“Sleep is sweet to the laboring man: we may be refreshed if we take a nap.”
From The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, published in 1678.
–Suzanne Ellison
“Sleep is sweet to the laboring man: we may be refreshed if we take a nap.”
From The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, published in 1678.
–Suzanne Ellison
For the last seven years or so I’ve been working with kiln-dried wood that I have rived to help straighten out the grain in my components. But I haven’t really written about it because – I’ll be honest – I was uneasy about presenting the process.
It works really well. It’s not as perfect as riving green stock – that’s the gold medal technique. But it can greatly improve the strength and working characteristics of your parts and allow you to use plain-old lumberyard wood.
As this is one of the core techniques in “Guerrilla Chairmaking,” I thought I’d begin the discussion about it here on the blog and take my spanking.
Here’s how I do it.
I use 8/4 quartersawn white and red oak when I go “dry riving.” I’ve done it with walnut and maple, but oak splits the best among the species I can get here. At the lumberyard I look on the edges of the boards for the straightest grain possible. Most quartersawn boards will have pretty straight grain on the edges and faces. The boards might have some curvy grain near one end – likely the beginning of the tree’s root mass. That’s OK – the curvy stuff comes in handy.
Then I crosscut the boards to the lengths I need. That’s 23” for legs and long sticks and 13” for short sticks. I mark out my parts on the end grain and plan the splits to follow the annular rings. Then I put the stock on my workbench (over one of the bench’s legs) and rive it out with a froe and a mallet – just like green stock. With dry stock, I haven’t found as much need to rive the stock in half and then rive it by half again. I just pop the parts off the board.
If I purchased straight-grained boards, I’ll get a flat surface along the split. I dress that with a jack plane and then work from there to true up the stick off that riven surface. I use a jack plane for most of this work, working either in a cradle (as shown) or against a stop a la Chris Williams and John Brown.
When the grain curves, I don’t throw that stock away. As you can see in the photo the top section is straight, but the bottom is radically curvy. I have a couple choices: crosscut the straight section and use that as a short stick. Or use the curved shape as an arm or crest.
The parts I make seem strong as hell. For the book I’m going to test them against green rived stock (that has been air-dried). Chris Williams has a torture test for brash wood that also weeds out blanks with short grain.
In the book, I’ll go into a lot more detail than is possible with a blog entry, but this entry has enough for anyone to give it a try.
— Christopher Schwarz
I’ve been getting many questions lately about classes at our storefront; right now, we have none scheduled. We won’t schedule any here until everyone here has gotten the COVID-19 vaccination, and until the adoption thereof is widespread.
I know some schools have released schedules and opened registration for this year – I’m rolling the dice on getting stuck (twice) in time to safely teach at two of them: Berea, Kentucky’s Woodworking School at Pine Croft May 14-16 (Dutch tool chest) and Tampa’s Florida School of Woodworking Sept. 20-24 (Anarchist’s Tool Chest).
But our shop is also Chris’ family home, so we’re not taking any chances.
And when it is safe for us to schedule classes again, I have no idea what they will be…except that I will teach a tool chest class of some kind, natch.
In the meantime, you can catch me at one of the schools above, and catch Chris online at Colonial Williamsburg’s 23rd Annual Working Wood in the 18th Century conference. He’s speaking on period workholding on low workbenches and showing how to make a staked stool, as well as delivering an after-dinner talk on how studying the architecture around you can make you a better furniture designer. If you’re interested in Chris’ talks, best hurry; conference registration closes Jan. 8 at 8 a.m. EST. (The conference is a live stream Jan. 14-17, and some sessions will be available on demand.)
Excerpted from Peter Galbert’s “Chairmaker’s Notebook.”
While the softness and flexibility of the green wood is obvious, you might wonder what the advantage is of split wood. Working from split wood can be a tough concept to grasp, even for the experienced furniture maker.
Trees don’t have any flat or square parts, and wood is not a homogeneous material that’s indifferent to the way it is cut. Trees are a bundle of fibers, and once the tools and techniques to split and shave these fibers come into play, hand-tool jobs that would be difficult or tedious with sawn planks become simple and fast.
One way to compare sawn wood to split wood is that a saw blade ignores the fibers and cuts across them. Splits follow the fibers, which yields strong parts that display amazing flexibility without a loss of strength.
But there is more to this story.
Whenever sawn wood is shaped, shaved or cut with hand tools, the direction of cut is of primary concern. A smooth surface can be created by cutting or shaving the fibers in the direction that they ascend from the sawn board. Cutting in the opposite direction, where the fibers descend into the board, will cause the cutter to grab the exposed end grain and lever out small chips. This “tear-out” leaves a rough, undesirable surface and takes more effort to cut.
On sawn boards, the direction can change from one area to another, especially if the tree didn’t grow straight. The showy grain patterns so prized in cabinetwork are the result of milling across the fibers, whereas split and shaved pieces will have uniform – perhaps even boring – figure.
But showy grain can force you to constantly change your cutting direction to avoid tear-out, which slows the process. Plus, when shaving round parts from sawn wood, you will usually have to change direction as you shave around the surface. On the lathe, changing direction is impossible.
But when parts are split and shaved to follow the fibers, the direction of cut is simplified. You always head from the thick area to the thin. On round parts, this allows you to work around the entire piece without changing direction.
This enables you to rely on the shape of the piece to dictate the tool’s cutting direction instead of constantly interpreting the surface for clues.
Split wood can be worked in either direction when shaved parallel to the fibers. Once the fibers are carved across, the direction of cut is always toward the thinner area.
This simplifies and speeds the shaping process. Trying to shave a sawn spindle that has fibers that are not parallel to the axis of the spindle requires a constant changing of the cutting direction, which renders the process impractical.
The title of a book is serious business. For me, the title is not about marketing. Instead, it is a sincere expression on every page of what the book is about.
When we work with our authors, we ask them to propose a book title before they sign the contract or write a single word of the manuscript. Few of these proposed titles become the title of the completed work. Sometimes the title changes because the book’s content changes course. Sometimes the title changes because the proposed title is so generic – “About Wood” – that the title might as well be, uh, “About Wood.” But having a title in mind helps you focus as you write.
All of the books I’ve written were born with different names (except for “Campaign Furniture”). I keep a long list of ideas for book titles on my phone and append it every week as I take long walks through Covington’s neighborhoods.
For the last few months, I’ve been looking for a better title for “The Stick Chair Book.” It’s not a bad title, but it doesn’t capture the tone of the chapters I’ve been writing. Here are some of the titles I’ve jotted down. Note that I allow even crap-tacular titles onto this list because they might lead me to something useful.
Where the Chairs Have no Names
Irregular Chairs
First Chair
Musical Chairs
Armchair Critic
Be Seated
The Easy Chair
All of these titles suck donkey eggs. But creating and tending to this list keeps my brain working on the problem, even when I’m asleep, showering or writing blog entries to fill an empty Sunday on the calendar.
The work always pays off. A couple weeks ago as I was answering an email or blowing my nose, I thought: My book should be called “Guerrilla Chairmaking.” And I scrambled for my phone to add this to my list of ideas (I’ve lost too many ideas by not writing things down immediately).
You might hate the title. That’s OK. But it’s the right title. I came around to it as I was building the cherry lowback chairs shown in this blog entry. This chair is built primarily using a jack plane, a block plane and a band saw. That’s about 90 percent of the work. Yeah, you need a couple specialty tools to saddle the seat. But really, you can skip those if you want. The wood is kiln-dried stuff from the lumberyard. No steambending. No shaving horse. No drawknife. No riving green wood.
Really, this book is about making chairs without proper chairmaking tools, chairmaking training or chairmaking techniques. And the chairs aren’t half bad.
It’s also not a rejection of proper chairmaking tools, techniques or training. It’s merely a stepping stone for those of us who want or need to make chairs but don’t have the skills, tools or access to materials to create the fantastic stuff coming out of other professional chairmakers’ shops.
It’s a way to get started with what you have on hand. And to do a good job.
Plus, with the title “Guerrilla Chairmaking,” we might be able to show some gorillas making chairs in the book for fun.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.