Brian Boggs will be checking in every Monday to answer questions and post comments about chair making and traditional woodworking techniques.
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Replies
Brian,
Looks like I have the honor of posting the first message. I have three very general questions:
(1) What are your favorite woodworking books?
(2) What are your top three favorite tools?
(3) What was/is the most difficult woodworking skill for you to master? Why?
Houston,
I think my answer to your first question might get me fired from this position, but I really don't read woodworking books. After about two pages I've pretty much had my fill. After eight hours in the shop the last thing I want to spent the evening with is more woodworking. Not that I am tired of it, but I like to make room in my life for other thoughts and inspirations. I also find that I am in such a small niche with my work that very little that I have heard about or seen in print really addresses the issues I deal with. I also like learning from experience. There is a skill to that that is probably the most important one any woodworker (or other profession) will master.
But the books that I have been most influenced by are all of Krenov's books and the book "Make a Chair from a Tree" by John Alexander. But I haven't read them in nearly twenty years. Don't know how they's strike me now.
Favorite tools .That's tough too, but I'd say that my spokeshaves, bandsaw, and lie-Nielsen hand planes are about as fun to work with as anything I use. I might like a table saw if I had one.
The last question is easier. Designing a chair is far more difficult than anything else I do. Partly because the designs grow in difficulty as my skills improve. But also because good design incorporates so much more than tactical skill. A good chair needs to be comfortable, beautiful, and sturdy. And that's the easy part! Then you need to consider the cost of making the chair versus the value it might have in the market place or the value you might feel it has. I want a chair to also fit a home. That means it needs ot be compatible with other furniture either generally available like shaker or mission, or a line of furniture you design. In addition it needs to fit into the general work flow of a month in your shop. How does making this chair effect the overall shop routine? Good design not only excites the buyer, it has to improve production line as well as the bottom line. Anything else becomes an expensive mistake as many woodworkers have discovered. Once the actual chair is designed, you need to begin to design a way to build it. That can be just as tricky. Following the old rule of KISS is a good idea, but still good chair design is a challenge and always will be.
I don't say all this to scare people away from chairmaking. In fact I think it is a great product for small shops exactly for the above reasons. I think small shops can be better at al this than a factory. But be ready for a complete challenge.
Brian
Brian,
I recently found out that you live in Berea, Kentucky. My family just moved from Southern California to Lexington, Kentucky and I am thinking about moving to that area in the next year or so.
I am pretty new to woodworking, but I love it. I have been taking classes at my local community college and trying to soak up as much woodworking knowledge as I can. If I move to Kentucky I want to be able to continue to grow as a woodworker and have relationships with other woodworkers in the area. What is the woodworking community like in the Lexington/Berea area? Are there any woodworking groups/communities in this area? Can you recommend any woodworking schools that are close by?
I read about Berea on-line and it seems like there are a lot of woodworkers/artists who live there. I plan to visit Berea when I come out to visit my family in December. Hopefully I will have the opportunity to stop by your shop and visit with you.
Thanks for your response,
Phil
Phil,
You're always welcome to visit the shop. We give shop tours to the public daily at 2:30. I don't know how to describe the local woodworking community. We all are quite busy and seem to choose to spend our social time outside the profession. That is not a criticism, probably a healthy tendancy. But anytime I have needed advice or to borrow equipment or farm out a piece of work there are several shops here to pick from, and they have all been very helpful over the years. One shop right behind mine does a lot of work for me and I reciprocate occasionally.
I think Berea is about as good an environment to build a woodworking business as anywhere I have heard of for several reasons. The city and local Artisan Center have been great at promoting local crafts and Berea has a well established reputation for quality handmade objects. So marketing is fairly easy here and the cost of living is very managable realtive to other places with such a ready-made market. I can't understand why more woodworkers haven't moved here over the years.
The only school I know of here that holds workshops is Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking. A very good environment to learn in and a beautiful setting as well. (http://www.kellymehler.com). I taught there this summer and am scheduled there again next year. I certainly enjoy teaching there and the students Ihave talked to from my class as well as several others have all raved about the school.
If you're looking for a longer term learning opportunity, you might consider my own apprenticeship program. I offer three and six-month apprenticeships here in my shop. For more information on that contact Tina, my office manager, at [email protected]. She'll send you a copy of the flyer we send out.
I hope to see you in the shop sometime.
Brian
Brian,
I have recently purchased your DVD from Lie Nielson and found it to be quite informative. I am interested in building a shaving horse and would like to know if your plans are available. I know you wrote an article on it in FWW but I am having trouble locating the article.
Bill
I have been teaching chairmaking classes for about 18 years now. One place I find a lot of confusion is around steam bending. It's understandable. Every aspect of steam bending is a variable that unlike most of what we deal with can't be easily measured. The flexibility of a given piece of wood is always an unknown. Experience will work to your favor, but it's guess work at best. The amount of steam you need to generate is critical, but how do we measure it? How do we know when it is enough? Do I need to use a strap to get the bend I want or can I just clamp a steamed piece of wood to a form and wait. Wait how long?
It would take a pretty thick book to cover all you'll need to know in any situation for successful steam bending, but there are some basics that will greatly reduce your failure rate. And all you can do is reduce your failure rate, you'll never eliminate it. I think mine is around 5% or less. But every time I change how I do things it goes back up for a while until I find and get rid of the new bugs. This morning I'll just try to comer some of the aspects of wood selection for bending. I'll write on the other problems later.
I think the hardest part to solve is wood selection. That is largely because the market does not readily supply wood for steam bending. Most sources sell only kiln dried woods and those are not selected for steam bending success. I always saw my own because controlling the way it is sawn form the log as well as how and how much it is dried can make a huge difference in the failure rate of bending. If you can't do that, you can at lease look for very straight grained wood. Even kiln dried wood can be steam bent. You'll need to re-moisten it and it will never bend as well as air dried wood, but it's doable. In fact a chairmaker working in a neighboring shop swears by using KD lumber to steam bend. There are several clues to look for in selecting a good bending wood. As far as I can tell, all of our better furniture woods bend fairly well. I have bent oak, hickory, ash, maple, cherry, walnut, Locust and osage. The general tendency seems to be that faster grown woods in these species are more elastic than slower grown. Of the slower grown examples some bend very well. In the ring porous woods I look for small pores and thin spring-wood rings relative to the late wood area in a growth ring. It also seems that the heavier the wood, the better it bends. Whether any of these characteristics actually effect flexibility I have no idea, but they seem to be characteristics that often show up in flexible wood. I work with almost exclusively southern-grown woods too. That's just bnecause I live in Ky. Woods grown further north may show other characteristics as clues to the woods flexibility. So read what you can, but mostly pay attention to clues in the wood and take notes. Your experience wil be a good teacher if you are a good student. Most woodworkers just don't pay enough attention to the details in a piece of wood to notice clues.
In sawing my own wood, I prefer to quarter saw everything, leaving the bark on. This allows me to resaw along the grain pretty easily. I will orient the grain in an individual part depending on how it goes in the chair. I prefer to orient grain with the medullary rays parallel to the grain of the adjoining piece. So slats are generally quartersawn (rays paralell to the legs) or an arm will be flat sawn (rays parallel to the leg again) This lessens stress in a joint. But for optimim strength in an individual part and best success rate for bending, keeping the growth rings flat on the bending form works best for most woods. This is for two reasons as i understand wood. One is that in most trees there is a twist (sometimes very slight) to the grain. this sometimes shows up as a spiral pattern in the bark of the tree and I avoid this as much as possible. But in some woods like maple and cherry this is nearly impossible to see in the wood. The growth rings, on the other hand are always very visible and sawing parts straight along the growth rings is fairly easy if you're using quarter sawn wood. So the grain will tend to bemore parallel to the part in that orientation.
The other reason the part is stronger if oriented with the growth rings flat to the bend is that the rays help hold the rings together. The rays are grain running from heart to bark, so they act sort of like plywood, making it slightly more difficult to split most straight-grain woods along the growth rings as opposed to along the medullary rays. For the same reason most wood is more stable parallel to the medullary rays. So you are less likely to get splintering up in a bend from a face sawn surface than you are a quarter sawn surface. Ash seems to be an exception to this, but it tends to bend so well anyway that you can bend it any way you want. I prefer a rift sawn blank when bending ash. This way I avoid ring separation as well as rays separating.
While these are things I keep in mind when selecting wood and preparing it for bending, wood is such a variable material that rules are only of limited use. They can also get in the way. Pay more attention to the wood than any writing, and don't worry about trying to make any conclusions. Conclusions aren't much use anyway. Just keep gathering data and paying attention and steam bending will be a fresh experience every time but a little better informed with each project. If it's not fun you probably can't blame the wood for that.
Brian
A common concern about post and rung chairs is how well the rungs joints will hold up. The fact that most people's experience of older chairs of this design is that of loose joints that are seemingly always needing re-glueing. The conclusion in response to this experience it that round joints like dowel joints and rung joints just can't work well. This is attributed in part to the fact that so much of the joint involves end grain and end grain is often said to not glue up well. But the fact that there are examples of this kind of chair that have held up for generations would suggest that there is a way to make this design successfully but that just isn't often done, particularly in factory made chairs. There are several factors that are critical in making these joints successful and unfortunately they are too often not taken seriously enough.
One crutial factor is moisture content. In many early chairs the legs were worked from green wood and the chair assembled before the leg completely dried. The rungs were dried before assembly. The theory was that the legs would shrink and the rungs would swell and the whole thing would "lock" together. Sometimes a notch would be carved into the rung tenon. The shrinking leg wood would actually deform and be molded by the shape of the notch during drying forming a great mechanical lock. The problem with many of these chairs is that the legs would be too green causing the dry rungs to swell so much that the wood at the surface of the rung and the mortice of the leg would compress permanently. When the whole joint dried later the compressed rung would be too small and become loose.
In R. Bruce Hoadley's book "understanding Wood", he describes some testing he did to show how these joints do fail. His experiments clarify the problem, but what is needed is an understanding of how it is that some chairs did actually work and remain tight for generations. John Alexander explains this pretty well in his book 'Make a Chair From a Tree" and I made hundreds of successful chairs using this method. The idea is to assemble the chair with the leg wood being ideally at about 15%-20% and the rung wood about 4-6%. This insures that the leg will shring plenty and the rung will swell, but the movement is not so great that the over-compresion described earlier is likely to cause failure. Using maple for legs and hickory for rungs helps this to work too as the maple compresses well without getting loose later and the hickory is hard enough to resist compression in the initial shrinkage as well as in use later. All oak can work well too or oak legs with hickory rungs. With this method, glue is often not needed and traditional makers in this style often don't bother using it. This makes for a beautifully efficient process.
One big limitation to the traditional process is that it does require the use of woods like oak, hickory and maple. Since I make my living at this and need to sell my chairs I need a process that works well with walnut and cherry wood as well. So I have adapted a version of this that seems to actually be stronger than the old traditional way. The problem is that it requires significantly more precision. The limitation in the old joint is that the joint is only as strong as the compression resistance of both the rung and the leg woods. But if a full strength glue bond is achieved in addition to the movement advantage of the old way, you get a joint that is as durable as any. This is no small challenge. Not only is the moisture content critical in all parts, but the precision of the joints becomes more critical as well. In order to get a glue bond that is full strength, there can be very little oversizing of the tenon. I think this tolerance is about +/- .003. I shoot for mortices and tenons of the same size with a tolerance of +/- .002. If the tenon is too tight you risk not only splitting the leg, but also shearing off the glue. The surfaces of both mortice and tenon also need to be very clean, not torn from a dull drill bit or lathe tool. Gluing to torn fibers doesn't make a strong bond.
Getting the glue to go into a hole that allows no space for glue is a trick too. This where hide glue comes in. I use hot hide glue and apply a very thin "sizing" coat to both tenon and mortice before assembly. This is allowed to dry completely. This dried coat soaks completely into the wood and does not change the dimension measurably. At least when I measure before application and after drying the sizing coat, I cannot read a change in dimension of as much as .001"on a dial caliper. At assembly another thicker coat of hot hide glue is applied to both parts. This coat re-activates the surface of the sizing and provides a lubricating effect during assembly. Since the sizing is dry on the underside and already fully integrated into the wood fibers, it cannot be sheared off during assembly even in a tight fitting joint. The sizing coat also solves the problem of glueing end grain. it seals the pores and creates a "solid" surface that the glue from the tenon can bond to. I have cut open many gule joints like this and found that the bond is inseparable all the way around the joint. I have tried to separate samples by driving a chisel right down the glue line and have never succeded at getting a separation. I have even bored out the tenon with an undersized bit leaving just a 1/16 rim of tenon wood, then filled the hole with water and boiled it using a soldering iron. I never have been able to get it to fail.
So with joints glued this way, with proper fits and good moisture content control, post-and-rung chairs can be made to be quite durable. The key is to develope the skills and patience needed to meet the challenge.
Brian
Mr Boggs,
Greetings from England.
I've just joined the network and found your no-glue chair discussion fascinating, because I'm in the midst of making 6 such (ladderback) chairs from local green oak.
This greenwood "adventure" follows a course with Mike Abbott in Herefordshire, who you may know of. He too makes post and rung chairs using the no-glue method of controlled differential shrinkage and grain alignment. With him, my wife and I made 2 ash ladderbacks seated with Wych elm bark, as a prelude to making 6 in oak for our dining table, a classic English oak arts and crafts monster.
At the moment I have a small list of problems with my oak chair making that I can't seem to find answers to in the literature or on the Web. I was hoping you might help.
I'll ask my questions 2 at a time, if I may:
Q1
Mike Abbott routinely steams the front chair legs as well as the back (for 2 hours with 40mm diameter legs), although the front legs are not bent. Experience has taught him that steaming decreases the chance of a rung splitting the front leg vertically, when the leg begins to dry around that rung.
The green rungs are turned at 17.6mm and dried to ovals that are 15.6 mm X 16mm. The mortises in the still-green-but-steamed chair legs are drilled at 16mm. The rungs have their 15.6mm width inserted at right angles to the length of the chair legs (ie horizontally).
Mike thinks the leg wood is (paradoxically) being dried out by the steam. As you know, the steaming causes sugars and other nice-smelling things to leach from the wood. Do you know if this causes rapid loss of moisture content; and if so, what is the degree or rate of loss?
A boatbuilder, via the Knots forum, said that his experience was that too much steaming would degrade oak's structural properties, via a breakdown of lignum and other constituents. Over-steaming, in his experience, causes the oak to become brittle and to crack easily. So I presume it is not a good idea to keep steaming until the wood stops oozing the sugars et al?
Incidentally, I steamed exactly 3lbs of green oak rungs for 30 minutes (whilst steaming back slats to bend) and, an hour after leaving the steamer, the rungs weighed exactly 2lbs 13.5 ozs. a weight loss of about 6%.
I haven't figured out what this weight loss means in terms of moisture reduction in the wood.
The main reason I want to know about "steam drying" is that it's taking a long while to air dry the oak rungs and I'm wary of accelerating their drying via a kiln, as English oak tends to split very easily in dry heat. If I could, I would like to steam dry to accelrate the drying process without splits occuring - but not to the point of destroying the oak's integrity.
Any advice or arcane knowledge on all this?
Q2
All my previous woodworking has been of the fine cabinet making kind - nice smooth surfaces and oil/wax finishes. I notice that pictures of your chairs in FWW look more like fine furniture than rustic stuff. I prefer the fine finish myself.
Do you scrape, sand and otherwise do all the things that cabinet makers do to finish? Or are you just very good with that spokeshave? :-)
A related question: is it safe to oil the rung tennons before inserting them into the leg mortises or will this lead to joint failure? My thought is that the shrinkage of the mortise around the tennon exerts so much force that a bit of oil in there will not affect strength. In other work, I've found that oiling furniture parts before assembly makes life easier (as long as you protect glue surfaces). I imagined that oil in the glue-less joints of green wood chairs might help them go together and add some internal protection to the wood......?
On the other hand, a weak joint could not, later, be succesfully glued, I suppose.
Your advice will be appreciated on these issues.
David Trusty
Galgate, Lancaster, UK
Next week - questions on configuring the bevels on a drawknife and alternatives to bark seating strips, if you're willin'. :-)
Apologies for rambling on and on.
Edited 3/19/2006 3:02 pm ET by Lataxe
David,
First to your question on steam drying and such lore. ...
I have heard of this idea before and I have also played with the idea myself. But if you plan to be a chairmaker very long I think it is an energy-intensive method of buying time at best. You're better off just learning how to dry the wood naturally and slowly. As far as avoiding the splits in legs during assembly by steaming before hand, I know of one other chairmaker here that does that. The idea he described was the the steam softened the wood to allow the oversized bulbous tenon to mold leg wood around the mortice to form a locking joint. As far as the effect of steam on drying, the weight loss you measured is pretty good indication that water left the wood in the steamer. But that will be an expensive way to dry wood and will only get the drying process started. Another way to minimize cracking during the drying process is to soak the wood in water for a few weeks before starting the drying process. I am not sure why this works. It sounds bass ackwards, but for some reason wood seems to dry faster after soaking and with less degrade. Either way is not what you will want to do for long. They are both a lot of hassle.
Over the years I have gotten away from actual greenwood assembly for a number of reasons. One is that is that it requires the use of woods that work for the process like oak, hickory, ash and maple. More popular woods here like cherry and walnut don't make very good greenwood chairs. So to use these woods I had to use another method to get the strenght in the joinery I was used to with traditional greenwood. Besides the walnut was very easy to crack with the oversized rungs, much like your oak does. What I do now is assemble chairs with the legs between 8-12 percent MC and rungs between 4-6 percent. Instead of oversizing the rungs I turn the rungs to a true fit so I can insert the rungs by pushing them in with my hand. They barely go in and sound like opening a wine bottle opening when pulled out. This precise fitting eliminates any cracking of the leg . The swelling of the rung will make the joint as tight as any greenwood joint. After ten years all you have in a greenwood joint is a perfect fit. That super tight fit relaxes eventually, so making joints tight enough to split legs isn't making better furniture. I use hide glue support the joint as well. This makes a much stronger joint in the long run. You can get a perfect fit as well as the bond of a good glue joint.
On the idea of sanding, I have four employees and they do most of the shaving and sanding. If a customer requests a shaved finish we oblige. I dont' think you could see the difference in the photography, our shaving work is pretty smooth, but it is easy enough to feel. I have also made a few with more rustic finishes as requested by the customer. It is quite possible to make the chairs extremely smooth with shaves, but then you have to point out that they are shaved because the public won't notice. I do leave some coarser hand work on end grain areas where heavy cuts come out clean. Customers do enjoy that.
I have gone from asembling chairs with no finish to applying all the finish including the final wax coat to all parts before even drilling holes. Now we are assembling dry frames. It helps somewhat to prevent glue staining to oil before hand, but you just have to be very careful to keep the tenons clean and dry. If you are using linseed oil to finish with wait until after assembly. Linseed seems to creep on to the tenons no matter how careful you are. If yoiu are not going to sand after assembly and you are wanting to use glue, I would oil before assembly at least one coat to prevent glue staining. Yoiu'll just want to find an oil finish that doesn't creep too much.
If you want a lot more than this, you might want to consider our apprenticeship program (http://www.brianboggschairs.com/apprent.htm). Otherwise the one question at a time might work too. I wish you the best of luck in your charimaking.
Brian
Brian,
Thanks for the comprehensive and helpful reply. I have to admit that all my instincts tell me too that glue in the chair joints can't hurt.
Those rungs that I partially "steam dried" have not shrunk to their final dimensions any faster than the rest of the rungs that are drying naturally. That process, as you suggest, seems to have little to recommend it.
Having been perusing back copies of Fine woodworking, as one does, I came across your "Make a Stool" article of a year or three back. In this you dry your rungs to 4-6% MC (as you mention in your post) using a light bulb-powered oven. I think this is worth trying on my oak, albeit with just a few experimental rungs at first, to see how the cracking (if any) goes.
As to slaves for sanding and polishing, I only wish. I did suggest something of the sort to the ladywife (ie that she be my finsihing slave) but she merely sneered and went out to buy some more shoes!
Meanwhile, I wonder if I can pester you some more? :-)
I would like to use bark for the seats but the only suitable stuff here is Wych or Cornish elm bark, at £45 - £50 per seat (ie $85). One alternative might be oak strips rived from the sapwood of the logs I'm using for the chairs. A friend makes oak swills (woven baskets) out of such strips (taws, as they are called in Cumbria) and is a dab hand at riving 1mm or less thick ones.
My question is, would such strips be usable to seat chairs? I hear that "oak strips" are used in the USA. As the strips that my swill-making friend rives tend to be no longer than 6 feet (and are usually shorter) how would one best join them end to end I wonder...........?
Thanks in anticipation.
David.
David,
With this kind of material decision I would look to local traditions for answers. If a material is good for seats it would most likely have been used at some point in your local history. But even if a particular material has been used for seats, experience will tell you that all such materials vary greatly in their quality. Oak splints are a good example. I have used splints that are quite leather-like and have seen others that are very brittle from the same species. Exactly where the material grows will affect its quality. A seller of such material is not going to pay as much attention to these qualities. They measure yardage only. I would stick to the traditional stuff. Bull rush is good seat material. Although slow to weave it makes a handsome seat and it is at least inexpensive if you gather your own. It is also very sustainable as a material goes. Importing materials is a good thing to avoid.
Brian
Brian,
Are the plans for your shaving horse available somewhere?
Thanks,
Bill
Bill,
The plans were published in, I believe, the December '99 issue of Fine Woodworking and should be available online. The online index should have that so you can verify this information. Those plans are for my current shaving horse. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks will also have those plans available starting production early next year, so they will be available through them.
Brian
I'm a relative newcomer to woodworking. One problem that I've been struggling with is how to read grain direction to avoid tearout when handplaning. As soon as I think I get it figured out, a board will prove me wrong. There seems to be a dearth of literature on this topic. Hoadley's book, "Understanding wood" devotes only a couple paragraphs to this particular issue. Any tips on reading grain direction? What do you look for?
Houston,
You will always have trouble in some instances reading the grain direction. I was just planing some cherry yesterday and finding it difficult to see which way the grain went on the radial face of the band sawn surface. With fine grained woods like cherry or maple it's just tough to see. It sometimes takes a cut to prove it out. On woods that have more visible pores like walnut, oak, ash and hickory it is a lot easier. In fact you can pretty much get it right every time if you look at the right things closely enough. If you 've read much at all you already know that figure does not indicate grain direction. It is the pores in the wood that will tell you what you need to know. Not having the capability to put a drawing here will challenge my ability to explain what I look at. First of all what I look at is determined by the orientation of the surface I'm judging to the growth rings. A surface parallel to the growth rings is called the the tangiental face or the flat sawn face. This is pretty easy to read on narrower boards because the adjacent face has clear lines created by the growth rings that are good indicators of grain direction. You can also go by the cathedral pattern on the face. If the growth rings on the side you're working are concave, then the grain rises toward the points of the cathedrals. The opposite is true for a surface with convex growth ring pattern. On a wider board of flat sawn wood the wood near the edges is more radialy oriented and often one side of a board will have grain going in the opposite direction of the other side. A surface perpendicular to the growth rings is the radial face and is much more difficult to see grain direction on. With cherry and maple I generally make a guess as best I can and take a light pass on the joiner for a test. Rift sawn wood is nearly impossible to know the grain direction on finer woods. You can read where the growth rings are going, but the medullary rays are hard to see.
On coarser woods where you can see the pores it is much easier. I just look at the surface I am planing or shaving and notice how the pores exit the wood. Unless the grain is dead parallel to the surface one end of the pore as it peeks through the surface will be both wider and deeper than the other. Once you get used to this you will see grain direction at a glance. It gives an overall appearance that does not require close inspection to get a sense of once you are in the habit. I think of the larger end as the head, the pore thinning out to a tail. Think of cutting a straw at a low angle. You want to plane toward the tails. Just like you pet your dog, go head to tail.
In general you just want to pay very close attention to your wood all the time for all kinds of reasons. If you keep your tools tuned up, grain direction is less of an issue, but for coarse work, you do need to know. The reason it is so hard to see grain direction and that it is not the same usually on both sides of a wide board is that in most trees, the grain spirals somewhat as it goes up the tree. So as you slice up a tree you cut through this spiral so the grain goes up on one side of the board and down on the other. While I am reluctant to lay out rules for trees, in my observation, I have noticed that all the trees I have worked with spiral the same way, even though the severity of the spiral varies. They always go up the tree on the right side. That means that if you know which side is outside on any board, keep the bark side toward the fence when joining the board, or bark side to the right when hand planing flat or rift sawn wood. In wood you have purchased it is not always clear which side this is, but on wide boards it is obvious, keep your bark side on the right side of the plane and you should be in good shape. If you're planing quarter sawn wood, the same is true. If you know which side is toward the outside of the tree (you can usually tell by the curve of the growth rings), then keep the outside of the tree to the right as you plane.
Let me know if this works for you.
Brian
Hi there Brian,
I have a question about the mortise and tenon joints on your Sculpted Fan-back Rocking Chairs. How do you go about fitting the tenon shoulders of your rails to round leg members? I see this in Danish Modern chairs as well but realize they do it with milling machine set ups and was wondering how to it in a small shop. I was also wondering if you use live or floating tenons in your chairs?
Thanks for your time and your inspiring work!
Ian
PS Have a Happy New Year!
Edited 1/1/2006 12:02 am ET by IanVincentGodfrey
Ian,
Ian,
The sculpted fan-back is not a chair I expect to be teaching anyone else to make. Ever. It is the reslut of about 6 years of trying to design the best joint for chairs and building a chair that took best advantage of that joinery. It requires some expensive and custom tooling and is very difficult to do still. I liked the idea of a sculpted chair, but wanted the joinery to be finished before assembly with no shaping and carving on the assembled frame. So the joint line needed to be interesting and natural looking, following the shape of the parts. To do this the whole perimerter of the joint is housed, but just below the surface. The central shoulder is also just below the surface, so it is not at the same elevation as the two outer shoulders. To get all three shoulders to seat requires very precise calibration of three different router systems to a tolerance of .002". I cut the mortice part on the over-arm router using a template I had made at a local shop that had a CNC milling machine that could do it. I also had a custom pin made that is long enough and tight enough in the table to prevent any play. The tenon parts are cut using a morticing set-up shown in the same article you saw the joint in (Poplular Woodworking / Feb '05). I use a plate made by quick-tenon, a company that I think is not producing the plates anymore. The plate is essentially an adjustable hole that guides a bushing in the bottom of the plunge router. I had a custom version of this same plate made that is exactly the same size outside, but with a larger hole so I could cut the perimeter of the part which is actually a tenon in itself, then switch plates to cut the other two tenons. The shoulders are a result of setting the turret stops just right. But the joint needs to be cut dead on in all ways, depth of shoulders, tenon thickness, spacing, and length. The plates need to be indexed to move up, down as well as left to right, all to the .002" tolerance. The mortices are cut into the legs at an odd compound angle referenced to the bend. Some of the tenons are also cut to a coupound angle on the end of a steam bent part. I don't think much of this is doable on readily available equipment. But the system I use for all my tenon cutting works fine for this. This is also pictured in the same article. I have thought briefly about making this available, but it would be an expensive system. The market would be too limited.
So this may be more than you asked for, but in short, I don't "fit" the shoulders, they are cut precisely as part of a fairly complex system of set-ups. I don't recommend going there. It's a long expensive learning experience so that pay-out and pay day are a great distance apart.
Brian
Ian,
Looking back over you question from last week, I realized I failed to respond to the question about the floating tenons. I have only once used floating tenons. In the right situation they are a good solution. But I try to design a light and flexible chair. This means that too often the parts are too thin to recieve a floating tenon. Tenons on my chairs are nearly as large as the part it is on. The morticed parts are generally much larger.
While in theory the floating tenon is a very good solution to some joinery challenges, there is one problem you need to watch out for. Very often, the router or boring machine will cut a mortice in end grain that is larger than that of the coresponding joint in the side grain. This is a machining problem, not a design problem, but it is a common one, and one you'll need to solve before making successful floating tenon joints.
Good luck with it.
Hi Brian,Thanks very much for both responses. About your joinery on the Rocker, I had only seen pictures of it on your website and had not read the article you mentioned but I will be sure to look for it. It is truly a beautiful joint. About floating tenons, the solution I was shown for over coming the discrepancy in fit between the end and long grain is to file the floating tenon to fit each mortise creating a very slight step in it. That way you still get a suction fit on both ends. Thanks for the advice.Anyways I hear you are coming to the Inside Passage this summer to teach a course. That is where I am studying now so I will see you then. I'm very much looking forward to meeting you.All the best and thanks for taking to the time to address both of my questions.Ian Godfrey
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