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.

An update, in reverse chronological order:

It’s starting to look like a stool!

Stool

I carved the seat top, and reamed the leg holes, allowing the tapered leg tenons to enter the seat. Next is drilling the legs and stretchers, and gluing it up.

It’s very important to do all the steps of constructing the chair in the right order. Fortunately, every chairmaker uses a different “right order.” I could have done a better job on this stool, but it’ll all work out just fine.

The main considerations seem to be:

• Obviously, respect any strict order dependencies during construction: usually you need to make the parts before you can assemble them.
• Make sure that you can always hold the parts you’re working on without damaging them. If you cut too much of the seat too soon, you won’t have any flat surfaces left to clamp.
• If there are any steps where screwing up will permanently ruin a part, try to do those sooner rather than later, so you ruin as little work as possible.

Different people weigh each consideration differently, and sometimes the best choice depends on the shape of the parts for a particular chair.

One of the biggest variables seems to be: when do you drill and ream the leg holes, in relation to how finished the seat is? I’ve seen them drilled and reamed into a flat square board that hasn’t been shaped at all, and in a seat that’s completely carved, top and bottom. Knowing that different people do it differently helps reduce my worry about doing it wrong.

For this stool, I tried to remember the steps we used at Brian Cunfer’s class, but failed. Building a chair outside a class turns out to be challenging in ways I didn’t expect. I made notes about some complicated steps, but the simple things I knew I would remember… I forgot. Peter Galbert’s chairmaking videos have proven invaluable to remind me of small details that I’d otherwise have to figure out again on my own.

Tools

Earlier this week, we had 2 deliveries on the same day, with the new tools I needed to carve the top of the seat. Here’s my growing collection of chair-specific tools.

On top there’s a tapered tenon cutter (and a bevel gauge that snuck into the picture), and on the left is a tapered reamer. These are used to cut a tapered round mortise and tenon joint between the chair legs and seat. They were hand made by Elia Bizzarri.

In the middle is a Scorp: basically just a large curved metal blade with two handles. This one is made by Ray Iles. It’s used to rough out the top of the seat. For such a simple tool, it’s apparently not easy to design correctly: I previously purchased 2 other inexpensive models whose handles were set at an angle which made it impossible to carve the seat bowl. I’m happy to say that this scorp is superior to the others in every way, and didn’t cost much more than the others, even accounting for the UK exchange rate.

Below the scorp are a compass plane and travisher, which are used to smooth out the seat bowl carving. They are made by Jim White at Crown Planes. The finish quality of the tools is not as good as you’d find on antique tools. However, they work well, they’re far more available than used tools, and the prices are reasonable. In any case, it’s a hell of a lot better job than I’d do if I attempted to make them myself, and I’d still need to purchase the blades (not cheap).

You may notice that I know the names of the people who constructed all of these tools. The market for chairmaking tools is small (but much larger than 10 years ago). All of these tools are hand made in small batches by individuals who make their living constructing and selling woodworking tools. I’m happy to give my money to these people, instead of to companies who can’t figure out how to make a scorp which actually works for the purpose it was designed for.

Loots

Actually, it’s just chair parts, but I needed an anagrammatic section header.

Before my seat carving tools arrived, I did some work on the walnut stool. Hot damn, this is going to be beautiful if I don’t screw it up! I’m still paranoid that the walnut won’t be strong enough, and the legs will break the first time I sit in it.

There’s really only one leg blank I’m really worried about, because it has some wonky grain that crosses the spindle. I should probably just go chop up another beam instead of risking this one, but it seems like such a waste. Maybe I can get 3 legs out of the same piece, and make a walnut perch as well…

Anyway, tomorrow I’m brewing beer, so I probably won’t have time to drill legs as well. We’ll see.

After my chair class in 2007, I decided to build a Windsor-style stool that the teacher, Brian Cunfer, had in his shop. A stool lets me build my tool collection progressively: I wouldn’t need a steam box since the stool has no back. I figured I’d build one as practice and paint it, then build one out of my stash of walnut with a natural finish.

I got as far as turning the legs and stringers, before feeling my lack of a bench. You might notice that the legs and stringers are made of at least 4 different kinds of wood: they were all what I had sitting around in the right size. This hopefully won’t be noticeable under paint.

Now that my bench is usable, I’ve picked up where I left off. Over the past week or so, I pieced up the seat, cut it out, shaped the outside edge, and today I drilled the leg holes. Now, I’m waiting for more tools to carve the seat. The inshave I had was really not the right shape, so another one should be coming in the mail soon.

In the mean time, I’ve started cutting up my walnut for the second stool. It has a lot of knots, and the pith is throught middle of some pieces. But I found enough straight, clear wood for the seat, and I rounded enough sticks for the legs and stringers. Tonight I glued up the seat blank. Next, I’ll probably turn the legs and stringers, while I wait for the seat carving tools to arrive.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, “Epic” refers to a project which went on far longer than it should have, and/or is not finished yet.

Around 1998, when we moved into our house, I started building a woodworking bench. I built the base in the tiny workshop in Marla’s mother’s house, using mortise and tenon joints on some dimensional 4×4′ lumber. I was inspired around this time, from attending Michael Dunbar’s Windsor Institute and building a Windsor chair in October 1998.

Some time after that, I bought some hard maple for the bench top; a few years later, I pieced the top together. Unfortunately, due to some miscalulation and/or overzealous jointing, I ended up with the top about an inch too narrow for the base. Around this time, I also received a very nice Record woodworking vise for Christmas, before Record went out of business. (Thanks, Dad!) I cleaned the glue joints and trimmed the ends, but with inspiration from the chair class waning, I didn’t make any further progress.

Since it was a vaguely horizontal surface, it was fine for most of my general handyman tasks, even though it was inadequate for woodworking. It served this purpose well for many years, while I worked on a variety of non-woodworking projects.

Then, in 2007, I attended another Windsor chair making class, this time taught by Brian Cunfer near Lancaster, PA. I built a side chair, including turning the legs (which we didn’t do at Dunbar’s class).

With my newfound inspiration, I decided to continue work on my bench so I could build a windsor style stool. I flattened the top, fit it to the base, and bought a lathe to turn some legs and stretchers. After turning the spindles, I started turning wooden boxes. But woodturning doesn’t require much of a bench, and certainly doesn’t require a vise. And the top was still too narrow for the base…

Soon the newly flattened bench top was covered with spindles, broken boxes, box blanks, and other various bits of turned wood. After giving away a few dozen wooden boxes for Christmas, woodworking and turning once again ceased to be my primary hobby.

When my parents decided to visit after Christmas in 2008, Dad asked “What projects do you have?” I added “finish the bench” to the top of the list.

When he was here, we made some great progress. He brought some hard maple to widen the top enough to fit the base. We widened the top, trimmed the ends, re-flattened the top, and added a spacer block to mount the vise. Finally, after a few bolts to hold the top down, and wooden vise jaws, it’s starting to really look like a bench.

It’s now finished enough to use for woodworking, so I can build the stool seat and assemble it. Thanks!

The remaining tasks include smoothing the top and ends a bit more, and applying a finish. I’ll wait for the warmer months before finishing it, so I can ventilate the basement while the finish dries.

Anyone who has seen many woodworking benches will probably notice that this bench is fairly sparse, and that the base and top are attached in a somewhat odd position. I’ll provide an explanation, but no excuses. There’s no way I could’ve made a substantially better bench, without any bench to work with. The odd proportions are purely due to a series of changed plans combined with no desire to redo any work already done.

On the bench, you can see I’ve started the stool seat. I’ll post more about that as it progresses.