Good news: Alexander Brothers is now selling a new stick chair kit for the Curved Back Armchair in “The Stick Chair Book.” The kit supplies all the parts you need in red elm (my favorite chair wood) for $295. The kit will also build the similar Irish armchair featured in Fine Woodworking magazine last year.
Alexander Brothers does a fantastic job of selecting straight grain for the sticks and legs. I trust them to pick wood for me. So if finding the wood for a stick chair has been holding you back from building one, this kit can fix that problem.
Alexander Brothers carries kits for many chairs and even Megan’s Dutch tool chest. Here’s a link to see the other kits.
You might recall Chris took a sabbatical of sorts in December to work on a new book – and it’s almost ready to go to press. It might seem like this book, “Build a Chair from Bulls%$t,” came out of nowhere, and awfully quickly. But Chris has been thinking about the chair in this book since working on “The Anarchist’s Design Book” more than a decade ago. He’d planned to include a chair in ADB that was built from home-center materials, but chickened out.
Now that he’s a little older and at peace with what others think of him and his work, he located his eggs.
The chairs shown above, the design in this book, are made entirely from home center materials and easy to find, inexpensive tools. In other words, two of the biggest barriers to getting started in chairmaking – the wood and the tools – are removed.
The chair is built entirely without jigs using a method called “sandwich drilling” – shown above.
You’ll notice the seat is not scooped out (seat-scooping tools are among the harder to find and use), yet the chair is comfortable thanks to a wide seat, combined with the geometry of the backrest and the seat tilt. (And if you need a little cushion, add a sheepskin or…a cushion.)
The overall look of the chair, which is “broadly British,” with a touch of American-Windsor lightness, is intended to appeal to contemporary and traditional tastes. Its silhouette evokes antiques, but the lines are simple enough to fit in a contemporary design. The number of sticks gives it a formal air, but that’s balanced by the lightness of the parts.
But will it last? Yes. The joints in this chair are better than in any manufactured chair we’ve seen, with tight mortises and tenons, wedges, pegs, glue and natural tension that adds strength. And though the parts are from the home center instead of the lumberyard, they are carefully selected for maximum strength and longevity. There are no construction compromises.
There will also be no compromises in the construction of the book. It will be a hardcover 112-page black-and-white volume in our 6-1/2″ x 4″ “pocketbook” format, with sewn and taped signatures. Printed, of course, in the United States. The price should be about $22 for the printed book. But like Chris’ other books, the pdf and full-size plans will be free for everyone to download.
The illustrations are by R. Keith Mitchell, who also drew select images for Jim Tolpin and George Walker’s “Euclid’s Door” and “Good Eye,” and all the drawings in Dr. Jeffrey Hill’s “Workshop Wound Care.“
We should be sending the book to press in early March.
Bonus Video Along with the book, we’ll offer a free video on building the “Bullsh%$t” chair by apprentice Kale Vogt and Bridgid Meyer (Dinkles Woodshop).
Look for “Build a Chair from Bulls%$t” – both the book and video – in April.
These red flags attach to long lengths of lumber that extend out the back of your truck or car. The flags alert other drivers that they shouldn’t tailgate you (unless they want a mouthful of splinters). Also, a flag of some sort is required in many jurisdictions for loads that extend out the rear of a vehicle.
In the 20th century, these flags also developed as a marketing gimmick for your lumberyard, so you find many antique ones printed with a company’s name or logo.
Our warning flag is cotton – like the vintage ones – with a wire sewn into the top edge. The wire keeps the flag stiff, and a loop in the wire allows you to fasten the flag to your load with a bungee cord, twine or a staple. Our flag is made in the United States and is printed here in Covington, Kentucky. The flags are 17-1/2″ wide x 18-1/2″ tall and cost $21.
Sharkskin or shagreen, in general, is used by all woodworkers. But the cabinetmakers do not use it except for the most fine parts, like shark fins that are called “dog-ear skin,” which have the finest nap of all skin and which, by consequence, scratch the work less. —André-Jacob Roubo “l’art du Menuisier”
The following is an excerpt from “The Stick Chair Journal.” “The Stick Chair Journal 2” is also now available. While supplies last, you can purchase a bundle of issues Nos. 1 & 2 at a reduced price.
James Krenov was the first woodworker I heard about who didn’t use sandpaper. That idea – no sandpaper – was so shocking that I can remember the moment it happened. My boss at the time handed me a copy of “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” and mentioned that Krenov used only planes and scrapers to finish his furniture. I took the book with a somewhat skeptical look on my face. I was not impressed, but I was amazed.
Since that moment in the 1990s, I have met lots of woodworkers who eschew abrasives. They finish the work with edge tools only. Their sharp steel edges slice open the individual cells of the wood, allowing us to peer inside. The edge tools produce a shimmering glow in the wood that is almost unobtainable with sandpaper. And they do it all without producing the lung-destroying dust that comes with sanding.
Or that’s how the story goes.
FLAT & SMOOTH Egyptian woodworkers sanding a box, Fifth Dynasty. From “Egyptian Woodworking and Furniture” (Shire) by Geoffrey Killen.
Anyone who has embraced edge tools (myself included) goes through a phase where they finish projects using only sharpened steel edges. To be sure, this phase makes us better sharpeners. It makes us better users of planes and scrapers. But it doesn’t necessarily make our projects any better.
I invite you to conduct the following experiment. Plane one face of a board dead flat without any plane tracks. Then finish its other face with sandpaper, working up the grits with care to #220. Now finish both faces of the board with shellac, lacquer or varnish. Hand the board to another woodworker and ask them to figure out which is which.
I’ve done this. It’s a guessing game.
IT’S SANDED A stool in the British Museum that has been finished with sandstoning, according to Killen, author of “Egyptian Woodworking and Furniture.” Many pieces of Egyptian furniture show signs of being finished with scraping or rubbing with sandstone.
While there might be microscopic differences between surfaces that have been planed and those that have been sanded, they aren’t noticeable to the naked eye once a film finish has been applied. And people who say they can tell the difference are just guessing. (I have played this parlor game many times.)
So why learn to use a handplane? Easy! It’s usually faster than sanding. It produces little lung-clogging dust. And it’s frankly more enjoyable than sanding.
So why learn to sand? Because woodworkers have been doing it for at least 4,000 years (abrasive technology is older than the first handplane), and sanding can easily accomplish things that are difficult to do with edge tools.
In other words: You probably should learn to do both.
When I learned to finish surfaces, this was the routine: Plane the surfaces until you cannot improve them. Scrape any tear-out. Quickly sand the surfaces with a fine-grit paper to blend them and produce a consistent surface.
The above traditional technique (around since at least the 18th century) quickly produces nice surfaces. Using a combination of planes and abrasives is faster than using only planes or only abrasives (assuming we are all striving to get to the same destination).
If you don’t believe me, ask the ancient Egyptians. Or Grinling Gibbons. Or A.J. Roubo.
A FLEXIBLE RASP Chairmaker Chris Williams demonstrating how he and John Brown shaped the armbow using strips of abrasive, much like a shoeshiner.
BUT THERE’S MORE Sometimes I use abrasives to round over corners, produce fine chamfers or to fair curves. In other words, I use abrasives to shape the wood – not just prepare it for a finish. Unlike all the stuff above, this is not a known historical technique. Yet I gladly stand by it. Let’s talk about it.
I love my rasps. These steel tools allow me to shape wood without regard for grain direction or the shape of the wooden surface I’m working. I can just as easily shape a curved surface as I can a flat one. Rasps work by means of many tiny teeth that minutely scrape the wood. The fact that there are hundreds or thousands of teeth makes the work go quickly.
Each tooth of a rasp looks like a triangular pyramid. In fact, if you look closely enough, you will see that the teeth on a rasp look a lot like the teeth on a handsaw or backsaw. After drinking a couple beers, I would eagerly say that a rasp is only a little different than a saw. The primary difference is in the arrangement of the teeth. The teeth on a handmade rasp are scattered randomly on a steel blank. The teeth on a saw are arranged in a discreet line on one edge of the steel blank.
Also, the rasp and the saw make the same sound in use. They provide the same vibrational feedback to the user. And the teeth of the saw and the rasp both stop cutting when waste wood clogs up the teeth.
Sandpaper is not much different. Its teeth are randomly scattered over the substrate (paper, cloth, woven material). They also make tiny cuts. They also stop cutting when waste wood clogs up the teeth. And sandpaper makes the same “shushing” sound.
11 Reams and 6 Quire Paper Emery £10/3/0 1 Ream Sand Do (Paper) £0/10/0 — The 1800 inventory of ironmonger Christopher Gabriel of London. A ream is 500 sheets, and a quire is 24 sheets. So, Gabriel had 5,644 sheets of emery paper and 500 sheets of sandpaper on hand that day. From “Christopher Gabriel and the Tool Trade in 18th Century London” (Astragal Press) by Jane & Mark Rees.
Put another way, sandpaper is just a flexible rasp or saw. It uses the same cutting technology – tiny teeth. The only difference is that with sandpaper the teeth are bonded to a flexible backing.
So, if you don’t use sandpaper, is it because you are opposed to paper or cloth?
I’m not trying to be a jerk. I am happy for you to use the tools that please you. If you hate sandpaper, fine. Don’t use sandpaper. But don’t delude yourself into some historical reverie in the process. And don’t (as mentioned above) assert that a sanded surface is inferior.
Abrasives have been around for as long as human history has been recording its progress. They have been used in woodworking since (at least) ancient Egypt. They show up throughout history – even in the beloved Golden Age of Furniture in the 18th century. And like any tool, they are useful when used in the right place, in the right way and at the right time.
In other words, don’t make a chair seat using only #40-grit sandpaper (unless that’s the only tool you have). That’s just as peculiar as making the seat using only a scraper or a travisher. Or only an adze.
The world is filled with many good tools and questionable opinions. So, keep an open mind and pick the tools you like and that bring happiness (or, as in my case, buy groceries).
A reminder that at 10 a.m. Eastern, registration opens for Covington Mechanical classes for the second half of 2025. See our ticketing site for more info (and to register at 10 a.m. Eastern).
