Last weekend, I finished the perch.

I painted it with one coat of Real Milk Paint’s new Butternut Squash color, followed by 3 coats of Mustard. I also used their anti-foam agent, and it made a big difference in reducing foam and generally making the paint easier to apply.

I think with milk paint, once it looks almost good enough, it’s time to stop: “better is the enemy of good.” Whenever I add “just one more thin coat in the spots that need it” I end up worse off, and have to smooth things out more than I’d prefer. Maybe it just doesn’t work to apply the paint when it’s too watered down.

After the paint, I applied 2 coats of Minwax wipe-on poly, as usual. In the picture above you can see what a big difference it makes to the color. I’m quite happy with the final color. The dark parts of the first image are more representative of the color than the washed out second image. I think the Squash undercoat made it darker overall, but luckily the yellow covered it enough, because they didn’t seem to go well together.

Marla’s initial reaction to the seating position wasn’t very favorable. It’s quite a bit higher than the other stools she has been sitting on, and it pitched her forward more than she’d prefer. I sat on it, and found myself sliding down the seat too much; maybe the poly wasn’t the best finish for this?

I trimmed the rear legs off by about an inch, but we’re not sure yet whether this will be the final position. Hopefully we’ll stop trimming before we reach the stretchers. I think to a certain extent, her desk ought to be raised up a bit, because we previously had it adjusted for a lower seating position. Luckily it is very adjustable, if we’re willing to clear it off.

This was a really fun stool to build. Everything went well, and I didn’t make any major mistakes, but it was also different from the other chairs and stools I’ve made.

The walnut stool is finished! I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Using naturally finished woods is in Windsor chairs generally not done, for a few reasons: strength, and aesthetics. I think on a simple stool with fairly plain turnings and without spindles, the grain doesn’t make the piece too busy. This stool is entirely walnut, except for the seat wedges, which I made from Cherry for a bit of contrast. There was quite a bit of variety in color in the different pieces of walnut, so I tried to arrange them with similar pieces nearer to each other. Even the seat isn’t a large expanse of “just brown.” It has stripes of color ranging from orange and pink, to grey.

Again, I used Minwax wipe-on poly finish. For the legs and stretchers, I applied the finish on the lathe, which protects the legs from damage a bit during construction. In areas where the wood is rubbed, it’ll stay polished even if the finish wears off. Everywhere else, the wipe-on finish is just shiny enough.

I’m happy to say that my “catalog of mistakes” helped a lot. I didn’t break any parts, or have to remake anything, and did everything in a better order. I built a test joint to make sure I made the stretcher tenons the proper size for the holes. Now my future challenge will be improving my ability to cut the tenons the correct size, and smoothly.

I’ll include a few pictures I took of the process, but most of the time I don’t feel like stopping to take pictures. Unfortunately Marla is usually asleep when I work, so I can’t enlist her help much either. Most of this stool was constructed between 11pm and 1am on any particular weekday.

Here’s the setup used for reaming leg holes. The tapered reamer is in a leghole, and I’m checking the angles with a bevel and a square. My reamer doesn’t have a very long body section parallel to the axis of rotation, so I adjust my bevel angle by half the taper angle, and line up with the tapered part of the tool instead. To use the square, you move your head sideways so the square and sight line are in line. Then you check the top of the the reamer in relation to the square/sight line, and adjust it accordingly.

This kind of reamer cuts slowly, but allows for a surprising amount of adjustment (I found out, on the previous stool). That means it also allows for a surprising amount of screw-up if you do it wrong, so it’s good that it cuts slowly.

By the way, I am really happy with these squeeze-activated clamps. They hold well, don’t mar surfaces, and are much easier to use than pipe clamps. They also have slightly more reach than pipe clamps, which comes in handy.

Here, I have glued up the undercarriage and glued it into the seat. This part of the process is a bit of a race against glue drying, so it’s hard to stop and take pictures. The standard construction order is to construct the H shaped stretchers first, aligned in one plane. Then add one leg, and make sure the stretchers are aligned properly. Add a second leg, and test with the seat. Then, add the last two legs, always making sure they’re aligned correctly. Finally, apply glue to the leg tapers and mortises, hammer them into the seat, and apply wedges (also glued). I happened to let the undercarriage dry between those steps.

If you think my bench looks messy in this picture, you should see it when I’m not in the middle of a project. It turns out that for building chairs, you really don’t need much actual working space on the bench. But having convenient tool storage would be a much better solution than just shoving stuff down the bench until things fall off the other end.

Here’s a closeup of the seat. You can see some of the interesting coloration here, but it’s better in person of course. I cut the walnut seat out of one thick piece, in a “book matched” arrangement. Unfortunately, the grain doesn’t match anymore since the seat is carved out, and book matching makes is a bit more difficult to carve the seat where the two planks meet. This was harder to carve than a pine seat; I don’t think I’ll be doing another hardwood seat.

I managed to mangle only one small section when trimming the legs, where I dug out too much wood near one leg. I’m also very happy with how well the scraper cuts across the end grain of the legs. With all the wood the same hardness, it doesn’t just cut the seat and skip across the leg. After scraping, I lightly sanded with 400 grit paper, and it was ready for finish. I probably didn’t need to go down to 400, but it did smooth out a bit of the raised grain after scraping. The seat still has a slightly wavy texture across the surface from the compass plane cuts, but it’s hard to notice.

I generally don’t sand the edges of the seat, I prefer to leave the facets from the spokeshave. Unfortunately, the end grain ends up slightly rough in some places. This isn’t too much of a problem under paint, but I did use some fine sandpaper to knock off the rough spots between coats of finish on this stool.

I’m very happy with how this stool turned out, and I might even still have enough momentum to build a perch. At that point I’ll be getting close to stool overload, though. If Marla loves the perch more than the stool, and I like it enough to work in front of a computer with it, I might make another one, but otherwise I’ll attempt to move on to another Actual Chair.

A somewhat belated update: I finished the stool.

I applied maybe 3 or 4 coats of the Salem Red milk paint, but as I usually find with with red paint, it still didn’t cover perfectly. I decided that if I wanted perfect coverage I should’ve just used a can of Rustoleum. Actually… although impatience did enter into the equation, I also decided this looked Good Enough. Since “better is the enemy of good,” I stopped.

After the paint, I applied 2 coats of Minwax wipe-on poly finish. This changed the color from a completely flat pinkish color, to the deeper red seen here. This is the first time I’ve used the wipe-on polyurethane instead of a Watco danish oil finish. I like the results: it has a bit of sheen, but not too much, even in the places which haven’t been worn smooth by sitting yet.

The color looks fine from a distance, and “interesting” close up. The paint is slightly transparent, and shows the brown stain underneath in places. As it wears, I expect this will become more apparent, but also more interesting.

Truthfully, this is a practice stool, and it will most likely end up in the basement, if the natural walnut stool turns out as well as I hope it will.

The next image is a family picture. Moving counterlockwise from the upper right, there’s the Sack Back chair I made in 1998 in a class I took with my dad at the Windsor Institute; the Bow Back chair I made in a class run by Brian Cunfer in Lancaster in 2007; and the stool I just finished by myself in my own shop.

I like them all for different reasons. I’m most interested in making chairs we’ll use, not just decorations. This is a “large” hobby, and we don’t have a lot of space for chairs we aren’t using; but I have no interest in selling them, either. That would be too much like a job, and I already have a job I like. So, I’ll have to either start making some more chairs of the same pattern, or live with the fact that I’ll never have a matching set.

My hobbies run in cycles (a topic for another blog post), but my hope is that my interest in chairmaking will last at least until I can complete the walnut stool, and hopefully long enough to build one of Peter Galbert’s perches.

In the slightly longer term, I anticipate building another actual chair. That would require tools and supplies I don’t have yet. Mainly, I would need very straight stock, preferrably oak, to split into spindles and bows for the back, and a steam box for bending the curved parts. Bending wood is quite fun, when it doesn’t break.

I’m considering starting with a rodback chair, because it has only one relatively small bent part in the back. This wouldn’t match any of my other chairs, of course. And, it would require a pattern, which I don’t have. However, I bought a very good book by John Kassay with measured drawings, which I think I could make a suitable pattern from.

But this is getting ahead of myself a bit. In the mean time, a few other small updates:

• I found some more logs. I’m pretty sure these are Cherry. They’re quite wide, over a foot, but only 18-20″ long. I’m not yet sure what I’ll use them for.
• I also found some very nice, but very large logs: perfectly straight, 2’+ diameter and 4’+ long. I have no way to lift them, let alone get them home. I’m considering how I might split them enough to carry eighths home, without anyone raising a fuss.
• We’ve been having problems with our DSL download speeds, so I connected our modem directly to the NID in the basement with a short cord. This instantly doubled our download speeds: our “internal” wiring was the problem. Now I’ll have to wire some outlets into the basement ceiling and find a place to put a server.
• I have a new batch of beer in the works; the recipe will come after it’s ready to drink.

Have fun!

My first stool is complete, and ready for finish. I didn’t even have to add any more mistakes to my list.

Windsor chairs are traditionally painted furniture: most often, green paint. When they were first built in the 1700’s and 1800’s, they were never stained or simply varnished over wood. The chairs were designed around the fact that they would be painted, and they were always painted. At that time, they used lead paint. These days, chairmakers generally use milk paint, which ends up looking similar to lead paint.

I found an interesting article about the traditional green color used on these chairs. For a long time, it was thought the chairs were painted dark green originally, and then repainted in the 1800’s or so, using black or dark grey. Recent paint analysis has found that actually the chairs were bright green, but the pigments used in the paint darken over time. When they were repainted, the color was chosen to match what the original bright green had become: dark, dank, nearly black/grey green.

My stool will be red, to match the other chairs in our house, primarily because I already have red milk paint and I don’t want to buy any more quite yet. Applying a milk paint finish requires a bit of a leap of faith: it looks horrible, before it starts looking good.

Brian Cunfer starts by dying his chairs brown, to provide a dark base under the paint. Then when the paint chips or wears through, which it does, it will have a uniform color under the paint everywhere on the chair, and won’t provide as much contrast with the darker paint on top. So, the first step in finishing is to dye the chair Horrifyingly Bad Brown. Other manufacturers call this color Middle School Woodshop Brown or Antique Mall Refinishing Brown. It’s especially hideous on woods such as pine.

Next, I’ll be applying probably 2 coats of red milk paint. The first coat will look splotchy, completely flat, and basically horrible. The second coat will look dead flat and mostly bad. After rubbing it down with a scotchbrite pad, I’ll apply some wipe-on poly finish, and it will begin to stop sucking. I’m not sure why I describe this now: probably to reassure myself that I didn’t just ruin the stool. But most likely, I’ll post more pictures of the process as I go.

Well built Windsors use different woods for different parts of the chair, depending on their function, and paint covers the differences in the wood. Hard, strong wood such as Maple is used for the legs and stretchers. Soft wood like Pine or Poplar is used for the seat, so it’s easy to carve and holds onto the legs well. The top parts of chairs are made of wood that is easy to shave and bend, such as Oak.

My next stool, made entirely from walnut, will technically speaking not be a well-built Windsor. I also won’t be painting it. I really don’t care, despite what some people might say about it: they aren’t allowed to sit in it anyway. I think it’ll look quite good as long as I don’t need to patch any mistakes.

… To Go Wrong.

It was bound to happen eventually, but I started making some fatal mistakes on the stool.

When I started drilling my first stretcher hole in one of the legs, apparently the clamps on the V-block weren’t strong enough: the leg rotated, and my hole ended up completely wrong. I also learned that my 5/8″ brad point bit is far too dull for how infrequently I’ve used it.

I got better clamps, drilled a successful practice hole in the ruined leg, and turned a replacement leg.

I managed to drill the four legs successfully, so I moved on to the stretchers. I originally turned them out of green wood, and after a year of sitting around they’re really wobbly. I did an adequate job cutting the tenons to size, using a sharpened box-end wrench; unfortunately this left them a bit oversized, so I probably won’t do that again.

Then, I cut the stretchers to length. Of course,when I say “to length” I mean to the wrong length, otherwise this wouldn’t be worth writing home about.

It turns out that the depth gauge on my folding rule makes a really excellent tool for measuring the inside distance between the legs. Brian Cunfer had a special shop-made tool for this, but I bet he could be using his folding rule instead.

However, it also turns out that the fixed-length segments on the folding rule aren’t 6″ long, they’re 7″ long. So my side stretchers are an inch too short.

Next: turning new stretchers, drilling them, and then gluing it up. I’m still “almost there” despite the setbacks.