Lost Art Press

For Sale: Comb-back Chair in Red Elm

Posted on by Lost Art Press

This is the first stick chair that I’ve built entirely with red elm. It’s a bit extraordinary that this chair exists because the species (Ulmus rubra) is rarely found in commercial lumberyards around here. Plus, finding enough straight and clear sections of red elm to make the sticks, legs and stretchers is unusual.

But I got lucky. My regular lumberyard got a small load of red elm from a mill in northern Indiana. I bought every bit of it, except for a couple boards with structural defects. (I have just enough of that wood to make a second comb-back in red elm, which is in-process now on my bench.)

Red elm is pretty much a perfect wood for making chairs. It is lighter in weight than red oak, but because of its interlocked grain it is impossible to split. That means that the pieces can be thin and incredibly strong. The downside? It’s a bear to work (but worth it).

Red elm also has incredible luminosity – like ash but with a browner tone.

This comb-back chair is set up for dining or keyboarding, with a back that tilts back about 12°. And a seat that tilts about 6°. It’s an all-around comfortable chair, though I wouldn’t call it a lounge chair.

The seat is 17” off the floor. The overall height is 41”. Like all my chairs, the joints are assembled with hide glue and oak wedges, so the joints are strong but can be easily repaired by future generations. The chair is finished with a home-cooked linseed oil/wax finish that has no dangerous solvents. The finish offers low protection, but it is easy to repair by the owner with no special skills or tools.

Purchasing the Chair

This chair is being sold by silent auction. (I’m sorry but the chair cannot be shipped outside the U.S.) If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Thursday, Aug. 24. In the email please use the subject line “Elm Chair” and include your:

  • Bid
  • First name and last name
  • U.S. shipping address
  • Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)

Shipping options: You are welcome to pick up the chair here in Covington, Ky. I am also happy to deliver the chair personally for free within 100 miles of Cincinnati, Ohio. Or we can ship it to you via LTL. The cost varies (especially these days), but it is usually between $300 and $550. 

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. The next chair for sale will be painted with linseed oil paint and sold for a fixed price at a drawing.

LAP Open Wire, Aug. 18, 2023

Posted on by fitz
We spent the last five days with this merry band of chairmakers – great fun! Today, we’re at our computers, awaiting your questions. (That’s a lie…but we check in at least every hour!)

We are here today and happy to answer your questions about woodworking, cats, our books, Shakespeare, linseed oil paint, the Anthe building restoration, or Jayhawks songs. This week’s open wire is hosted by Chris and me. Here’s how it works: Type your question in the comment field, and we will do our best to answer it. And know that concision is much appreciated.

So ask away. Note that comments for this entry will close at about 5 p.m. Eastern.

Note: Comments have been closed for this edition. See you next week.

– Fitz

Negative Yelp Reviews of my Chair Class

Posted on by Lost Art Press

Sadly, it’s another day, and we still have exactly zero weird Yelp reviews for our classes.

I mentioned this today to the students in my chair class as we were working on our combs, and we started brainstorming what some negative Yelp reviews of my chair class might sound like. Here are a few.

  1. Very limited vegan options for gluing.
  2. “Red oak” offered up was more “brown” than what a reasonable person – which I am – would consider as “red.”
  3. There are zero – zip, nada – Spanish tarts at “Los Tarts Press.”
  4. Too noisy for intimate conversation. Lighting was too harsh. Not enough televisions. ONLY ONE BATHROOM!!!! Will not return.
  5. Wanted to make a table, was told they had only chairs.
  6. Wish I could give ZERO stars. Asked for walnut, was given something that was DEFINITELY not walnut.
  7. Mallets need cushier handles. Visible sores after three uses.
  8. Limited alcohol menu – denatured only.
  9. No metric rulers – very unwelcoming environment for base-10 beings.
  10. Workbenches were stained, pock-marked with holes and DEFINITELY not 38” high. Unsuitable work environment for fine woodworking. Will not return.
  11. Floor littered with debris the entire time. Staff seemed unconcerned and ACTUALLY threw more garbage on the floor!!!! Don’t know how this place is still in business.
  12. Not a castle (as promised). Instructor didn’t have British accent. Didn’t once use a router plane.

We welcome your negative reviews in the comments below.

— Christopher Schwarz

A Simple Kiln

Posted on by fitz
My kiln is just insulation board, duct tape, one light bulb in a reflector (120°F is all you need), and some sticks poked through the sides to elevate parts. There’s a meat thermometer poked through the top. The kiln sits on top of a milk crate; the light’s reflector hangs in a hole in the kiln’s bottom. JA’s had a dimmer switch – but why complicate things?

The following is excerpted from the third edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree” – a book Jennie Alexander somewhat reluctantly agreed to in 2014. In 1978, her seminal book on green woodworking launched the careers of thousands of woodworkers and helped ignite a green woodworking movement in this country. Her reluctance to a third edition wasn’t due to a lack of passion for the book’s subject – the simple but gorgeous object that we now call a Jennie Chair had been an obsession of hers for decades. She simply didn’t know if she was physically and mentally up to the task of essentially starting from scratch on a new book – she had learned so much since the first two editions were published that this is an almost entirely new book. Thus, “Make a Chair From a Tree: Third Edition” is the culmination of a lifetime’s work on post-and-rung chairs, covering in detail every step of the green-wood chairmaking process – from splitting and riving parts to making graceful cuts with a drawknife and spokeshave, to brace-and-bit boring for the solid joinery, to hickory-bark seat weaving.

With the help of Larry Barrett, one of her devoted students, she worked on this new version of the book until just weeks before her 2018 death. Larry polished Jennie’s final manuscript, then built a chair in Jennie’s shop using her techniques and tools as we took many of the photographs for this book. Nathaniel Krause (another of Jennie’s devoted students), wove the hickory seat for this book. Longtime friend and collaborator Peter Follansbee helped to edit the text into the intensely technical (but easy to understand) and personal (but not maudlin) words that ended up in this third edition.

We know Jennie would be delighted by the contributions from the people she taught and who, in turn, inspired her. (Though we also suspect she’d say we should just start rewriting the book at the beginning…. again.)

There is no kiln in the first edition of “Make a Chair from a Tree.” Notes indicate JA was striving to get the rungs drier at assembly than they would be in the life of the chair, what we later came to call “super-dry.” JA made notes on different techniques chairmakers she met used, including one who dried rungs on the tin roof in the summertime. One of the first kilns JA used was the wood-fired kiln probably developed by Drew Langsner, used in various configurations by Langsner, Alexander and Dave Sawyer in the early years of Country Workshops.

After using it in the first class in 1979 Alexander briefly described it in a letter to friends:

“We made a kiln from cinder blocks and roof tin and chicken wire. After burning up some test rungs (JA certified perfectos) we installed the clay floor and cut back the heat. Fired by scraps & tended every hour (day & night) it worked very well. Very little checking on the rungs.”

I was a student in JA’s second chairmaking class there (1980). The kiln figures in one of my stellar moments in that class. It was the “tended every hour (day & night)” part that got me. We set up a nighttime schedule for the tent-camping crowd of scruffy would-be chairmakers. An alarm clock was given to the first student who would go tend the fire in the night. Then this person would reset the clock to sound off in another hour and tuck it into the tent of the next person on the rotation. Brilliant me, I decided that I’d take one of the earlier shifts, then be able to get back to sleep for some uninterrupted rest until morning. Except I slept through the alarm. I remember waking up way after my allotted slot, huffing & puffing to get the fire up again, and then turning the clock over to the next person. Several students got a full night’s sleep when they weren’t expecting it.

Chairmaker’s kilns have come a long way since. Most are over my head, and because I only make a couple of chairs at a time, beyond my needs. The one I use is based on the kiln Alexander featured in the afterword to the 1994 edition of MACFAT. I forget who came up with it; there’s reference to it (and other kilns) in Langsner’s “The Chairmaker’s Workshop.” I’ve dried chair rungs on the dashboard of my car in the summertime. I don’t have a tin roof.

– Peter Follansbee

Anthe Update No. 5

Posted on by Lost Art Press
The first floor of the Anthe building on Saturday. The retail store is coming along. All the drywall is required by the county for fire suppression.

When you rehabilitate an old building, your plans have to change (almost daily) to keep things moving forward and to code.

The “code” part of the project is what has been driving us for the last few weeks. We want the building to look like it did when we bought it and was empty. But it also has to be safe and adhere to the county’s regulations if we ever want to occupy it.

This week, the fire-resistant drywall went in around the stairwell, and it was (honestly) a bit dispiriting. I know we are going to cover parts of the drywall with beadboard (some of it original), which will look better. But the drywall really changes the look of the place. And it made us re-evaluate how we are going to use the second floor of the building.

The second floor with the required drywall (the steel ceiling had to be pulled off for the drywall – not our call). The boxed-in stairwell shrinks the space for our offices. We will likely give this floor up to storage.

My hope all along has been to use the second floor as our editorial offices, with excess storage at the rear of the second floor

But after the walls went up to meet code and were covered in the first layer of drywall, it was obvious that the second floor isn’t ideal for offices. The fire-resistant walls interrupt the building’s front windows. And the resulting space (and all the mechanicals on the wall), made me rethink the space.

I think we are going to devote the entire second floor to storage. 

After some thought, this makes good sense. The second floor has a double door at the rear (right above our loading area). We can use our forklift to put pallets directly into the second floor from a delivery truck. No elevator necessary. 

The third floor is more spacious. Plus we don’t need to remove all of the ceiling. This will likely become our offices. I hope….

The third floor looks like our future editorial offices. The fire-rated drywall area is much smaller, so the space is more open. And we don’t have any plans for it yet. This allows us to grow with lots of storage on the second floor and offices on the third floor, with room for workbenches and all the other things in my head.

Despite all this faffing, we are getting close to occupancy. If our schedule holds, we will be able to move fulfillment operations to Anthe by the end of this month. 

It’s not all dispiriting. We have a new functioning awning on the front of the building, which looks fantastic and works. Our bathroom works and is to code (after moving a wall about 5/8″).

And this is my fourth rodeo with 19th-century building rehabs. I know it is always worth it in the end. I had a similar crisis with all of the other buildings we’ve rehabbed. We get through it. And it’s awesome.

Thanks for all of you who have helped fund the restoration. It has made a real difference.

— Christopher Schwarz