Our second big batch of Crucible lump hammers will go on sale at noon (Eastern time) on Friday, Sept. 28. The price is $85 plus shipping. Details on the Crucible blog.
Peg the Seat
This is an excerpt from “Make a Joint Stool from a Tree” by Jennie Alexander and Peter Follansbee.
Now to fasten the seat to the stool’s frame. By this point, you have checked that the top of the frame and the bottom surface of the seat are both flat. If either needs correction, now’s the time. Once that’s been checked, position the seat in place. You can get this pretty close by eye and feel and then make fine adjustments based on measurements taken with a ruler. If it looks all right, then it is all right.
At this stage, Follansbee departs from period methods and uses a handscrew to clamp the seat in place for boring. We have often speculated and tested different methods for how period joiners might have held the seat in place.
Alexander has come up with a method that avoids the modern clamp. First, secure the seat with two cut nails, driven down through small pilot holes bored into the seat and stiles. These nails are set into diagonally opposite stiles. They must be angled to follow the rake of the stool’s frame exactly where the pegs will be. Don’t drive them all the way in; you need to be able to pull them out and replace them with the square wooden pegs. Once the nails hold the seat down, bore holes in the other two corners and drive those oak pegs in place. Now pull one nail, bore the peg hole and drive a peg home. Then remove the final nail, and repeat.
For most stools, we bore the holes so the square pegs fix the seat to the stiles. Some stools have pegs driven into the rails instead. Both methods work. Sight the holes in line with the stiles, aiming for the area between the joints – it turns out to be a small target. Align the brace and bit to bore at an angle close to that of the end frame of the stool. This way the pegs are pinching the seat down. Sooner or later, someone picks a stool up by the seat, and if the pegs are driven straight down into the stiles, then the seat can come off. Use a larger bit than you did for the pin holes in the joinery. We try for about 3/8″ diameter.
Bore one hole, peg it and then bore the next. The pegs are fashioned in the same way as the pins that secure the mortise-andtenon joints, except for one critical thing – these are square with essentially no taper. They must fit as tightly as can be, without being so tight as to split the stile. Drive some into test holes to check their size.
Work your way around the stool, boring and pegging each corner as you go. Hold the peg firmly while hammering. Any errant blow can split the peg apart. Best to have the shop quiet, so you can listen to the sound it makes. When the sound deadens, the peg is home. Trim it .” or more above the seat then hit it again. Sometimes the peg can go just a bit more, and being trimmed short makes it less likely to shatter. The peg needs to fill the entire hole; there should be no gap beyond the faces of the peg.
If you have time, leave the pegs proud of the seat and come back in a day or two and hit them one more time. Then trim them with a backsaw and chisel to pare them flush with the seat. Next, take one or two more passes on the seat itself with a very sharp plane set to take a light shaving. To hold the stool for this step, you can jam it against the front of your bench with your hip and plane it. Or stand it on the floor, and step on a stretcher to keep it from jostling about.
— Meghan B.
The Next Chapter: The Boarded Settle Chair
One of the furniture forms I’ve had a long obsession with are settles. These high-back benches were common in early homes and were handy for keeping warm by the fire. One of their variants, the settle chair – is somewhat less common. But it is just as delightful.
These boarded chairs are made from four planks that are nailed or screwed together. And – if you take what you know about stick chairs and apply it to a boarded chair, it can be pretty comfortable. Much more comfortable than the crate or coffin that it resembles.
The trick is to angle almost every joint so the backrest leans back, the chair leans back and the giant boarded sides open up to the sitter like the arms of a mustachioed aunt with boundary issues.
There are 100 ways to build this chair that are difficult. For the last several months, I’ve been tinkering with the construction process to make it as simple and foolproof as possible. Finally, on Friday I decided that drawings and CAD could take me no further. I had to build it.
This chair will be the next new chapter for “The Anarchist’s Design Book” expansion. If you have questions about the expansion, here is an FAQ.
I started with No. 2 common white pine 2x6s from the home center and glued them up into four panels:
1 Seat: 1-1/4” x 26” x 19”
1 Back 1-1/4” x 21-1/2” x 41”
2 Sides 1-1/4” x 19 x 49”
It’s a lot of wood, I know. But 2x6s are cheap. I also knew I was going to cut the side pieces with a decorative pattern, but I wasn’t sure what the pattern would be. Had I known the pattern, I would have glued up the sides in a way that greatly reduced waste.
I could bore you with all the mental gymnastics that came up with the steps to build this chair. If you come up with an easier way to do it with simple tools, I applaud you.
Let’s hit the highlights.
Cut the dados in the side pieces that will hold the seat. These dados are angled 97° off the back, which creates part of the “lean” to the back. The dados are 1/2” deep and start 15” up from the bottom of the side pieces.
Cut or plane a 9° bevel on the back edge of the side pieces. This bevel makes the sides open toward the sitter (remember the aunt joke?).
Screw the back to the sides with No. 9 x 3-1/8” screws. No glue. You will want to disassemble the chair to make things pretty. You can glue it up later if you like.
Glue 5”-wide blocks to the back edge of the sides, creating the back feet. You’ll have to cut the 9° bevel on one long edge of these blocks. Note that I’ve already cut an angle on the bottom of the sides to add some more lean. I recommend you do this at the end of the construction process.
Make the seat fit its hole. Here I’m using pinch sticks to get the measurement of the seat at its narrowest point. Cut the seat to size and fit it in the dados. Screw the sides to the seat.
Cut the decorative profile on the sides. I drew mine with trammel points. The three arcs for the top curves are all a 9-5/8” radius. The curve for the bottom is a 7-1/2” radius. I was trying to imitate the traditional wingback chair with these curves and exaggerated things to make it look more “ersatz hillbilly.”
Clean up the edges. Screw it back together and then see if you like it.
I’ll build a couple more of these chairs with different profiles and then get to work on writing the chapter for the book. This prototype is good enough to get cleaned up and finished. I’ve asked my daughter Katy to paint it – perhaps we’ll offer it for sale here if we’re both satisfied with it.
— Christopher Schwarz
A Primer on Copyright for Those Living in the 21st-century Wild West
Last week I wrote a blog post about my visit to the Wharton Esherick House, my last stop on a two-week work trip to the East coast. It was a job to find the place (I have it on good authority that they’re working on better direction signs); I was so over everything by that point in the trip that I nearly gave up and turned around to head home. Fortunately a kind driver stopped to set me straight at the final intersection, as my GPS had already told me I’d arrived. (I clearly hadn’t.)
My grumpiness dissolved as soon as I entered the office to buy a ticket for the house tour. I’ve long been a fan of Esherick’s woodblock prints and furniture. Now I was surrounded by stunning prints for sale, informative posters about the artist’s life and books about the man and his work. The Esherick House, essentially a work of sculpture in which the artist lived, has been on my top 10 pilgrimage sites since I first saw pictures of the place.
We should all know by now that it’s essential to get permission before photographing anything in a museum – and this includes house museums. Different places have different rules. The Cheltenham Museum (now known as The Wilson) told me it was fine to take pictures but not to publish them on a blog without express permission and payment of a fee. The Harriet Beecher Stowe House Museum in Hartford, Conn., permits picture taking for Instagram posts, while the neighboring Mark Twain House does not. (Major downer.) So I dutifully asked whether it was permissible to take interior and exterior photos at the Esherick House. The staff person said yes, and yes to posting on Instagram, but not for publication.
“Publication” is a tricky word in our time, not least considering that Instagram is a publishing platform in its own right. I knew I wanted to write a blog post about the place. Blog sites, contrary to what many imagine in our laissez faire “sharing” age, are no less subject to copyright restrictions than traditional forms of publishing on paper. So before writing my post, I contacted Julie Siglin, the executive director of the museum, to request permission, which she granted.
Bottom line: Ask before taking.
Yesterday evening I came in from the shop to find a message from Julie who was puzzled that my post had appeared on another site – with no credit to the original publisher or author – AND under another “author’s” name. I looked up the site, wrote to the purported author, told him to remove the post from his site and told him I was going to report him. While there, I noticed other posts he had taken from Popular Woodworking, so I notified the editors there. Then I read his disclaimer, excerpted below. I’m guessing that the owner of the site is not a native English speaker and that “Brandon Hamilton” is not his real name.
This immediately had me picturing a guy sitting at a kitchen table trying to come up with the most plausible name for a woodworker. What name says flannel checks and three-day stubble?
For the record, Popular Woodworking blog posts do not fall into the legal category “public domain” any more than do those published here at Lost Art Press or on other blog sites that post explicit copyright notices. Even when something does fall into this category, it is illegal to put your name on it as the author when you did not create the content. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling the content or using it to generate any kind of gain (other than traffic to your site). You are breaking the law.
— Nancy Hiller, author of “Making Things Work“
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Thank you.
I Love Difficult Teachers
This is a tricky topic to discuss. Good teaching can resemble abuse – at least from the outside. But I don’t think that good teachers ever actually abuse their students. Instead, I found that my best teachers were both scrupulously fair and uncompromising. For me, as a student, that was the combination that worked.
During my first year at Popular Woodworking, I spent every free moment in the workshop. I’d blast through my editing duties during the morning, and by lunchtime I’d be helping out the other staff or working on my own projects. Jim Stuard, one of the junior editors at the magazine, was a long-time professional woodworker and had excellent hand skills. He was always in the shop. Naturally, I latched onto him like a puppy.
Jim took teaching seriously and imitated his German masters when it came to doling out instruction. When I screwed up, he yelled “You’re fired!” and would walk away. This happened almost every day. He wasn’t a fan of answering my 100 questions about why something was. He was just there to show me how to do it. How to get through the day.
And occasionally, he was there to open my eyes.
There are a few points in the craft where you feel like you have turned a corner. Jim offered me my first corner. I was cleaning up the edge of a circular Arts & Crafts tabouret, and Jim came over to watch my progress. I did my best, but Jim rolled his eyes, sighed and pushed me aside.
“See these?” he said, pointing to some machine marks I had completely missed. “These have to go.” He cleaned up one quadrant of the tabletop and put the scraper down.
“Do that,” he said. “That’s craftsmanship.”
I was grateful that he didn’t “fire” me that day. That tense exchange unlocked a keen awareness and sensitivity to surfaces that has only become stronger and more refined every year. That day started me down that path, and I am forever grateful for the kick in the pants.
Why am I telling you this?
When I spent my two weeks at the Rowden Workshops run by David Savage, I was delighted to see that same sort of teaching style in evidence. The students were tasked with the impossible: Please do the work of a high-level professional. Right now. Right here. If they failed, they had to try again. David, like all good shop owners, was always there at the worst possible moment when you had really mucked something up. His staff was there to guide you to the solution.
I got to eat several meals with the students and listened to their begrudging admiration of the whole process. They were grumpy because they were always on notice. They were stressed because their work was constantly being evaluated. And they were wondering if the whole experience at Rowden was worth it – because we should all question our sanity at trying to make money at woodworking.
I thought about telling the students that they would get some perspective in time. They would see how much better they had become compared to other young woodworkers. But that’s like telling a teenager that life is short. They simply aren’t ready to receive the message. So why bother?
So I just listened.
If you would like a dose of this hard truth, salted with failure and seared with difficult trials, I recommend “The Intelligent Hand” to you. This book by David Savage contains the core ideals from Rowden, but without the hard looks or the glorious teatime. The print version will be released in mid-October. If you order it now, you will receive a pdf of the book (for free) at checkout.
Several friends who have read the book have sent me private messages, such as this one:
I opened up David’s book last night about 11:00 to take a quick look. Could not put it down til I got maybe 40 pages in. It may not appeal to everyone (though I think it will to most people) – but it is ***** awesome. My initial opinions are always tentative, but this is on a very very short list of best overall books on craft that I’ve ever opened.
Seriously. It is incredible.
I can’t let myself open it back up til things settle here, because it’s a total black hole for my attention. But it really is the book I wish I could have written in another 20 years or so. I met and liked David briefly last year – but I can understand exactly why you’re so taken with him. I truly cannot praise it enough. For ME, this is in the three or four best things LAP has done.
I agree. It’s very good.
— Christopher Schwarz