I don’t like making up names for furniture components. Not because I want to be pedantic. But because I want to avoid confusion. If something has a name (fiddleback maple) I would rather use that name than make one up (maple on a lot of acid).
One name that has escaped me for years is on a chair. The swoops next to the seat’s pommel – what are those areas called? I’ve consulted all my furniture books and haven’t found anything that made sense. So I grudgingly called them “leg swoops” in “The Stick Chair Book Revised Edition.”
Last week Aspen Golann was helping teach a class here and I asked her if she knew what they were called.
After a minute of thinking, Aspen remembered that the conservators at Winterthur called them “cups.”
Brilliant and perfect – cups! That’s what I’m calling them from here on out. I updated the anatomy section of my book to reflect this. I also added a few more terms that I stumbled on while digging through a bunch of books on chairs. The three anatomy drawings are included below. If you download them and print them out, they will be high resolution (about 300 dpi).
Better hang them up in your shop and memorize them, because there will be a quiz.
As Nancy Hiller famously said, “It’s all problems.”
We will move the remainder of our inventory into the Anthe building during the first week in October. The three semis have been scheduled. We have a plan.
But until that moment the first truck arrives on Oct. 2, we have to move a few mountains.
It began when our walk-behind forklift was delivered. It was about 8” too tall to fit through our new $6,000 roll-up door. Yes, everyone measured the opening, including the salesman for Crown. Someone somewhere made a mistake.
So to fix that problem, we had to remove the new door, rip out the $400 plastic flaps that kept the AC in the building and hire a mason to remove three courses of bricks ($500) and rebuild the opening. Then order additional parts for the roll-up door ($1,900).
So last week, we rolled our brand-new fork truck through the new opening and we heard a quiet but terrible noise. Some of the old floorboards crumbed under the wheels of the truck.
Yes, a structural engineer inspected the building and green-lighted our plan.
But some of the floorboards were unexpectedly worn (some were 1/4” thick ) and fragile from 130 years of heavy use. (The joists were holding more-than-fine.) So we added felt and a thick tongue-and-groove OSB floor. The floor is designed to be removed by future generations if they want to return to the old floor.
We also added the OSB to the second floor to allow us to move pallets around more easily (there will not be a fork truck on the second floor – just a manual pallet jack).
Despite all this, we are making it, one unexpected problem at a time.
Note: Please do me a favor and don’t take potshots at our efforts here. These decisions were arrived at by professionals (not us) with decades of experience with old buildings. This blog entry cannot possibly give you all the information you need to have an opinion of what is happening on-site. If you’re gonna be a jerk, I’m not going to respond; I’m just going to delete your comment.
A big pile of chairs in progress this week. Mine is in there somewhere….
We just finished up the chair class with students selected by Chairmakers Toolbox, and we are both inspired and exhausted. Building eight stick chairs in five days with limited tools is no joke. But working with a group of chair-crazy enthusiastic young woodworkers gives me hope for the future of our craft.
So today I am happy to sit on my tukus and answer Open Wire questions. Type your question about woodworking into the comment field below. Megan and I will try our best to answer it. Apologies if our answers are brief and not surrounded by the usual pleasantries. Saturdays are a lot of typing.
The following is excerpted from “The Essential Woodworker,” by Robert Wearing. In our opinion, “The Essential Woodworker” is one of the best books on hand-tool usage written in the post-Charles Hayward era. Wearing was classically trained in England as a woodworker and embraced both power and hand tools in his shop and in his teaching.
He begins with a table. As you read the chapter on building a table, Wearing connects the dots for the hand-tool user by showing how all the tools are used in concert to produce accurate work. It’s not just about sawing a tenon or planing an edge. Instead, it is about how to gather these skills and apply them to building furniture – tables, doors, carcases, dovetailed drawers, plinths, etc.
The book is filled with more than 500 hand-drawn illustrations by Wearing that explain every operation in a hand-tool shop. His illustrations are properly drafted, drawn in perspective and masterfully clear.
The accurate sawing of tenons (Fig 119) is a vital skill. They should be sawn with confidence and should fit from the saw. To saw clear of the lines, for safety, is not recommended since whittling an overthick tenon to size is both more difficult and less accurate than sawing correctly in the first place. A 250mm (10in.) tenon or backsaw is the most commonly used for this purpose. Frame saws are used in Europe and by some workers in the USA, but they have never been popular in Britain since the manufacture of good-quality backsaws, and beginners usually find them rather clumsy.
Before starting, check over the names of the parts on Fig 95 [top] and shade in the waste. While there is little chance of throwing away the wrong piece, it is essential that the sawdust should be removed from the waste and not from the tenon. That is, the ‘kerf’ (the sawcut) should be in the waste and just up to the line. Beginners using the thick pencil aid in Fig 105 [see bottom of post] should saw away one pencil line and leave the other intact. The technique is not difficult if the following guidelines are followed: do not saw down two gauge lines at a time; do not saw to a line which is out of sight. (A modification to the saw is described in Appendix B.)
Start sawing always at the farther corner not the nearer one. Beginners may find it useful to chisel a triangular nick there to start the saw accurately (Fig 120). With the rail held vertically in the vice, start to saw at that far corner, slowly lowering the handle until a slot is cut about 3mm (1/8in.) deep (Fig 121). Now tilt the workpiece (Fig 122) and, keeping the saw in the slot, saw from corner to corner. Then turn the work round, or stand on the other side, and saw again from corner to corner, leaving an uncut triangle in the centre (Fig 123). Now grip the work vertically and, running down the two existing sawcuts, remove this last triangle, sawing down to the knife line, but no farther. Keep the saw horizontal (Fig 124).
If there is a set-in or haunch, saw this next. Repeat these stages on all the other tenons (Fig 125). The haunch may be sawn right off now or later.
Sawing the shoulder is most important as this is the piece left exposed. Except on wide rails, which may be planed, the shoulder should go up from the saw.
Cramp to the bench, deepen the knife cut and chisel a shallow groove (Fig 126). Lay a very sharp saw in the groove and draw it back a few times to make a kerf, then saw off the cheek. Take the greatest care not to saw into the tenon (Fig 127), which would then be severely weakened. Should the waste not fall off, the cheek has probably been sawn with an arc-like motion, leaving some waste in the centre (Fig 128). Do not saw the shoulder deeper. Prise off the waste with a chisel, then gently and carefully pare away the obstruction. Saw off the haunch if not sawn previously.
Saw off the set-in with a little to spare, and trim this back to the knife line with a chisel only just wider than the tenon size. This avoids damage to the corner of the shoulder. Finally saw the mitre (Fig 129). The tenons should be lettered or numbered to identify them with their mortices.
Make a preliminary fitting of the joints. The tenon may be too wide or too thick. Check for the latter by inserting it diagonally into the mortice (Fig 130). A tenon may be wrongly thought to be too thick when in fact it is too wide. It may have been sawn too wide or the mortice may have been chopped tapered (Fig 131), in which case trim it square. The most accurate way to correct an overthick tenon is to use a router plane, to the sole of which has been screwed an offcut of rail material (Fig 132).
Having checked that the tenon will enter the mortice, grip the rail in the vice and tap on the mortised member using a woodblock and hammer (Fig 133). The hammer face is small and makes it a more precise tool than the mallet. Check every joint in this way. If the shoulder does not close, either the tenon is too long or the haunch is too long, and either of these problems can easily be corrected. But a badly sawn shoulder can only be corrected by re-squaring and taking back with a shoulder plane.
“Thick Pencil Trick” – Beginners will find it helpful later on, when sawing the tenons, if a thick, soft pencil is run in the gauge marks. This produces a double pencil mark (Fig 105).
Earlier this week, I put up a chair for sale that I was proud of. Not my thing, pride. But the chair represents a small milestone in my work.
I didn’t expect many people to bid on the green Irish chair I’d built. It’s a painted chair. It’s not a comb-back chair. And it’s painted. But here’s the humiliating thing. No one has bid on it.
So here’s the thing. The rules of the sale are the same. Bid on this chair (or not) by 5 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 21. If the highest bid is $1, I will honor it. Here are the instructions for bidding.
Or maybe I shouldn’t build any more Irish armchairs in the future (no matter how comfortable they are).
