Chris Williams teaching his chair class in our strorefront in May 2018.
On Friday I finished teaching my first chair class, 16 years after taking my first one in Canada from David Fleming. That class – plus John Brown’s “Welsh Stick Chairs” – set me on a long journey of building and researching chairs in an effort to find my own designs and techniques.
It was a personal struggle, which I didn’t document here on the blog or in my books except for the stray breadcrumb. And it was a lonely one until I met Chris Williams, a Welsh chairmaker who worked with John Brown for many years.
Finally, I had someone to talk to about chairs who spoke the same design language. Who had read the same books. Who looked at these gorgeous and eccentric chairs with similar eyes. (Side note: I like Windsor chairs, but they are different enough from Welsh ones that when I talk to Windsor makers I feel like the awkward stepchild.)
Meeting Chris about four years ago inspired me to finish work on my designs and push the structure of the chair a lot harder than I had been for the previous 12 years. There have been struggles and failures – cracked armbows, dead-end designs and a bad batch of glue. It was like walking in a fog for years. Now that seems to be lifting, and I think I can see a long distance ahead.
But I still remember my first chair class with a perfect clarity. I also remember the sheer frustration I experienced when I returned home and began building my second Welsh stick chair within days of stepping off the plane from Ottawa.
I didn’t have any patterns. I didn’t have the jigs I needed. I didn’t have any wood appropriate for chairmaking. And I was missing several important tools. But I plowed forward and made a chair anyway. And then at least 50 more.
When teaching my first chair class, I wanted to remove the barriers to making a second chair. So all the students made copies of my patterns in Masonite. I gave them all a set of the weird jigs I use, including the rig for drilling the sticks, the block for locating the stretchers, Zee Hinder Pluggen (don’t ask) and a handmade half-pencil.
And I offered them a kit of chair parts, just like the kit they received to make their first chair with me. I hope it works.
I don’t know how many chair classes I’m ever going to teach – certainly no more than two a year. They are exhausting to prepare for and execute. Plus, we have Chris Williams coming here in May to fly the Welsh flag and teach another batch of students using his methods.
That, and Chris’s upcoming book on John Brown, is probably enough to infect the next generation of Welsh chairmakers. I hope.
I’ve had my head so deep into a chair class I’m teaching this week that I forgot to mention that the Lost Art Press storefront will be open this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
There’s lots to see.
Megan Fitzpatrick is finishing up the insides of two Dutch tool chests – one for herself and one for a customer.
We have some of the prototypes of our newest Crucible tool: the Williams Welsh Card Scraper. You can give our two working prototypes a spin, but we won’t have any for sale I’m afraid.
I have a bunch of new stick chairs complete and almost complete – including a beautiful one in walnut. Come have a sit and take a gander.
Brendan Gaffney has been out of town but will likely be back and working on a chest on a stand that has some really tricky details, angles and joinery.
The storefront is located at 837 Willard St. in Covington, Ky., 41011. Come hang out and ask all the woodworking questions you like. Kids and pets are always welcome.
Monroe Robinson’s trussed log bridge. Photo taken by Dick Proenneke in 1981.
Editor’s note: In January we announced a new book about Dick Proenneke. Here, author Monroe Robinson shares how building furniture with his father, counting sockeye salmon in Alaska and a bridge led he and his wife to be caretakers of Dick Proenneke’s cabin. There is no one more qualified to write this particular book, given the years Monroe has spent in the restoration of Dick Proenneke’s cabin and the replication of his tools, and we are thrilled to include Monroe in our roster of authors. — Kara Gebhart Uhl
Spending 19 summers volunteering at Dick Proenneke’s cabin and then writing “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” has its unlikely origin in the southern Arizona of my childhood. In this desert landscape I learned about wood as I helped my father construct a dozen pieces of our household furniture from aromatic cedar, but what I remember from those times was fear of criticism. This fear drove me to work hard and always to the best of my ability. The desert also provided the awe I felt and still feel from every wild creature I encountered traveling the desert by foot. I used leftover cedar boards to stretch more than a few rattlesnake skins to make wall plaques to sell to tourists. Today, protecting wild creatures and wild lands is deeply woven into my life and everything I make. It is not surprising I became someone inspired by the life of Dick Proenneke.
The dream of watching tens of thousands of caribou drew me north in 1965 at the age of 19. By chance that first summer working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, I helped count 24 million sockeye salmon returning to spawn in the headwater of the Kvichak River watershed borders Twin Lakes where Dick Proenneke would build his cabin three years later. This is a wild and magical corner of Alaska and, just like with Proenneke, it has held a part of my soul since that first summer.
In 1979, my first log construction was a trussed log bridge only 30 miles from Proenneke’s cabin. The many years of striving to do my best work had transformed from the fear of my childhood to the reward of constructing this bridge where no space between logs would accept a credit card. I had to plan this project well for I was working more than a 100 miles from the nearest store and there would be no provisions beyond what I initially flew in. (See Fine Woodworking magazine issue No. 33.)
In 1981, Dick Proenneke hiked the 30 miles to the homestead where I had constructed the bridge and said to the owner the bridge was the most beautiful log work he had seen. This was how I first heard of Dick Proenneke and the life he was living at Twin Lakes. IN 1982, I hiked 65 miles through the wilderness to meet Dick Proenneke. We corresponded until Dick departed Twin Lakes in 2000 when the the National Park Service (NPS) invited me to consult on what should happen to Dick’s cabin. Arriving at Twin Lakes, I met K. Schubeck who later became my wife. The two of us have been caring for Dick’s cabin as volunteers and meeting visitors every summer since. I have been involved in all the restoration of Dick’s cabin and replicated most of his handcraft as his restored originals were flown to the NPS archives. At Twin Lakes doing my very best work is expressed in replicating the detail of Dick’s handcraft. I want future visitors to imagine Dick’s hands polishing the patina on the replicated objects.
Replica of Dick Proenneke’s 4″ bean can chimney cap that Monroe Robinson made from two bean cans and a 9″ circle of 5-gallon gas-can metal.
Dick Proenneke’s handcrafted crimping tool.
Many visitors to Twin Lakes every summer have memorized sections of Dick’s published journal entries. Many have an insatiable appetite for Dick’s handcraft and have contributed to my understanding of Dick’s work. It is now a responsibility to share my knowledge of Dick Proenneke’s handcrafted life, his tools, his handcrafted items and how he used and repaired those objects. The book is a glimpse into a life lived with purpose, a life Dick shared with the hundreds who received his detailed and outward-looking correspondences.
Dick Proenneke’s cabin door hinge showing how accurately they were sawn and fit.
Dick Proenneke’s cabin can be a very busy place sometimes, making it difficult to provide a complete tour to every visitor even with two of us being present. People arrive by float plane as early as 8 a.m. and as late as 10 p.m. seven days a week.
Occasionally three, four or even five floatplanes will be there at the same time. It is sometimes exhausting but always a privilege. The future is moving away from our volunteer service toward using uniformed seasonal rangers as tour guides with the maintenance and care done by NPS staff flown in. A portion of the money from the sale of “The Handcrafted Life of Dick Proenneke” will be donated to an endowment account K. and I helped set up. This account will assist the National Park Service’s care for Dick’s cabin and help maintain the wilderness character of Twin Lakes.
Figure 6.12. Three 25 mm (1″) long lengths cut sequentially from an English oak plank were prepared and tested. Each piece started the test weighing 73± grammes, and were approximately 177 mm wide by 21.5 mm thick. Piece A was kept near a radiator for three days prior to further experiments. The weight recorded after this additional drying was 69 grammes. Subsequent microwave oven drying to 0 percent MC and a final weight of 65 grammes shows the piece started the test at 6.5 percent MC. After oven drying it measured 171 mm wide x 21 mm thick. B, the middle section of the three cut pieces, was placed outside but sheltered from rain for three days after which it, too, was oven dried to 0 percent MC. Prior to drying it weighed 76 grammes with a dry weight of 66 grammes. This equates to just over 15 percent MC, indicating its MC rose probably 7 percentage points over the three days. Dimensions of the piece just before oven drying were 177 mm wide by 21.5 mm thick. C was weighed and measured after three days of soaking in water. Its weight after soaking was 92 grammes and measured 184 mm wide by 22 mm thick. Subsequent oven drying to 0 percent MC and a final weight of 67 grammes show MC of this piece was 37.5 percent after soaking. Dividing the narrowest width (A) by the widest width (C), i.e., 171 / 184 = 0.93 or ~7 percent shrinkage from 30 percent MC, or greater. Similarly dividing the narrowest thickness by the greatest thickness, i.e., 21 / 22 = 0.955 or 4.5 percent shrinkage. The photograph was taken after A was oven dried but before pieces B and C were dried. The dimensions are very approximate as only a steel rule took the measurements. Although measurements are only approximate it’s interesting to note shrinkage factors for the tangential shrinkage (~7 percent) and radial shrinkage (4.5 percent) for this piece of oak are quite close to European oak numbers provided in various wood movement tables, i.e., 8.9 percent tangentially and 5.3 percent radially.
This is an excerpt from “Cut & Dried” by Richard Jones.
Oven drying in a microwave oven takes between 20 and 45 minutes. The average time is 30 minutes. It saves a great deal of time compared to drying wood in a regular oven. It does, however, require care and attention to details. Poor methodology and mistakes in the procedure usually lead to problems and failure.
You will need to be able to weigh the wood samples. I find electronic postal scales purchased at a reasonable cost from an office supplier work well enough for my needs. If you require more accuracy, more expensive scales are required. My scales provide readings in 1 gramme divisions from zero up to a maximum of 2,200 grammes, and the machine can be set to give readings in either grammes or ounces.
To dry the wood I use a turntable-type microwave oven with several power settings. The only two settings I use are the very lowest setting and the next higher setting which is “defrost” – your oven is likely to have a different configuration. But whatever marked settings are available, restrict yourself to the lowest one or two power levels. As the wood is heated, moisture evaporates from all exposed surfaces, including the bottom face resting on the turntable; three to five paper kitchen towels laid under the wood absorb and dissipate the condensed moisture drawn downward from the wood. If you’re testing several samples, make sure they don’t touch each other because this can concentrate the energy and can lead to smoking and possibly fire.
If the wood starts to smoke during the drying procedure the sample is ruined and you need to start again with a new sample. Smoking during the cooking means you have burnt away some of the wood volume, so weight measurements taken thereafter are inaccurate. This is why I mostly restrict myself to the lowest power setting and short bursts of heat. The second lowest power setting, defrost on my microwave oven, is seldom used, but I do sometimes use it for the initial drying cycle of very wet wood.
The ideal wood sample is the same as described in section 6.6, i.e., a full thickness and width piece taken at least 400 mm in from the board’s end, approximately 25 to 32 mm (1″ to 1-1/4″) long. Weigh your sample and make a note of this. If the sample is already partially dried, e.g., about 25 percent MC to 15 percent MC, cook the wood at the lowest oven setting for between one and a half and two minutes in the first cycle.
If you know the wood is already below 10 percent MC, I recommend you cook it at the lowest setting of the oven for no more than 45 or 60 seconds to start with.
When wood is definitely very wet, 30 percent MC or above, the first cooking should last no more than between one and a half and three minutes with the oven at the second lowest setting. Even in this circumstance I prefer to use the lowest oven setting. It takes a few minutes longer to dry the wood but is preferable to starting again because of a burnt sample.
After the first cycle, weigh the sample or samples again to form an impression of how quickly the wood loses weight, i.e. loses water. Let the sample rest for a minute or so and re-cook it for between 45 and 60 seconds and re-weigh.
Continue with this routine until you can’t measure any weight change, i.e., less than 0.1 of a gramme variation if you are using highly accurate scales. My scales read only to the nearest gramme, so I stop cooking when five or six low-weight readings are recorded.
When this point is reached, use the formula provided earlier, i.e., MC percent = ((WW – ODW) / ODW) x 100, where WW is wet weight of the sample, and ODW represents the wood sample’s oven dry weight.
The following cautions are important: Do not use the microwave oven’s high power settings. The internal heat built up in the wood needs to dissipate, and high settings cause rapid heat build up, smoke and even fire.
The more wood tested in one go, the more time is required to complete the job. This is useful because after the initial heating of a large batch you can rotate from one sample to the next in the oven with short bursts of cooking for each piece. This gives each sample a break between heating cycles, thus reducing the chance of overheating any one piece.
I generally find kiln-dried wood samples react differently to cooking than green or air-dried samples. It’s best not to mix samples of very different moisture contents and different wood species during the test, but it’s possible if you proceed with care.
Being sure the wood sample or samples is, or are, truly oven dry requires patience and careful weighing using accurate scales. It’s better, and safer, to use several short cycles in the oven at low settings than it is to try and rush the job using a higher setting for extended times. The latter strategy usually results in burning the wood and failure.
In closing, these final, following warnings probably seem obvious, but they’re worth mentioning. Removing cooked wood from the oven requires care. It’s usually quite hot, and can and does burn skin – you probably don’t need to ask how I know that! Use an oven glove or heavy leather work gloves. Also, be aware that at the end of testing, and unknown to you, wood might have charred on the inside: It can smoulder and burn and, if placed in a rubbish bin, could start a fire. Careful disposal is essential. The safest thing you can do is put the cooked wood in water when you’ve finished drying it to ensure it doesn’t burst into flames later – it can happen.
I wasn’t the first person to use Southern yellow pine to build a workbench in 2000. But it sure felt like it when I built the above workbench for Popular Woodworking Magazine.
At that time, almost all of the workbenches I’d read about and saw in workshops were made from European beech or white maple. And most were what we call a European bench, German bench or Ulmia-style bench.
I was making $23,000 a year at the time, and we had a 3-year-old girl, so I couldn’t afford a commercial bench or even the wood and vises (about $800 to $1,000) to build one in beech or maple.
I was desperate to make a bench. I was working on a pair of sawhorses topped with a door I had scavenged from the Coca-Cola plant where our shop was located.
One day I went to the home center to price out some plywood and spotted a gleaming pile of clear 12’ 2x8s – the same stuff we used for joists and rafters to build our houses in Hackett, Ark. My normal Pavlovian response to yellow pine was my arms turning rubber – yellow pine can be incredibly heavy, especially when it’s packed with resin.
But instead of that rubber feeling, something clicked in my head. I could make workbench out of yellow pine. Then I did some quick math: Eight 2×8 x 12’ boards would cost only $76.56. Add the hardware, a face vise (later replaced) and the Veritas Wonder Dog, and I could make the bench for $175.
The bench ended up on the cover of the February 2001 issue, and we showed it off to readers during an open house one evening. Their reaction was split down the middle. Someone called it a redneck bench. Someone else said that at least it was better than my sawhorses. But a few people asked a lot about the mechanical properties of yellow pine.
It’s amazing stuff. It’s stiff, hard (after the resin sets up) and stable. In fact it’s way more stable than beech or oak.
As a result, I’ve continued to build benches from yellow pine since 2000 with no complaint. My first Roubo (2005) and Nicholson (2006) workbenches were made from yellow pine. And I’ve built at least 25 or 30 benches from the stuff during classes or at woodworking shows. (That actually was our gimmick for a few years – we built a bench during the show and gave it away at the end of the show.)
Today, the $175 Workbench came back home to me. John has had it for the last 10 years in Indianapolis. He’s moving house and won’t have room for it. So Megan Fitzpatrick and I rented a truck and brought it to the storefront.
It’s now a bench for students when they take classes here. We scooted my father’s workbench under a window, and it fits perfectly – like it was made for the spot. We now have eight workbenches in the front room of the shop, but we’re not going to expand the number of students we serve above our normal six.
Instead, the extra bench is going to be used by Brendan, Megan or me while classes are going on. We all have commissions that have to get out the door, and delaying projects by two, three or five days while a class goes on can be stressful.
