Chairmaking.org Posts

I’m making the staked high stool featured in Christopher Schwarz’s book The Anarchists Design Book. If you read part 1 of this build you’ll know that I’ve finished the stock preparation, glued up the seat and run the sticks through the bandsaw to get the octagonal profile on them.

I’ve been really busy for a while and haven’t managed to get in the workshop for far too long (plus it’s been pretty cold!) but I finally found a couple of hours and set off to further this project. This time I’ll be refining the sticks for the legs and stretchers, turning the tenons, and drilling and reaming the tapered mortises the seat.

Tapering the Legs

The legs need a gentle, even taper from the top down and in order to keep the faces fairly equal it’s important to mark the end of the leg with lines to plane down to. I set my marking gauge to just over an ⅛” and scribe lines on the end of the leg referenced from each face.

I mark the centre of the legs ready to put them on the lathe. Marking the centre can be done in several ways but I usually do it with a marking gauge. I set the gauge to roughly half of the width of the end of the leg and scribe lines on the end from four of the long faces. This gives me a good idea of where the centre is and I use an awl to poke a little hole for the lathe drive to set into. I repeat this for both ends of the leg and for all three legs, I also mark the centre of the stretchers too while I’m about it.

I put each leg on the bench and hold them between a dog and my Veritas Inset Vice. I’ve honed the iron on my No. 5½ Stanley plane and it’s cutting beautifully. A quick rub of a candle on the sole of the plane to wax it and I’m ready to start planing.

I take a short stroke, perhaps about 6”, from the bottom end of the leg then take a longer stroke with each pass until you have achieved a full length shaving. It should probably take 4 or 5 strokes before you have achieved a full length shaving. This removes progressively more material from the bottom of the leg than from the top. I had to repeat this process 3 times before I reached my lines but it will depend on how heavy a cut you have your plane set to take. I work around the leg until I’ve done all 8 faces and I check to make sure the leg looks right.

Tenoning the Legs

Over to the lathe and I fix a leg between centres and turn the tenon to roughly the right size and profile ready for the tapered tenon cutter to refine. I love the Veritas tapered tenon cutter, it’s like a giant pencil sharpener. As long as you’ve got the profile somewhere close on the lathe it should only take a few rotations in the cutter to give the perfect tapered tenon.

Mortising the Seat

With all three legs tapered and tenoned I turn my attention to the seat. I lay out the sight lines and mortise locations then set up my cordless drill with a 16mm spade bit in an extension. The extension allows me to see more easily if I’m in line and staying true to my bevel gauge. The bevel angle for the front legs is 13° and the resultant sight line is 16° offset from the front edge of the seat.

I lay the bevel gauge along the sight line and tape it in place so it doesn’t wander around while I drill the hole. I place the tip of the bit in the mark I made and then take the time to accurately align the bit with the sight line and the blade of the square. Going slowly at first, to ensure that the bit doesn’t wander, I begin to drill faster as the cutting wings near the face of the seat.

With regular stops to check alignment I make my way through the board. I’ve clamped a backer board to the seat so there’s no tear out as the drill bit exits the wood.

Reaming the Mortises

After drilling all three holes (the bevel angle for the rear leg is 22° by the way) in the seat it’s time to ream them with the Veritas tapered reamer. This produces a clean mortise that exactly matches the tenon profile on the legs.

It’s a bit more tricky to get the angle right with this tool as it doesn’t fit my extension. Nevertheless, I line up the body of the drill with bevel gauge, check sight line alignment, and begin to slowly ream out the mortise. Slow and steady is the key here; I give the drill a couple of slow speed rotations and insert the leg to check for alignment. If I’m off I can correct it by adjusting the angle of the reamer and making another couple of rotations. I continue like this until the tenon protrudes slightly through the seat.

Now that I have all three mortises reamed I fit the legs and stand back to check that all looks well. If something isn’t right with the angles or shape of the legs it will stick out like a sore thumb but there’s not an easy way to fix it at this stage, it’s probably better to start again with a new seat.

And with that I’ll call it a day. Next time I’ll be refining and tenoning the stretchers, drilling mortises in the legs for them and shaping and refining the seat.

As you may have read in one of my earlier posts I’m currently making a staked high stool from The Anarchist’s Design Book by Christopher Schwarz but at the back of my mind I’m always thinking about what to make next. I know, I know, I should just focus on the project at hand and devote all of my attention to it, after all I do have a history of making silly mistakes when I take my eye off the ball!

But I just can’t help myself and I’m allocating brain time to mulling over which style of stick chair I should build next. I like the stick chair form and the Welsh stick chair is the one that everyone seems to be talking about at the moment.

Shamefully (given how close I live), it’s a few years since I last visited St Fagan’s Museum near Cardiff. The last time I was there I took lots of pictures which I use as a reference when considering a chair build. I look over the pictures time and time again but every time I’m time I’m taken in a different direction and left confused about the form I’d like to make. Welsh stick chairs are beautiful and the design is open to such a huge range of interpretation. I’ve made one and I love it but I want to build something different this time around.

It was while I was tidying the workshop today that I found the plans that I bought to accompany Chris Schwarz’s “The Stick Chair Book“, another excellent tome from the good folks at Lost Art Press. I laid the plans out on my bench and looked over the designs. I had previously discounted making the lower backed chairs as I didn’t particularly find the form pleasing. But the more I looked, the more I thought that maybe I’d been foolish in discounting these designs. I was starting to warm to the idea.

I went back to the house, grabbed my copy of The Stick Chair Book from the bookcase and flicked through the pages towards the back of the book which describe each of the designs as well as offering much needed (for me at least) hand-holding through the build process. I spent a good hour or so reminding myself of the chairs before realising that I was on the edge of a momentous decision and that a nice cup of tea was in order.

“I’m going to build a low-back chair” I proclaimed to myself. Now, which one to build? I was drawn to the visual simplicity of the Irish style stick chairs and after an extensive scouring of my books and the Internet I came to the conclusion that the style of chair that has come to be known as the “Gibson stick chair” was appealing . I wasn’t particularly taken with the Gibson’s design originally but as I studied it’s lines it really started to grow on me. I could see myself nestling down into it beside the hearth with a fire blazing away, a steaming mug of tea and good book in my hands.

My wife has the final say about any piece of furniture that makes it into the household so I sought approval and received the seal of approval far too easily. There’s still time for a change of plan but for now I think that the Gibson chair is the next project on the bench and I’m going to start looking around for some nice pieces of oak or perhaps ash.

I was looking for a long time at vintage scorps on eBay etc. and I just couldn’t bite the bullet on any particular one. I didn’t want to pay a lot for a vintage tool only to find that it was excessively correded or that the tool steel had been ground right down and left only the substrate steel.

I started looking at new ones and found that there are some very expensive ones on the market individually made by blacksmiths and they look like wonderful tools but this early in my chairmaking journey I just couldn’t justify that amount of outlay.

Here in the UK the most readily available scorps are from the Swiss company Pfeil and Ray Iles. Reading different opinions across the web there wasn’t a huge outpouring of love for the Pfeil tool but I couldn’t find any strong opinions either way on the Ray Iles.

I found that Flinn-Garlick of Sheffield (one of my favourite tools shops) had the Ray Iles scorp for the bargain price of £60 so I thought I’d give it a go.

Getting hands-on with the scorp for the first time I was pleasantly surprised how well balanced it felt in my hands. Bear in mind that I have no point of reference as I’ve never used an inshave / scorp before but I do know when something feels right.

The tool was very sharp right out of the box so there was no work to do to the cutting edge before putting it to the wood.

To take it easy on the scorp (and on myself!) I started out with a piece of softwood. I marked up the front edge of the wood with a scoop similar to that found on a Windsor chair set myself the challenge of working down to the line and hollowing out the block with something vaguely akin to a chair seat profile.

Once I got a feel for the cutting edge I was amazed at how fast I could remove wood. Even more exciting was how cleanly it was cutting. I had a big grin all over my face, this was such fun! I inevitably got carried away and went too far in some areas but overall I delared the test to have been very successful and the tool to have performed well above what it’s modest price tag might suggest.

Next up was the real thing. I was working on my first Welsh style stick chair and I’d elected to make the whole thing from some beautiful Welsh oak that I’d had for over 10 years. I clamped the seat to the bench, marked out some lines and set to work.

I’d expected the oak to be very challenging and to tear badly but working across the grain and taking manageable bites I had a result I was really happy with within an hour or so. The scorp had well and truly proven it’s worth and was set to be a long-term member of my chairmaking tool kit.