)
After two minutes, the tenon has swollen to almost its original size.
After a couple minutes, the tenon swells to .635”. After an hour or two, it swells to almost its full size (.640”).
When I assemble a chair, I can feel this process at work. The tenons enter the mortises with a little effort. The hot, wet glue hits the mortise and within 10 seconds or so, the joint becomes difficult to rotate. After a few minutes the joint is impossible to move.
If this seems like a lot of work, it’s not. It might add 10 minutes to the entire construction time involved in a chair. But I suspect those 10 minutes of extra work might add years to the lifespan of a chair.
My name is Jennie Alexander. Until 2007, my name was John Alexander. I thank all those who have been supportive and kind. Yes indeed, people change, times change, wood continues to be wonderful!
I am a chairmaker. I made my first post-and-rung chair in the late 1960s. My interest in chairs began much earlier when my mother, Dorothy Parker Lowe, gave me her two-slat post-and-rung chair. In 1978, I wrote “Make a Chair from a Tree: An Introduction to Working Green Wood,” a practical book about post-and-rung chairmaking to document what I had learned up to that time. I call this book MACFAT for short. In 1994, in a second edition I added an afterword showing some updated methods. The book has been a part of the growing interest in the practice of traditional crafts with hand tools and green wood. It led me to coin the word “greenwoodworking.”
By 1999, both editions of the book were out of print. With Anatol Polillo, a good friend and craftsman, I made a two-hour video of “Make a Chair from a Tree.” It is now available from Lost Art Press. The two books, the video, extensive teaching and research have led me to the wonderful world of kind and sharing traditional craftsmen and scholars. I have learned more than I have taught. Thanks to them I have grown both as a person and chairmaker. This third edition continues the process. The basic approach – working greenwood with simple hand tools, understanding how greenwood changes shape as it dries and taking advantage of those changes to construct a strong, long-lasting two-slat post-and-rung chair – remains the same.
Greenwoodworking is a traditional way of working a piece of wood that (initially) contains substantial moisture content by riving (splitting) and shaving. Saws are used only to cut across long fibers, not with them. In some greenwoodworking crafts not only is greenwood used in the initial stages, the shrinking and swelling characteristics of wood are employed and sometimes artfully avoided. That is true here. To make this chair, we need only hand tools. Tool expense is modest.
I use the phrase “post-and-rung chair” as a useful generic term for a crowded group of vernacular chairs: country, kitchen, ladderback, Shaker, Appalachian, Delaware Valley and so on. The basic post-and-rung two-slat chair described here has but four parts: four vertical posts, 12 horizontal rungs, two slats and fiber seating.
Where Did this Chair Come From? I became a greenwoodworker by accident. My mother was a single parent. I helped around the house. She told Jerry at Boulevard Hardware that she would pay for any tools or supplies I needed. Jerry – or his sidekick, Miss Erma – gave me a Stanley loose-leaf notebook full of descriptions on the use of Stanley hand tools. I attended the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, where excellent shop classes were mandatory. At mother’s suggestion I framed and finished my apartment in our basement. She then sent me to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where I repaired furniture in the abandoned woodshop. Through all this, first and last was the post-and-rung chair that Mother gave me! I grew up with it. It inherited me.
Before I made my first chair, I was a young lawyer reading books on woodworking and chairmaking and had collected some tools. My neighbor, Jack Goembel, let me use his shop. Later, another woodworking friend decided to stop woodworking to become a mail carrier and sold me his lathe, band saw and drill press. To buy them I had to take out our first-ever loan. It was at the insistence of my lovely wife, Joyce.
I joined the Early American Industries Association (EAIA) and met Charles Hummel, then curator of collections at the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. He brought out the best in me. Somehow, I wound up with a funny workbench, working seriously on furniture and visiting museum basements with Hummel to see broken pieces of furniture.
Hummel’s landmark book “With Hammer in Hand” (1968) catalogs an extensive collection of woodworking tools, equipment, account books and furnishings produced by three generations of the Dominy family of East Hampton, Long Island, circa. 1760-1840. Hummel once told me, “We have a Dominy chair that when the humidity is down you can disassemble.” We did so, and from this type of research I learned much of what I know about how old chairs were made. One example is a notch or groove turned in each tenon – the same notch I’ve seen in Southern chairs as well; hundreds of years and miles apart. I was fascinated and became an expert on busted chair parts.
Sabbathday Lake Shakers, 1984. Front row: Minnie Green, R. Mildred Barker, Marie Burgess, Frances A. Carr. Back row: Elsie McCool, Theodore E. Johnson, Wayne Smith, Arnold Hadd.
Joyce and I made several trips to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, where we met Sister Mildred. Our first visit was to see the chairs. Sister Mildred said, “You know, it’s interesting. People think we’re chairs.” We visited a couple more times to see the chairs and also learn about the Shakers. Soon, I decided that I wanted to build a Shaker one-slat dining chair and managed it with a few tools and a lathe.
What is a Jennie Chair? The chair in this book emerged from the study of the joinery in those busted chairs, Shaker chairs, Appalachian ladderbacks and the human body. The chair is especially comfortable because the back posts are bent and have a characteristic flat shaved on the front face, giving rise to the name “mule ear” for chairs like this. The rear posts also flare outward, enhancing the curve of the back slats for more comfort. The position of the lower slat supports the sitter’s lumbar spine.
At first, my slat backs were too heavy with hickory and big parts. I asked, can we lighten it up? Can we make it like a kitchen chair? Because that is a masterpiece. The mule ear is important to get the roundness of the post out of the way, and it looks good. I also asked: How many rungs and where are they? The wonderful kitchen chair I own is missing one rung compared to mine. Many, or even most, traditional post-and-rung chairs have just two rear rungs: the seat rung and the bottom rung. I want every rung to share the shock. It’s like grass in the wind. I came up with this idea early in the process.
Detail of slats/post. The flat, or relief, shaved on the rear post makes it easier to bend and more comfortable for the sitter than a fully-round post.
The chair is attractive, strong and comfortable. It looks like a traditional post-and-rung chair. However, its construction differs. When put in service, a post-and-rung side chair suffers its greatest stress in the fore and aft direction when sat upon, and when it is leaned back upon. Disregarding custom, we anticipate and respect these powerful destructive racking forces. Unlike “traditional” chairs, the side frames are constructed first. Then their rung tenons are firmly interlocked in place by the front and rear rung tenons. I have never seen nor heard of another post-and-rung chair so constructed. A cautionary note to myself: In a vernacular craft of long history, such as stick-chair making, it is all too easy to claim invention. With time we learn that there is little new under the sun. I suggest you make your first chair “by the book” then go on from there. These features make a Jennie Chair.
Cautionary Words to the Experienced Craftsperson This book contains all that you need to know about making post-and-rung chairs from shaved greenwood. My goal is to provide enough information for woodworkers of all levels to be able to make a chair from a tree.
But in ways this text is a bit pedantic, cautionary and repetitive. I envision my reader as a married homemaker in Cincinnati, Ohio, who plans to learn chairmaking in one-half of the family’s two-car garage. I wrote this for her. So please bear with us.
I found an error on page 530 of the book – two missing mortises – that we repeated in the full-size patterns. So we fixed the mistake and issued new pdfs for the book and the full-size patterns. It’s not a huge error. A drawing earlier in the book shows the mortises correctly. And the text is correct. I suspect most of you would do the layout correctly and might not even notice.
It has been one of those weeks where everything feels like it is spiraling down the toilet bowl. Last week while making divider legs, an end mill self-destructed – destroying the fixture that holds our dividers’ legs and damaging the mill’s chuck. Estimate: No dividers for three weeks.
And the chair on my bench is fighting me every step of the way. I trashed two shoes yesterday before settling on something that might work. But I’m looking at this chair as I type this, and I suspect this one might be a burner.
There is some good news: Megan and I finished sharpening up a batch of finished dividers and sent them to the warehouse. So we will have some dividers in the store to sell shortly. And our machinist thinks he might be able to fix the damaged fixture in the mill.
Still, it’s one of those weeks where I fantasize about switching places with a friend who is a third-shift security guard at a factory. The place is so quiet and automated that he spends most of his time writing songs in the control room.
My daughter Katherine has just put some jars of Soft Wax 2.0 up for sale in her etsy.com store. These jars are left over from the Lost Art Press Open Day last week. So it’s not as big a batch as usual.
This is the finish I use on my chairs. She cooks it up here in the machine room using a waterless process. She then packages it in a tough glass jar with a metal screw-top lid. She applies her hand-designed label to each lid, boxes up the jars and ships them in a durable cardboard mailer. She is an independent business woman, and I could not be more proud.
Shown here is her loyal cat, Bean, who is sniffing the jar at the request of Katherine. Unlike the earlier version of soft wax, this version has almost no solvents – just a wee bit of a safe citrus solvent. We all love the smell when she cooks it.
Instructions for Soft Wax 2.0
Soft Wax 2.0 is a safe finish for bare wood that is incredibly easy to apply and imparts a beautiful low luster to the wood.
The finish is made by cooking raw, organic linseed oil (from the flax plant) and combining it with cosmetics-grade beeswax and a small amount of a citrus-based solvent. The result is that this finish can be applied without special safety equipment, such as a respirator. The only safety caution is to dry the rags out flat you used to apply before throwing them away. (All linseed oil generates heat as it cures, and there is a small but real chance of the rags catching fire if they are bunched up while wet.)
Soft Wax 2.0 is an ideal finish for pieces that will be touched a lot, such as chairs, turned objects and spoons. The finish does not build a film, so the wood feels like wood – not plastic. Because of this, the wax does not provide a strong barrier against water or alcohol. If you use it on countertops or a kitchen table, you will need to touch it up every once in a while. Simply add a little more Soft Wax to a deteriorated finish and the repair is done – no stripping or additional chemicals needed.
Soft Wax 2.0 is not intended to be used over a film finish (such as lacquer, shellac or varnish). It is best used on bare wood. However, you can apply it over a porous finish, such as milk paint.
APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS (VERY IMPORTANT): Applying Soft Wax 2.0 is so easy if you follow the simple instructions. On bare wood, apply a thin coat of soft wax using a rag, applicator pad, 3M gray pad or steel wool. Allow the finish to soak in about 15 minutes. Then, with a clean rag or towel, wipe the entire surface until it feels dry. Do not leave any excess finish on the surface. If you do leave some behind, the wood will get gummy and sticky.
The finish will be dry enough to use in a couple hours. After a couple weeks, the oil will be fully cured. After that, you can add a second coat (or not). A second coat will add more sheen and a little more protection to the wood.
Soft Wax 2.0 is made in small batches in Kentucky using a waterless process. Each glass jar contains 8 oz. of soft wax, enough for two chairs.
