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LAP Home Blog Home Books Crucible Tool Apparel, Etc. FAQ Menu Open Wire: May 11, 2024 Posted on May 11, 2024 May 11, 2024 by My daughter Katherine assembling a chair we built together. This may or may not work. For the last month, our blog has been sinking into madness. Subscribers weren’t receiving emails, our RSS feed was jacked up and this week we started receiving fatal errors whenever we tried to post. We have lots of technical help, and I hope in the coming week things will be cleared up for good (we are migrating our blog to a self-hosted server with lots of in-person, on-the-phone support). Then I’ll be able to tell you about the final make-room-at-Anthe sale we are now running . And lots of other news. But until then, our apologies for the weirdness. I hope we will be able to answer your questions today. Let’s give it a go. Write your question in the comment field below, and we will answer it. Comments close about 5 p.m. — Christopher Schwarz Share this: Print Email Facebook Tumblr Pinterest Twitter Like this: Like Loading... Posted in Open Wire 129 Comments on Open Wire: May 11, 2024 2 new Chair Classes are Live in 10…9…8 Posted on May 8, 2024 by fitz If you, too, would like to get bunny ears from Chris while making a chair in our shop, log in to our ticketing site at noon (Eastern) today. Signups go live for: Build an Irish Armchair with Christopher Schwarz (Aug. 12-16) and Build a Welsh-style Comb-back Chair with Christopher Schwarz (Sept. 30-Oct. 4) – Fitz Share this: Print Email Facebook Tumblr Pinterest Twitter Like this: Like Loading... Posted in Uncategorized 13 Comments on 2 new Chair Classes are Live in 10…9…8 London Woodworking Festival2 Classes in the U.K. Posted on May 8, 2024 by fitz If I leave the cat treats behind, I can fit the rest of my ATC into this Nanuk hard-sided case. Right? I find this difficult to believe…but it must be true. Chris and I have never flown to a place to teach concurrent classes. Or flown concurrently to different places to teach classes. But it is finally happening: Chris and I are both presenting at the London International Woodworking Festival (London, England – not London, Ky.) on Saturday, Nov. 2, and we’re both teaching classes before the festival…which means I had to break down and buy my own hard-sided case in which to pack my tools for the flight. No more borrowing Chris’s Pelican. Or his tools while teaching, as our courses run at the same time. Chris is teaching a 5-day class in making a Comb-Back Stick Chair (Oct, 28-Nov. 1), and I am teaching a 3-day class (Oct. 30-Nov. 1) in making a Dutch Tool Chest . You can see a full list of all the courses on the Festival website . – Fitz p.s. Yes of course I was tempted to title this Anarchy in the U.K.” (I used to have the T-shirt…thought I was cool. Was not.) Share this: Print Email Facebook Tumblr Pinterest Twitter Like this: Like Loading... Posted in Woodworking Classes 18 Comments on London Woodworking Festival2 Classes in the U.K. Arms for a Stick Chair Posted on May 7, 2024 by fitz Simple arms Arms that are not connected into an armbow are easier to make and somewhat easier to assemble. The following is excerpted fromThe Stick Chair Book, ” by Christopher Schwarz.The Stick Chair Book ” is divided into three sections. The first section, Thinking About Chairs,” introduces you to the world of common stick chairs, plus the tools and wood to build them. The second section – Chairmaking Techniques” – covers every process involved in making a chair, from cutting stout legs, to making curved arms with straight wood, to carving the seat. Plus, you’ll get a taste for the wide variety of shapes you can use. The chapter on seats shows you how to lay out 14 different seat shapes. The chapter on legs has 16 common forms that can be made with only a couple handplanes. Add those to the 11 different arm shapes, six arm-joinery options, 14 shapes for hands, seven stretcher shapes and 11 combs, and you could make stick chairs your entire life without ever making the same one twice. The final section offers detailed plans for five stick chairs, from a basic Irish armchair to a dramatic Scottish comb-back. These five chair designs are a great jumping-off point for making stick chairs of your own design. The arms can be the simplest part of a chair. If you’re lucky, you might find a branch in the woods that grew into the shape of a perfect arm. Or the arms can be as basic as two straight boards: one for the right hand and one for the left. If you like, you can make a C-shaped arm that wraps around the sitter by gluing three sticks together – one for the sitter’s right hand, one for the spine and one for the left hand. On the other hand, a chair’s arms can have insanely involved joinery – mitered scarf joints or curved half-laps (for starters). And if that’s not enough of a challenge, try steambending, where there’s a significant risk of chuck-it-in-the-trash-and-start-day-drinking failures. With dozens of methods available, deciding how to make the arms of a chair can be daunting. So, let’s begin with some basic principles. Typical Pieced Armbow The-three-piece armbow is strong and can be made easily with boards from the lumberyard. The Goal of the Arm The mechanical goal of every arm on every good stick chair is simple: Avoid short grain as much as possible. If you plan to build your chair with two separate, disconnected arm pieces, then things are fairly simple. You can easily find two sticks to do the job and avoid weak short grain. The troubles begin when you want your chair to have what’s called an armbow” – a curved arm that wraps around the sitter from her right hand to the left. How in heaven’s name do you avoid short grain with a C-shaped arm? There are several strategies: Find a curved branch that looks like a 90° bend. Saw it through its thickness (called resawing”) to make two identical curves. Then join the two 90° curves to make an arm that curves 180°. Or get really lucky and find a curved branch that is perfectly C-shaped. Take a straight stick and use steam to bend it over a form to make a 180° curve. Saw up a bunch of thin (1/8″-thick) pieces of veneer. Apply glue to their faces like spreading butter on bread. Bend them over a curved form” that represents the arm’s final shape. Let the glue dry. This is called bent lamination.” Purchase cold-bend hardwood,” which is flexible when wet. You bend it over a form (similar to steambending but without the steam). When it dries, it keeps its shape. Create a pieced armbow.” This is where you use three or four chunks of wood that are sawn to a curved shape. You glue them up in a way that eliminates short grain, sometimes adding a piece called a shoe” to the top to shore things up. Get your arms in the air I spotted these curved branches on a tree on the grounds of St Fagans, the national history museum of Wales. It could be one massive armbow or several 90° bends, depending on how you cut it. Typical Dimensions Arms can vary quite a bit. A steambent arm might be 1″ thick and 1-1/2″ wide. A pieced armbow might be 1″ thick and 2-1/2″ wide. A curved branch or root can be a whopping 2″ thick and 4″ wide. The arm has to be strong enough that it won’t crack during assembly or in service. And this challenge is made more difficult by all the holes you drill in the arms for sticks. Make the arm too bulky, however, and it might look ugly. It’s a balancing act. In the world of stick chairs, a typical arm is about 1″ thick, give or take. In a strong material, such as oak, I’ll accept 7/8″ thick. For width, I like 1-3/8″ wide for arms that I’ve bent. And about 2-1/4″ wide for pieced armbows. If the arm has a shoe, I usually shoot for 1″ thick for that component, though I have seen much thinner ones on historical chairs. When assembled, the armbow is typically wider than the seat. If my seat is 20″ wide, then my armbow will be 23″ to 26″ wide overall. The depth of...