More Hearth Benches

I've made a series of benches that have become my best sellers at the Wake Forest Farmer's market.  These are inspired by the bench that my wife's grandfather made, see my earlier post.  The first few had legs that are octagonal in cross section, shaped on the shaving horse with only the tenon turned on the lathe.  For my recent benches I've been turning the legs and being very careful with the angles for what I think is an elegant solution. I call these hearth benches because I have one in front of my fireplace.  They also make great coffee tables or just a place to sit down and put on your boots.

White oak bench with a scalloped seat.

Ambrosia maple bench with white oak legs.

Walnut bench with white oak legs and a maple dovetail key.

The tops are 2" - 3" thick, rough sawn sections of white oak, walnut, maple or cherry often with at least one "live" edge.  I cull through my lumber suppliers stash of unusual or cast off stock that can't be milled to 8/4 s4s standards.  I'm being a bit sarcastic.  As woodworkers, we pride ourselves on precision and accumulate expensive machinery to mill boards to be flat, square and regular.  Sometimes, following that process of refinement and regularity, we end up with products made of wood that eradicate all character except the rectilinear extrusion that we made it into.  I like to leave the wood for the bench top with vestiges of it's former life and be very precise about the form, rake and splay of the tapered tenon leg.

One of my early benches in use by my family, walnut  with white oak legs.

Faceted carving on the bench top ends.

Top of the tapered tenon in the bench top.

Splits and checks when encountered in otherwise suitable wood, are also left in place.  I stabilize the splits with dovetail keys recessed into the benchtop.  This detail was utilized to great effect by George Nakashima, a great Japanese American architect and furniture maker.  I encourage you to look him up and appreciate his designs which are still being made by his family.  His philosophy that trees are noble organisms and can be given a second life in furniture is one that I can appreciate.

Maple dovetail key in a walnut bench top, stabilizing a split.

Chair Devil

No, this post is not about furniture possessed by evil spirits.  It's about a rather mysterious tool.  Anyone making chairs and stools by hand accumulates a stock of tools specific to the tasks of shaping and refining chair parts.  Most woodworkers acquire tools that help them make square, flat stock to be made into rectilinear forms.  Not so with luthiers and chairmakers.  There's hardly a right angle anywhere on a chair that is made to accommodate the human form.  Rounded and curved parts are the norm.

 At left are some of the tools that I've made for myself.  The tool in the top left is a travisher, which is a specialized spoke shave for hollowing and sculpting seats.  One starts with the inshave or scorp in the top right and then refines or "fairs" the surfaces with the travisher.  The tool in the foreground is the chair devil.  I've seen manufactured travishers and inshaves but I think all the chair devils in existence are craftsman made, and that in itself contributes to the mystery of it's construction.  Chair devils are scrapers, the blade cuts by means of a burr raised on the tool steel edge with a burnisher.  You may be familiar with card scrapers or the venerable Stanley #80 cabinet scraper which is a most useful tool to tame tearout after hand planes have reached their limit.  A chair devil is a scraper for parts that are round in cross section, although I have seen examples that are simply flat scrapers held in a handle.  In the photo above you can see what it does. The stock is held in the shaving horse and when pulled like a spokeshave, this tool raises curly shavings and leaves the surface of the wood smooth and uniform.

Doesn't take long to generate a pile of shavings. This particular chair devil is made of osage orange, cocobola, brass hardware and a blade made from a card scraper.  Brass threaded inserts and counter sunk machine screws hold the blade in place. I've been known to over think the design process, but this is one time that a simple solution landed in my lap. The scraper blade needs to be at approximately 75 degrees relative to the work surface to cut wood fibers, and a chair devil can be made with a bed and throat at that angle, but the method described below is somewhat simpler.

I start with a squared piece of stock 1 1/4" square, 12" long and turn the handles on the lathe, leaving the center portion square.  Then cut the bed into the square center section the depth of the cocobola cap, about 3/8".  Note that it is important to make the bed dead flat, and the blade is recessed into the osage bed by the thickness of the blade, no more.  A throat is cut into the the cocobola cap for shavings to escape, but the throat should be narrower than the blade width, only as wide as the curved area so the blade is captured between the flat areas of the osage bed and cocobola cap.  If the blade isn't seated properly, or if there are any gaps between the cap and bed, shavings will clog the throat.  Some fine tuning will be necessary to refine the throat so that shavings feed smoothly through the opening.

At this point in the construction process the center portion is still square in cross section.  Remove the blade and with a block plane remove wood from the bottom until the desired 75 degree angle is reached, see photo below. The radius can be shaped relative to the bottom plane and then the blade can be marked and shaped.  This method eliminates the need to make a blade bed and cap at an acute angle, relying instead on square construction and forming the angle by stock removal after all the major parts are constructed.  The devil's in the details.

75 degree angle achieved by planing the bottom 

Windsor Chair Repair

I was recently entrusted with the repair of a windsor chair that has been in a family's possession for three generations. The chair is a Nichols and Stone sack back windsor made in Gardener Massachusetts.  The Nichols and Stone name goes back to the 18th century, but production really ramped up in the 1860's when they opened a furniture factory in Massachusetts.  They had a reputation for making sturdy all wood furniture and built a business that lasted into the 21st century.  It's difficult to date this particular chair but the family reports that it's over 100 years old.

The chair is made entirely of hard maple and the quality of the wood has contributed to its longevity.  Virtually every mortise and tenon joint was loose and some were totally disengaged.  Luckily, none of the tenons were damaged and all of the pieces were whole.  I suspected that the original glue was hide glue, and confirmed this once I got it into the shop.  The original finish was a stain applied to the whole chair followed by shellac.

The first rule of art conservation is to "do no harm" to the original work. The concept for the repair of furniture is similar, with the additional criteria that it must be returned to active use, to accept all the strain and abuse for which it was originally made.  This particular chair has a lovely patina acquired over it's more than a century of use. "Refinishing" the chair would strip it of its character, all the hints of it's history, the various nicks and scrapes from long past incidents, the wood burnished and blond showing through the darker layers where hands have grasped the arms and worn the surfaces. I took great pains to maintain the original finish.

Hide glue is reversible.  Modern glues are often stronger than the surrounding wood and when failure occurs, it's typically a wood failure.  Hide glue, even a hundred plus years old can be reconstituted which means that joints can be separated with steam or warm water.  Dust and loose debris was cleaned from the joints, but I didn't have to scrape back to bare wood because the new hide glue adheres to the old.  I had to disassemble the chair in order to refit the mortises and tenons.  The arm posts and back hoop are wedged tenons.  These had to be removed in order to separate the parts, and the top of the arm post has a finish nail inserted into the arm and tenon to pin it in place.   Each piece was numbered before disassembly so I could correctly put it back together. 

A new batch of hide glue was prepared, and I began the process of reassembly.  The legs and stretchers go together easily, but there were a total of fourteen spindles that had to glued and set into the arm and hoop.
This is a very comfortable chair.  Hopefully, with these repairs it will continue its service for another century.