Starting a Chairmaking Journey

I've mentioned in other posts or videos or social media that I am a fan of Chris Schwarz. Chris is a furniture maker and publisher (odd combination). He founded Lost Art Press which is dedicated to reviving out of print or disappearing books on woodworking and furniture. Chris has published multiple books on woodworking of his own, to include The Anarchist series on woodworking. Anyhoo....  

A big focus of Chris's work is about making chairs. Specifically, stick chairs. 

What are they? Good question.

You can pretty quickly see why it's called a “stick chair". It kinda depends on sticks. Now before you make the mistake I did, this is not the same as a Windsor chair.

I think Chris would tell you that the Windsor chair is a “great-great-grandchild" or something of the stick chair....and you can see why. There are certainly common elements, but the stick chair is far less ornate and there is no steam bent wood or laminations. It's just sticks. The stick chair is simpler in design and construction and you can imagine some version of it in one of your ancestral homes. Even the example I show above (which is one of Chris Schwarz's) is a pretty involved version for the average poor farmer or sharecropper to make....but they did make something similar. People had to sit, right?? 

If you want to read more on the history behind these chairs, I defer to Chris. He knows it way better than I ever will. 

Chairs in general, of any form, are really the hallmark of a great furniture maker. They have an almost infinite number of designs, are often built to complement a specific table or decorative style, and they get a lot of use, so the design has to be comfortable. There's a lot to think about. 

To add to that, think of the geometry and math and precision that has to come together to make a chair like this, particularly with the legs. 

For chairs to be sturdy and comfortable, the legs have to have two angles: the rake (which is the angle of the legs viewed from the front of the chair) and the splay (the angle of the legs viewed from the side). All four legs have to have rake and splay or the chair is less sturdy for the weight of a person sitting. Yeah, you could make it all straight and out of 2x4s, but that's ugly and honestly, it still won't hold up as well. 

If that weren’t confusing enough, if you want to make a chair rather than just a board with legs, you need the seat to pitch to the rear at a couple of degrees, which means the rake and splay of the rear legs are often different than the front. Yowza. That means multiple compound angles and lots of geometry and I can't count to 20 without taking my socks and shoes off. 

Chris's career now is all about encouraging people to start building chairs and to demystify the whole process. His The Anarchist Design Book is kind of a tutorial (as well as a great reference on furniture) and helps walk you through learning the steps to build a chair, by starting with a staked saw bench, and then building on those skills until you have built a stick chair. So that's what I am doing..and I started with a saw bench. 

I didn't get as many pictures and videos of the whole process as I had wanted, but here you go, starting with the legs. Mostly because I started with the legs.

I started with a square stick, about 1.75" to a side... and had to get them into an octagonal shape. In the picture below, I have one blank held in a clamp, and then the clamp is held in the vise. 

That allows me to work the corner down to a flat surface. It's not clearly visible, but I work one corner down to where it will ultimately match the two adjoining facets. Then turn it. Work another corner. And so on until the blank looks like the octagon you can see lying on the right on the bench. Soooooooooooooo satisfying. Yes, this makes for beefy legs....but it’s a sawbench, not fine furniture. 

The wood for this project, by the way, all came from dead or fallen trees here on Tumblewood. The legs are hickory I believe, and the seat is pine. No trees were harmed in the making of this bench. 

There is reasoning behind the choice of materials for chairs. Yes, you can make a chair all from one species, but for sure in the legs you want sturdy, straight grain. If you look at the picture above on the ends of the blanks you can see that the grain is very vertical in its orientation. Not perfect...but pretty good. For the seat of a chair, there is a little more tolerance for how the grain runs, and woods like pine or poplar or even the ubiquitous sweet gum are ok, and sometimes preferable since the more random grain actually can grab the leg better and compress around the tenon. 

It's at this point that my documentation of this process fails me...somehow I failed to get pictures of the seat, and drilling the mortises. Or even shaping the tenons. Suffice it to say that Schwarz provides the needed angles and geometry and since the seat (or top) is basically just a rectangle about 17" long by 8" wide, and about 3" thick, you're not missing much. I just located the locations for the mortises and drilled them and then reamed them out with a tapered reamer.  

I elected to skip tapering the legs. Chris does this for a majority of his chairs and it does make them look better, but I wasn't worried about that at this point. This is a sawbench, not fine furniture, so the more abuse it could take the better. Plus, being able to observe the elements of design with your own eye helps drive home the “why" behind the design element. Weird. Seeing is believing, I guess. 

Once the mortises were drilled, I had to taper the very ends of the leg to create a tenon. 

You can see here how the end (the tenon) tapers and then fits into the bottom side of the top. Terrible photog skills. 

Now....for those of you who have wooden chairs, you have probably experienced at one point or another the separating of the leg from the seat. That's usually due to the fact that the tenons are cylindrical and symmetrical and they don't go all the way through the seat. In a stick chair, the tapered tenon creates a “wedge" effect so that anytime someone sits on it, they are basically pushing the seat down onto the legs. The other thing is that tenon protrudes through the seat or the bench top. A kerf or sawcut is made in the top of the tenon, effectively splitting part of the tenon in half. That kerf then has a wedge driven into it which spreads the tenon out against the walls of the mortise. Once the protruding tenon and wedge are glued and dried in place, the tenon is trimmed flush with the seat with a flush saw. 

Here you can see the tenon after trimming it flush. Dang. I need to work on my pic skills. The wedge is visible in the middle of the tenon.

Ideally, the wedge and the tenon should be perpendicular to the long grain of the seat (indicated by the long brown lines in the pine). I didn't quite get that right. If you drive the wedge in parallel to the long grain, you run the risk of splitting the seat, especially if the seat is a hardwood like oak. By the way....the black dots are worm holes. This wasn't an especially beautiful piece of pine, so it was good for experimenting and learning new skills. No big deal if I ruined it.

With the tenons glued in place, the build is almost done. The next step was leveling the seat and legs. In chair building the leg blanks are often made extra long. Taking four blanks, putting them at compound angles, and then expecting them to all end up at exactly matching in the common plane is nigh unto impossible. It's roping the wind. Pinning a cloud. Convincing a teenager they're wrong. Just don't even bother. By leaving the legs long, you can even them out after the fact. The trick here is putting the piece on a flat, level surface...in this case the outfeed table for my tablesaw. The floor in my shop is as uneven as the tax burden. 

With a small torpedo level on the top, I use small wooden wedges or shims to raise the legs till the top is level in both directions. 

Almost there. I did have to play around a bit more to get it dead on level. 

Now for a fun trick... 

With the seat leveled out, and the legs shimmed, I have to determine where to cut the legs so they are all the same length and are at a matching angle. No problem for a machine, but how does an individual maker do this? 

If I take a pencil, plane off most of one side so it is flat, I can attach it to a known and fixed reference, and then by keeping that reference on the table, I can mark all the way around the leg.

In this case I just used a piece of 2x4, which gives me a rather arbitrary height of 3.5", but in the case of this saw bench, having a specific height is not as important as it would be if I were making a chair. In a chair, if the height is too high, shorter folk will be swinging their legs and looking ridiculous. Make the chair too short and your taller friends will view the world through their knees. There's a science to this, you know.  

Yeah, the line is just a bit off. Leave me alone. 

This process creates quite the optical illusion and mind game for you until you actually see it and experience it. When you draw lines like this on four separate legs and the angle of the line, which is parallel to the flat surface, but wildly not relative to the leg...one can only think, “No way in hell is this going to work." 

With the lines all marked, I can take the bench, stool, chair thing off the flat surface and over to the vise.

A few strokes with a backsaw and voila....a surface that is parallel to the seat and in theory will be the same as the other three. The biggest trick here is manuevering the piece around to work around four gangly legs, and the bench. I will have to develop some new clamping techniques for this, but it can be done. 

And there you have it. I brought the thing down to my office just to test how well I did. Seems to be nearly perfect. The thing will probably live in the shop, and with that crazy floor, perfect is next to meaningless. And the camera here is playing tricks with your eye. It's not nearly as askew as it looks in the picture, although I can probably get more accurate on the splay and the rake. 

This is the first piece of furniture I have built using this technique. My goal here was primarily to experience what is involved and start building the necessary skill sets. I need to do more to get that muscle memory, but that will come with time. So I am calling this a win. 

Now, I wonder how much weight this thing will hold...