There are two reasons I bore and ream the mortises for a chair before saddling the seat. 1) Saddling the seat removes any spelching made by the drill bit. Or, put another way, I don’t spelch my newly saddled seat. And 2) If I mess up the boring or reaming then I haven’t wasted as much time if I’d saddled the seat.
Like many chairmakers, I use sightlines and resultant angles to bore and ream my mortises for the legs. And I’ve figured out how to do it without any trig. Or numbers. Or words. (OK, scratch the “or words.” The words and explanation are covered fully in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” </blowhard advertisement>.)
With this chair I use the same angles as the staked chair in the book. So use the drawing above to draw your sightlines and set your sliding bevel square (which Roubo calls the “false square,” which amuses me greatly, which wasn’t supposed to be amusing but is).
Bore the 5/8” hole for the mortises, using the sliding bevel as a guide for your bit. I put a backer board under the seat so I can bore straight through without thinking/stopping. When the shavings change color I rotate the brace twice more and pull out.
Reaming is similar. But instead of using the bit as a guide for the bevel square, I use the shell of my chuck. This is why I love the chuck of my Yankee brace. It is a straight cylinder. Some chucks are fancy shaped like a baluster. They’re pretty, but they are no help when reaming.
Ever four turns or so, I pull out and check my angle using a dowel with a tapered tenon on the end. I can’t check my work (easily) using the actual legs because they are all kinds of tapered.
Then I drive all four legs into their mortises, stand back and make sure the whole thing doesn’t look like a bandy-legged goat.
Katy has made another couple batches of her soft wax, which you can purchase on her etsy store. Each tin is $12 and contains approximately 4 oz. of wax (by volume).
Katy makes the wax in my basement shop, She packages it up and even designed the label.
The wax is based on an old French recipe and a fine polish for the interiors of woodwork (and exteriors – I love it on chairs – though it is not designed for high-performance situations).
Note that the wax is not for your beard, mustache or lizard.
Speaking of lizards, modeling the wax today is Brunhilde, Katy’s chameleon companion. Yes, Brunhilde is named after the princess in the legend (and the movie “D’Jango”).
All the legs featured in “The Anarchist’s Design Book” are octagonal or square in section – this makes them easy to make without a lathe. For this chair design, I decided to turn the legs but make the shape simple enough that you could shave them if, again, you are lathe-less in Louisiana.
This shape of leg is a modernized bamboo turning. The top section of the leg tapers and flows into the leg’s tapered tenon. The taper begins 6-1/2″ from the top of the leg and tapers from 1-1/2″ to 5/8″ at the top of the tenon. The bottom section of the leg tapers to 1″ at the floor.
This profile looks nice with the 12.8° taper I use on my tenons. However, if you use a different angle, I’m going to show you how I laid out the leg so you can design it to suit your tools.
First I made the leg blanks into 1-1/2″ x 1-1/2″ x 19″ octagons. I chucked them in the lathe and turned the leg to a straight cylinder (note that after you get the leg dimensions figured out you can skip this step to save time).
Then I marked the length of my tenon (3″) on the leg and turned the tenon very slightly oversized. The tenon starts as 1-1/16″ in diameter and tapers to 5/8″ at the top.
With the taper roughed in I took a straightedge and held it up to the taper and eyeballed where this taper would end at the full diameter of the leg. This guess is about 6-1/2″ from the top. I could have drawn it out in CAD, but I like wood better than pixels.
I marked the cylinder at 6-1/2″ from the top of the leg and then turned the remainder of the top taper to that point. Note that I turned a small groove where the tenon began. This is an important mark when you shave the tenon to its final size.
The rest is easy. I turned the bottom taper from the 6-1/2″ line down to the bottom of the leg. The bottom of the leg is 1″ in diameter. In the photo above I’m looking for humps with a straightedge.
Then I removed the leg from the lathe and used my tapered tenon cutter to shave the tenon to the perfect shape and size. It took only a few turns to do. When I shaved the legs in the tenon cutter I stopped cutting right at the groove I turned in the leg.
Then I sanded the legs (avoiding the tenons) with #180-grit sandpaper and got ready to leg up the chair. That’s tomorrow’s entry.
The funny thing is that it was my mad obsession with acquiring woodworking stuff that helped me find a balanced approach to the craft. You see, I became as obsessed with acquiring woodworking books as I was with the tools. I’ve always been a voracious reader, so consuming books on woodworking and tools was natural. (And add to that the fact that I was freelancing at the time as a contributing editor for the WoodWorkers’ Book Club newsletter. That job was a five-year-long force-fed diet of woodworking writing.)
Read enough modern woodworking books, and you might just want to gouge out your eyes with a melon baller. They are all so similar and shallow and filled with idiosyncratic information. I can’t tell you how many times I read the following phrase: “This might not be the right way to do this, but it works for me.”
Something inside my head made me wonder about that “right way” the author rejected.
It just so happened that at about that same time I had a short phone conversation with Graham Blackburn, one of my woodworking heroes. I had a few of Blackburn’s books from the 1970s, and I knew he had a command of woodworking history. So I interviewed him about the origin of the word “jack” in “jack plane” for a short piece I was writing for the magazine.
We then started talking about saws.
During the conversation, Blackburn said I could find the answer to one of my questions in the book “Grimshaw on Saws.”
Huh? I replied.
I’ll never forget what he said next: “You don’t have a copy of Grimshaw, and you’re an editor at a woodworking magazine? Hmmm.”
I was ashamed. So ashamed that I went down to Cincinnati’s public library that weekend to check out Robert Grimshaw’s 1882 treatise on saws. It was sitting on the shelf next to a bunch of other old woodworking books I’d never heard of. I wondered which of those books were also “required reading” in Blackburn’s world. I checked out as many of those cloth-bound books as the library would let me. I went home. I started reading, and I haven’t stopped.
The things I learned from the old books were different than what I expected to learn. I actually expected the shop practices to be different – you know, they had different ways of cutting a mortise, a tenon and a dovetail. But really, not much has changed in the way that steel (usually) defeats wood.
While there are a wide variety of ways to perform every standard operation, the pre-Industrial craftsman didn’t seem to have secret tricks as much as he had lots of opportunities to practice and become swift.
Instead, what surprised me was the small set of tools that were prescribed for a person who wanted to become a joiner or a cabinetmaker.
Joseph Moxon, the earliest English chronicler of woodworking, describes 44 kinds of tools necessary for joinery in “Mechanick Exercises” (1678). For some of these tools, you’d need several in different sizes (such as chisels), but for many of the tools that he described, a joiner would need only one (a workbench, axe, fore plane etc.).
Randle Holme’s “Academie of Armory” (Book III, 1688) has approximately 46 different joinery tools explained in his encyclopedia. An exact number is hard to pin down because some of the tools are discussed twice(for example, mallets, smoothing planes and hatchets) and some tools seem shared with the carpentry trade.
Academy of Sanity. Randle Holme’s 1688 book outlined a small tool kit that could be used for building lots of furniture forms.
If we jump forward more than 150 years, not too much has changed. The list of tools required by the rural joiner in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” (1839) isn’t all that much different from the tool list described by Moxon and Holme. “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” gives a significant description to about 40 tools used by a young apprentice during his climb to journeyman.
As the Industrial Revolution begins to crank out mass-manufactured tools, the basic list of tools recommended for basic joinery starts to expand. There are more kinds of boring bits available, new kinds of metallic planes (such as blocks, shoulders and routers), plus some new saws, including the coping saw.
By the 20th century, the basic list of tools for joiners stands at about 63, according to books by Charles Hayward, the traditionally trained dean of workshop writers. Still, when I looked at Hayward’s list it seemed rather paltry compared to what was in my shop. (See this book’s appendix for a comparison of these tool lists.)
At first, I attributed these short lists of essential tools to three things:
• Everything in the pre-Industrial age would have been more expensive because it was made by hand.
• The general level of economic prosperity was lower.
• Technological innovation had yet to produce the fantastic new tools shown in the modern catalogs.
After a year of burrowing deeper than our Kenton County moles, I’ve decided to attend a few events this year to see old friends, repay some favors and do some research during side trips. The following is a list of places where you can hurl rotten garbage at me without coming to my home.
Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event, Braxton Brewing, Covington, Ky. March 10-11, 2017
We’ll have the Lost Art Press storefront open on one of the two days (probably Saturday). And will be organizing a barbecue/beer/Hammerschlager event at Rhinegeist Brewing across the river. Details to come. If you attended last year’s event at Braxton then you know it was a hoot – probably the biggest Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event I’ve been to.
Handworks, Amana, Iowa May 19-20, 2017
Handworks is the S%^&. Period. End of story. Get there by any means possible. We will be there with books and tools. This year I promise not to die.
Dictum classes in Germany Build a Sawbench, June 12-14 Build a Mallet and a Marking Gauge, June 15-16
These are the only two classes I’m teaching in 2017. Heck they might be the only classes I teach for the next decade. I owe the good people at Dictum a huge personal favor. These two classes are my way of repaying them. If you’ve never taken a class at their Niederalteich location, I highly recommend it. Many of my favorite stories begin with the line: “We were at the gasthaus in Niederalteich when Brian….” The classes are taught in English. The eating is in German.
Lie-Nielsen Open House July 7-8
I have so many friends who attend this event that it’s difficult for me to skip it. The Open House is always a wonderful weekend of food, woodworking and axe throwing. Bring your family and they’ll enjoy it as well.
European Woodworking Shop Sept. 16-17
Again, this is one of the few events that one simply cannot miss. The Cressing Temple barns inspire woodworking awe (and regular awe). There are always lots of fun makers, tool dealers and English-types at this well-organized show. And the food! I’ll be there.
Please note that this blog entry does not mark my return to public touring and teaching. This is probably too much activity already, and next year I will burrow in deeper.
