Note: This article is part of an ongoing series about the details of tool chest construction.
When building a tool chest, it’s tempting to get to the dovetailing as soon as possible. However, the work you do before the dovetailing is more important in the long run. (Even crappy dovetails hold nicely after hundreds of years.) And so I’m afraid we’re going to talk about a topic that bores people to tears: stock preparation.
Stock Selection I use white pine for tool chests whenever possible. It’s lightweight, easy to work and plenty strong. My second choice is poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), which is dirt cheap here in Kentucky. Poplar is easy to work and available in wide widths. The major downside to poplar is its smell. Some people find its odor to be as pleasing as dog poo. It doesn’t bother me.
Crosscut in the Rough After I purchase my stock, I immediately crosscut it to length while it’s still rough and sticker it for a couple weeks in the driest area of my shop. I check the moisture content with a meter to ensure I don’t encounter any surprises. Boards move the most while losing their last few bits of moisture as they reach equilibrium. So let them do this while in the rough.
Making Panels Tool chests are painted, so you don’t have to fuss over the grain patterns in the panels. But you should fuss over the grain direction. After jointing and planing the boards to size, orient the boards in each panel so the grain direction runs the same way.
Also, and I know this will make people howl, orient the heart side of the boards so they will face the outside of the tool chest. Doing this will ensure the corners of your tool chest will stay as tight as possible. That’s because when boards warp, the bark side becomes concave and the heart side becomes convex. So putting the heart side facing out will force the corners of your carcase together. If the bark side faces out there is a danger that the corners will open.
This is a fine detail because the carcase is enclosed by dovetailed skirting. But you might as well do it right.
Squaring and Planing After your panels are glued up, square them up. Don’t trust your machines to do this. Check the ends with a reliable framing square and tweak the panels with a handplane. Then remove all the machine marks on the boards’ faces with a handplane. Do this before dovetailing.
If you handplane your panels after dovetailing, you can create gaps in your joints. You can plane the tailboards without creating gaps, but planing the pinboards after the joints are cut is asking for trouble.
With your panels square and clean, you are ready to cut dovetails. Details on that operation next.
A few years back, Christopher Schwarz taught a handful of what he affectionately calls “the baby anarchist’s tool chest class.” The premise was to help build the woodworking community by offering to young would-be hand-tool woodworkers a low-cost class to jump-start their skills. These classes involved an intensive week of tuning up old tools, then learning to wield them while building a simpler version of his “Anarchist’s Tool Chest” in which to keep them, and little sleep or showering (because: camping).
Since Chris has stepped back from teaching, Mike Siemsen has taken up the baby anarchist baton, and is (for I think the third year) offering much the same at his Minnesota school. The 2018 “Hand Tool Immersion 101” class is May 7-11, and costs $650 (materials included). Mike is offering free camping and communal dinner prep on site. And bathrooms and showers. Because Mike spoils his students.
Most woodworkers familiar with Derek Jones know him as longtime editor of the UK periodical Furniture & Cabinetmaking, a position he held for ten years. Those who follow Derek on Instagram will also know him as a maker of hardwood marking gauges and occasional instructor of furniture making and French polishing, most notably at Robinson House Studio in southeast England. But few of those who aren’t personally close to Derek are aware that, had he not gone into woodworking, he might well have become a chef.
There are many parallels between the kitchen and the workshop, he notes. Both are workspaces filled with dedicated tools, many of them sharp. Both require a commitment to cultivate deep, embodied knowledge of materials and processes while keeping your wits about you lest you curdle a custard or find you’ve created a drawer shaped like the letter Z.
Derek’s culinary interest sprang from his experience as a teenager, when he worked in pubs and restaurants managed by his father, but his dad advised him not to go into the hospitality field because of its “unsociable hours.” He chuckles at his dad’s caveat today; being a self-employed woodworker often comes with similar encroachments on what might otherwise be personal time.
After Derek left school at the age of 17, he took off for the south of France, where he spent a couple of years. There he developed an interest in French peasant food – “good, wholesome stuff,” such as a casserole he still makes today with pork belly or sausage (“quite robust sausage, such as chorizo”), butter beans, cabbage, mushrooms and leeks. “The cabbage goes on last. As soon as it goes to a vibrant green, out it comes, and you’ve got this steaming-hot plate of goodness. It’s heaven. I’d eat it all day every day,” though the rest of his family – his longtime partner, Tracey, and younger daughter, Mahli, who still lives at home – don’t share his enthusiasm for the dish.
While in France he worked in bars, restaurants and camp sites – and also as a tour guide on coaches (buses, in the States) bound for Monaco and St. Tropez: “You’d have this little script you’d read out” while pointing out landmarks.
Derek was born in greater Paddington, West London, in 1964. His mother has always been a dancer; she spent years on stage as a chorus girl in theaters on London’s West End. Early on, his father worked in property management for a private landlord who had mansion blocks around Maida Vale, north of Paddington. The family left London for Brighton, a city on the coast in southeast England, when Derek was still young. His parents split when he was 10 or 11.
That was when his father got into the business of managing pubs and restaurants. Today, management is widely considered a hardcore skill taught by business schools. But Derek understands that what really makes a good manager is the ability to relate to other people – to understand what matters to them, and provide it in the most satisfying way. Far from being primarily a number cruncher, Derek says, “my dad’s a wandering minstrel, really. Very congenial,” which made him invaluable to the owners of pubs and restaurants where he worked. He’d optimize each operation, then turn it over to other managers. Derek lived with his mother and worked part-time for his dad.
Today, Derek and Tracey live in the port town of Newhaven, about 12 miles east of Brighton. When they started to look for a place to buy, they couldn’t find anything in Lewes (pronounced “Lewis”), where they were living at the time. But in Newhaven, which Derek calls “the poor relation to Brighton,” they found a 1930s house with a garden and parking for two cars. He has a “tiny little shed” in back that serves as a shop. He insulated the structure, added electrical wiring and moved in his Roubo bench, along with hand tools, a drill press, router and Festool Domino. It’s a set-up that works well; while his “little workshop” is at the end of the garden, he has access to a full suite of tools “at the school.”
“The school” he’s referring to is the London Design & Engineering University Technical College, which operates in partnership with the University of East London Design and Technical College. Although Derek’s teaching currently focuses on engineering, rather than woodworking, his career as an instructor grew out of a venture when he was working as editor of Furniture & Cabinetmaking. In 2014 Derek arranged to bring Chris Schwarz to the U.K. to deliver two classes, the Anarchist’s Toolchest and Dutch Toolchest, at Warwickshire College. The classes were structured to allow young students to take part in sessions that would otherwise be beyond their means. The pieces made by the instructor were filled with hand tools donated by makers from both sides of the pond, including Lee Valley, Sterling Tool Works, Bad Axe, Texas Heritage Tool Works, Walke Moore Tools and Karl Holtey. The fully equipped chests were then auctioned off with the proceeds going back to the host college to support their full-time students. The following year the lineup included Roy Underhill, Tom Fidgen, Peter Follansbee and David Barron and covered two locations over two weeks.
An attendee at one of these classes, Geoffrey Fowler, approached Derek to run and teach at a similar event at a school he was planning to build in London. Derek wasn’t enthusiastic, in part because he was working full-time as editor of the magazine, but the two of them struck up a friendship. Instead of organizing more such classes and events, Derek offered his services to spec out the woodworking shops with tools and equipment that reflected those found in a professional shop. Changes at the magazine coincided with circumstances at the school which meant that Derek was able “come and lend a hand” for one day a week. He’d stand back and watch instructors who, he says, were doing a fine job of teaching but hadn’t necessarily had much, if any, experience in commercial work – i.e., earning a living from work in the field, as distinct from delivering what we know today as “content.” “D’you know what?” he wanted to say; “that’s not actually how we do it commercially.” He realized that he had real-world experience he could contribute to the curriculum. One thing led to another, and before long he was doing a lot more teaching.
Gradually, his teaching shifted to the subject of engineering: the principles of marking things out and making components to fit. The methodology is similar, whether you’re working in wood or metal, and these days he’s teaching more metalwork than woodwork. “It’s not a huge leap, is it, really?” he asks. “We’re still taking small amounts of material off. The vocabulary is very similar; the necessary skills to be able to generate drawings that other people can read, they’re identical.” And even though it’s 2021, he’s still teaching students to draw by hand. “They hate it!” he says. “But I won’t let them go anywhere near software until they can draw on paper. It’s the same with hand tools. I don’t let them go anywhere near a machine unless they can use a file and a saw.” Here he takes a moment to share an anecdote about a student who recently asked if he could use “the long metal sandpaper,” to which Derek replied, “You mean the file?”
Early days
Derek got his start in the trade as a “Saturday boy” around the age of 15, when he had a job restoring antiques. In those relatively dark days, restoration meant stripping, followed by French polishing; there was still scant respect for the patina that develops with use. He also learned to repair furniture, which entailed replicating parts. “I don’t think there’s a better training ground…than to take things apart to find out how all the parts go together,” he remarks. “You learn about joints intimately. You learn about proportions – without realizing you’re soaking up all this information.” His boss, John, taught him to look closely at the subtle differences between Victorian and Georgian furniture. You’d expect Georgian, being older, to be more clunky, he thinks. But it was just the opposite. Anyone familiar with the history of furniture will appreciate why.
On completion of his “French Sabbatical” in his later teens, Derek returned to John’s emporium to complete his training as a cabinetmaker, supplementing his income with an early-morning window cleaning round in the city center so he could save up money to buy woodworking tools. He got his own shop, a garage behind Hove Station, at “the posher end of Brighton,” and restored pieces to ship by the container-load to the North American market. Brighton is full of antique dealers, he notes, and he was constantly hunting through secondhand shops and auctions for pieces with potential. The city was also home to a thriving furniture making trade; in one square mile he could find French polishers, upholsterers, gilders, carvers and more – all the areas of specialization that make up the traditional furniture industry. An American dealer purchased everything Derek made or had bought for resale, then arranged to receive the container when it reached the United States.
After a couple of years, the booming interest in “brown furniture,” as Victorian, Georgian and Regency furniture is often disparagingly known, waned. So Derek turned to smaller items, producing one-off pieces and sometimes replicating others, such as when he bought a pair of chairs and made two more to match, then sold them as a set.
In his late 20s Derek embarked on a two-year degree in 3-D design at Northbrook College in the coastal town of Worthing. After graduating, he rented workshop space, this time with a couple of other craftspersons, Paul Richardson (who became editor of The Woodworker magazine and would go on to launch Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine) and Anthony Bailey (editor of Woodworking Crafts magazine). By now he’d expanded his knowledge from period to contemporary furniture, in addition to having learned to draw and design. He built up the business, which grew to seven people. They built conference tables and other high-end office furniture for corporate clients based in London, such as the Bank of Canada. But “two events you’d never think would impact a rural Sussex shop” dealt his business a critical blow – first, 9/11, then the Enron scandal. Both events “just wiped our business out,” he says – their work was for the kind of clients who’d been based in the Twin Towers and operated internationally. And after Enron, shareholders became a lot more cautious about how the businesses they invested in were spending money.
“It was a disaster,” he remembers. To stay afloat, he and his partners had to turn on a dime. But pivot they did, this time to the custom kitchen market, a potentially lucrative business at a time when property values were rising dramatically, particularly in the south of England. Here, though, Derek found, “clients faff about over the color, the handles, everything. All the successful bespoke kitchen makers had a swanky brochure and showroom.” He and his partners couldn’t effectively break into the market, so they sold their business.
Furniture & Cabinetmaking
This time, Derek turned to drawing and drafting. “I was a freelancer, carrying out site surveys for high-end bespoke fit-outs [installations, in the U.S.], drawing up designs and running the project.” Every now and then he’d rent space in a workshop run by Marc Fish of Robinson House Studio in Newhaven, to build the odd project. Marc showed him a copy of Furniture & Cabinetmaking magazine. “I was horrified,” Derek says. “Good grief, what’s going on here?” he wondered; nothing in the publication related to his real-world experience. “Everything seemed so twee and out of step with current trends and processes. I was used to having my work represented in a magazine format where the style, layout and content compl[e]mented each other. Woodworking magazines at that time were lacking in all respects.” Marc mentioned that the publishers were on the hunt for a new editor. Derek briefly considered applying, then dismissed the idea. A year later the publishers were still looking for an editor, so he applied. “I’d never written anything longer than a postcard before then,” he adds. He told them that while he had no background in publishing, he knew the topic well. Between his appointment to the post and starting at the magazine, Paul Richardson, the founder of F&C and onetime bench mate, had been killed in a traffic accident. “Paul had moved away from F&C by this time to launch several other titles. We hadn’t spoken in years but I was really looking forward to working with him again. It wasn’t to be, though, and as we hadn’t exactly parted on good terms. I felt that maybe I owed him one last favor to restore his creation back to its former self.”
He ended up staying in that position for ten years. Throughout that time, the world of print publishing was in trouble. Circulation was in decline; the length of the magazine was getting shorter. When he first took the job as editor, Derek and his colleagues had access to a workshop the publishers provided, which allowed them to generate significant content of their own, but after about 6 years the publishers decided to pay outsiders to produce content instead. The decision grated on Derek. “If you’re teaching, it feels wrong to be teaching a subject you’re not actively pursuing. I teach, and I make stuff. If you’re editing a woodworking magazine, not to be doing any woodworking is just wrong.” In addition, as a seasoned professional woodworker, Derek knew that writing an article and getting the photos and other illustrations took a lot of time, and what the publishers were willing to pay professional woodworkers was far from fair compensation. He had a hard time breaking the low rate to woodworkers who were interested in writing for the magazine – so hard that this challenge, above all others, finally convinced him to change course, which is how he came to his current teaching position.
Marking gauges and cricket tables
Derek started making marking gauges when he was editor at Furniture & Cabinetmaking. During his professional career he’d always made things in batches, so he did the same with marking gauges, gradually developing processes that minimized the need for handwork, which took far more time. “I’m at that point now where I’ve refined them and can do a batch of 20 or 30 quite quickly,” he says. “Quickly is a relative term, I rarely have consistent back-to-back days to work on any project these days so I don’t really count the hours. As long as it’s quicker than the time before, I know I’m making progress.” Finishing is the slowest part. “I start off using a couple brush coats of diluted shellac, not to fill the grain (although that’s a happy coincidence), but to raise it so that when I apply a shop-made hard wax paste, the surface is dead smooth. I aim to have the best finish with the least amount of product. It’s a long way from my French polishing background but something I probably wouldn’t have thought about without that knowledge.” He figures once he’s got the process so streamlined that it’s profitable, he’ll lose interest.
His current focus outside of teaching engineering is on cricket tables. Having started out with antiques in the laissez-faire Wild West that was England in the 1980s, he understood that the cognoscenti looked down on Victorian furniture, much of which had been manufactured in factories for a mass market. Back then, the pieces of greatest interest were Georgian (dating from the early 18th through early-19th centuries) and Regency (a short period in the early-19th century that followed directly afterward). But “you could take Victorian furniture and convert it with different hardware to change its style.” Sic transit gloria mundi. He apologizes for the deceit but acknowledges “that was the market.”
At the time, he had no interest in anything earlier than Georgian furniture. So it should come as no surprise that years later, when he saw Peter Follansbee and others making traditional English furniture from the 17th century, “I thought it was a bit wacky, not proper.” His opinion about these earlier furniture forms changed when he went to an auction a few years ago and saw “a cute little table” – symmetrical from one angle, but not from others. It was “so different to anything usually on my radar, it stuck out.” He loved it – and put in a maximum bid of £90. It eventually went to another bidder for £900. So began his obsession with the cricket table.
Along with marking gauges, cricket tables have been the focus of his production ever since. Explaining their development, he says “they go right back to being stick tables, and at some point they go over to being joined furniture.” He started with a couple that were “quite rough” but kept at it, learning from each one. The clamps we use today didn’t exist when cricket tables were originally made, he points out, but the tables still hold together. “That blows my mind.” These days he’s perfecting the techniques and familiarizing himself with the geometry. “I spent so many years making square boxes. You suddenly think, oh my god, I’ve got to make something that’s 60 degrees!”
His interest in cricket tables led to a book contract with Lost Art Press. He anticipates it will likely be published early in 2023.
These days Derek teaches engineering in London four days a week. On Fridays he works from home – grading, planning lessons, etc. – “terribly dull stuff that goes with being a teacher.” He spends most weekends and evenings on the book, though the last couple of weeks he’s been making some chopping boards, a tray, cutlery inserts and spice racks for a bespoke kitchen company, stuff he calls “bread and butter work.”
I asked Derek what advice he’d give to a would-be furniture maker. “I’d probably advise them to have an interest in something niche,” he replied. “If you’re doing something niche, it’s a small market, but the people in it will be loyal and tend to value what you can deliver, because they find it hard to find people who do what you can do.”
Many of Derek’s clients come to him because they can’t find anyone else to do what he does well, or within their time frame, a situation that helps make it possible for him to charge what he needs to for his work. Three of his customers have been with him for 30 years; they even stayed with him through a strange period during the late ’80s when he chucked woodworking for a job at Gatwick Airport, where he worked in the Dispatch Office coordinating the turnround of civil aircraft and calculating optimal weight and balance so that planes could take off when they reached the end of the runway. But even that professional diversion contributes to what he does now – it taught him about timekeeping, which is essential in the business of aviation.
He expands on his point. These longstanding customers “never query your price. They’re happy with your lead times. They never question your ability to do stuff. They pay on time. In the commercial world, you send someone an invoice and they pay you in 30 days, maybe 60 days. They may go bust [in which case you may not get paid at all]. You learn the value in those relationships. It’s a business relationship, but it goes deeper. You need to nurture those relationships and those customers because they’re the ones keeping the roof over your head, ultimately.”
Why Lowfat Roubo?
Finally, those familiar with Derek’s Instagram account may wonder why he goes by @lowfatroubo. Here’s the backstory.
When I was at [Furniture & Cabinetmaking], I commissioned a series of articles from David Barron about benches that were scheduled to run back to back. The first was a Scandinavian bench, the second a Roubo. We trailered the Roubo at the end of the first article – standard practice. David submitted his copy and pics on time, then left for the U.S. to attended Handwerks. We subbed the text, paid an illustrator for the plans and started work on the layout. Unfortunately David had sent all low-res images – totally useless for print. He’d erased the high-res files from his camera. With just two weeks in the schedule I decided to ‘reconstruct’ the bench with pine 2x4s (not the solid beech he used). I only intended making a short bench top and maybe two legs just for the photo sequence, but it was going so well I made the full version. The coverline was something like ‘Avoid the heavy lifting and build a Lowfat Roubo.’ About a week after it went on sale, I needed a name for my online accounts in a hurry and liked the sound of Lowfat Roubo. It fits in well with my ethos – trimming down the excess but keeping things authentic.
When the magazine closed the workshop, I brought the bench home, cut a foot off each end and installed it in my home shop. It’s what I work on now. I’ll never part with it.
On Saturday, Chris Schwarz and I had our biennial chair conversation. I subjected him to a mind probe about his recently purchased a Welsh stick chair and an Irish Gibson stick chair he is currently building.
Suzanne: Please confirm if you have more Welsh chairs (made by other chairmakers) than house cats.
Chris: We are at a 2:5 chair:cat ratio. To be honest, Chris’s (Williams) chair has melted into the fabric of our daily lives and furniture because it isn’t a “room broach,” like so many pieces of custom furniture are. That’s the beauty of these chairs – they are so charitable. Welsh chairs like the one I purchased last week are as rare as hen’s teeth – especially here in the States. It’s a bit odd seeing it in an American house. I put it by my fireplace so it might feel a bit more comfortable.
Suzanne: Your newest chair was purchased during your visit with John Porritt. Not to get too personal but to use a term referenced in “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” (p.50) did you experience the “tingling in the bathing suit area” when you saw this chair? What struck you about the chair?
Chris: My first sight of the chair was less like a tingling and more like the aggressive groping I received from Kym Harper during 8th grade.
It was the second-best chair that John Porritt owned (the best one was in his house, see the gallery below). That chair is good enough to be in a museum.
What I like about Welsh stick chairs, especially the one I bought, is their motion. Most chairs are designed to look fairly balanced and stable to give you the confidence to sit in them. Welsh chairs, on the other hand, have a wildness.
The chair rakes back aggressively. It suggests it will be a comfortable chair to lean back in. And it delivers on the promise.
Also, there are many little details of this chair that deserve study. Some of the tenons into the arms are blind – not through. That’s quite unusual, and I am eager to work out the best way to build a replica. The crest rail has some subtle shaping that is difficult to photograph. The ends have a bit of a waterfall-like curve.
The armbow is clearly a bent stick that has been resawn, scarfed and bookmatched. It’s just a lovely piece of work. The only bummer about the chair is the shiny finish – likely shellac – which looks a bit wrong to me. I’m going to live with it for a while before I consider cutting it back. I’m not eager to mess with antique furniture as that’s not my specialty.
Suzanne: You have given a lively description of why this chair has such a strong pull for you. I’m looking forward to reading about more details after you have spent more time with the chair. As for the finish, live with the chair for a long while before thinking about a change.
When comparing the new Welsh chair with your American Welsh chair you wrote the chairs look distantly related, but also your chair is “uptight” in comparison to the old chair. That made me take a second look at the side view photo of the chairs. The older chair looks more relaxed and your chair perhaps has a stiffness to it. What elements of your chair do you think make it “uptight” and are you OK with that?
Chris: There are many elements of my chair that are more “uptight” in the craftsmanship. Some are obvious and some aren’t.
Obvious: I use hard edges and facets on every possible surface. I don’t like things that are rounded over. Even my seat, which is saddled and curved, has a sharp line surrounding it. The legs and stretchers are faceted – not turned or smoothed to round. I don’t round over the arms. My crest – same thing.
Less obvious: My sticks are consistent and have little tapering or entasis. One of the hallmarks (and charms) of an old Welsh stick chair are the small handmade inconsistencies in the construction. The sticks are not as regular and may taper or have a lot (or no) entasis. Also, I shoot for precise spacing of my sticks, which adds to the overall sharpness of the design.
I am, of course, happy with my design. It reflects the way I approach furniture, writing, cooking, music and making my bed. I like my desk to be clean….
But, I would like to be able to work in the older mode as well. This will require just as much thought and work. It’s not a sloppiness or a shortcut.
Suzanne: Adding to the sense of relaxation in the Welsh chair are the spindles under the arm. They tilt back in concert with the back of the chair and are another suggestion offered by the chair to sit down and lean back.
Your chair by itself is clean and it is evident you have thought through every detail. When placed next to the older Welsh chair the hard details of your chair stand out. If we were looking at two humans they would be an old pensioner next to an edgy teenager.
A few more questions about details. When you are working to make each detail exact and as precise as possible are you losing spontaneity?
Chris: Probably. But I think spontaneity in furniture should be in very low doses. Some people can make big design swings (and succeed) while building an object. I am not that kind of designer or builder.
Suzanne: Using pre-made dowels for spindles saves time, and you aren’t trying to make replicas, but does it take away from the Welsh aesthetic of the chair?
Chris: Perhaps. I use factory dowels in the classroom to remove a barrier that many first-time chairmakers face, which is the difficulty of making long, thin sticks. I make my own sticks for customer chairs. Even so, every stick – factory made or not – is scraped and shaped to fit. They do give a very consistent place to start, and they do contribute to the overall consistent look of the finished chair, like it or not.
Suzanne: Adding the sharp edge around the seat echoes the sharp edge of the armbow but does it make the chair more inviting?
Chris: I think the sharp edge around the seat removes the mushy line I see on many chairs. I hate mushy lines. My opinion is either have a sharp line or blend the seat and spindle deck together completely. The former is my approach because I like to repeat design elements up and down a chair. The second option (no line whatsoever) is one employed by old chairmakers who weren’t trying to show off.
Suzanne: You also wrote in a recent post you obsess over every detail. When do you know when a chair is finished and you can comfortably walk away?
Chris: For me, I spend a long time looking at my work from different vantage points and in different lights. I’m looking for things I can improve. I keep working until there’s nothing left that I can improve.
That doesn’t mean the results are perfect. There are lots of things on a finished chair that are not perfect. Those imperfections are details I cannot repair without starting over. A good example of this might be a wedge that is 5° off the axis I was shooting for. I can’t fix that without destroying the entire thing.
For me, making furniture is as much about looking as it is about doing.
Suzanne: I think it is the same for craftsmen and artists in any field. Step back, step away then come back to see what needs to be tweaked before saying the chair is done. You will also have a list of changes for the next chair because chair begets chair, no?
Chris: Yup. I have already made changes to my American Welsh Stick Chair. I incorporated those into a chair that hasn’t yet been made public. I also have a couple minor changes to make to the arms in future chairs. I don’t think it ever ends. Heck, I still make changes to my tool chests….
Suzanne: On to the Gibson, a variation of the Irish hedge chair! In “Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950,” Claudia Kinmonth wrote, “…although the origin of the name, which may be associated with Oldcastle, county Meath, is unclear. This design is distinguished from others by the distinctive ‘W’ (or less often an ‘M’) shaped arrangement of back spindles…Gibson chairs were once common in county Cavan, although they were generally made in northeast Leinster, especially counties Louth, Monaghan, Meath and Westmeath.”
The first Irish stick chair I found was painted green and not a Gibson but I loved it. Then, you turned up a true Gibson (although not painted green) and I liked it even more. These are wide and open-armed chairs. You have started making your first Gibson chair. What are your thoughts so far?
Chris: I’m in the middle of building the first one, and today I fit the arms to the front spindles.
A couple things really stand out for me with this chair. It seems to me to be an all-wooden version of a Morris Chair. The geometry and seat height (and other factors) give me the same feeling as when I first started making Morris Chairs in 1997 or 1998. The back leans 25°. That’s insane. Plus the seat is low – 15”. The position of the arms is similar. The extreme (24”) width of the seat is also similar to Morris Chairs. I’m not saying one influenced the other but the similarities are remarkable.
The best part of building the chair is trying to get into the heads of the chair’s original makers. This is necessary because there is obviously a right order of operations and a wrong order of operations when making this chair.
After I drew the chair full-size on paper and started to work it out at my bench, I received little flashes of communication across the centuries from Ireland. Things that aren’t completely obvious.
Like today: Mounting the arms on the front sticks first allows you to easily find the 25° angle of the two outside back sticks. Once you drill those, then it’s a piece of cake to drill the ‘W’-shaped sticks.
In other words, once you get into the briar patch, it’s obvious how to get out. Until then, it looks like a nut-doodle chair that is hard to build. It isn’t.
Mostly, I’m looking forward to sitting in it. My spine has a lot of questions.
Suzanne: I have to take you to task for your “Do the Irish have big butts in general” question on an Instagram post last week. I believe you could have used “generous bottoms” or “perhaps a bit wide abaft the beam” instead. The Gibson is a big welcoming chair and nothing wrong with that, boyo.
Chris: Apologies. But could you answer the question?
Suzanne: I’ll do some research and get back with you much, much later.
Chris Williams, your Welsh brother, will be returning to Covington later this month. What are you most looking forward to during his visit?
Chris: Mostly the arguing about the chairs. We work in very different ways. And we see the chair in different ways. He has baggage I can’t claim. And I have my own personal hang-ups. In the end, we’re both better for it. And I don’t have anyone else that I can talk to about this stuff who isn’t bored out of their minds after five minutes of splay-splaining. So my relationship with Chris is a healthy and wonderful thing. It is one of the greatest gifts the internet has given me.
Suzanne: What is the perfect place to put your chair (either one). Sit down and get comfortable. What are you drinking and what are you reading?
Chris: I like to be alone. The dream is to put it by a fireplace. Three-legged cat on my shoulder. Glass of red at hand. And a book of short stories by Wendell Berry.
Suzanne: My Welsh chair is by a fireplace, bottle of red and rereading “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” The Gibson under a tree, sipping a fine whiskey, memorizing “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a cat sprawled next to me (because the chair has plenty of room).
The gallery has two more images of the green Irish stick chair and a gathering of Gibsons.
Memory is a damn funny thing. It can be as impossible to hold onto as a handful of water. And yet you can drown in a cup of it.
Today I went to pick up a load of sugar pine for an upcoming tool chest I’m building for a customer and got whacked upside the head by a pointed 19-year-old memory.
Since the closing of Midwest Woodworking a few years ago, I’ve run dangerously low on my stock of sugar pine and didn’t have enough to do the job. Enter Kevin McQueeney, an Indianapolis woodworker who offered to help me purchase a load through his local supplier.
After some back-and-forth, it became obvious that the sugar pine was going to come from Shiels Lumber here in Cincinnati. It’s an old place in the neglected industrial lowlands of the city, about a half mile from the foundry that makes our holdfasts.
Hearing the name Shiels was like waking up from a deep dream. How had I forgotten about this place?
When I started at Popular Woodworking magazine, the first significant project I was permitted to build was an interpretation of Benjamin Seaton’s tool chest. My boss made me change a lot of details so it would be accepted by the magazine’s readership – the corners were assembled with finger joints instead of dovetails, and the interior till had to be simplified.
But despite these compromises, it was a major piece and the first cover project of my career.
The first hurdle with the project was finding white pine that was thick enough for the job. One of the associate editors took me to Shiels, a wholesale yard that is off-limits to retail customers. We loaded up a truck with the pine, and I remember looking up at a weird sign painted on a building that towers over the yard that reads: “This Way Sinners.”
I wondered about the sign 19 years ago. And I had the same sense of wonderment as I loaded my pine today and looked up at the same sign. Thanks to the Internet, I dug up a history of the sign behind the guy who had it painted in 1896. You can read it here. It involves a trip to the Holy Land, a misplaced photograph and hieroglyphics. And the story ends with: “Most salads require a little pinch of salt.”
And the pinch of salt in this story: After 19 years I’m back to building tool chests, buying pine at Shiels and wondering which way this sinner should go.