Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you'd left open

John Barrymore

Well the holidays are done and now the business of winter is in full swing.  But much solace can be be taken from these two beautiful happy faces. It is a period of change so Elsa and Anna were happy to have a joyous Christmas.

And now to chairs. I love dividers. There I said it.  These two beauts are from Starrett...a 6" and 12" respectively. One thing I love about chair making is you are always learning something new. Sometimes it's something big, sometimes its a small tweak to a method that makes a small but nonetheless significant difference. And know that when I say a significant difference I really mean it made something easier.

And so today I came up with a wizz-banger. I've always loathed leveling a rocker. A non rocker is easy. Wedges, trace the difference, cut, done.  But rockers have routed slots and therefore the slots have to be traced and chopped which is a major pain. The problem lies in the inconsistency of reaming. Some legs simply get reamed too much despite my best efforts.

SO today I thought why not check the length of the legs AFTER they are reamed and seated. So I checked them with my handy dandy 12" divider and viola they were off as you can see below. Now admittedly it's not much but try chopping out end grain hard maple and you'll fast appreciate this small difference.

I marked out the difference and I was a simple matter to turn to the new length. I turn the legs to length anyway so a different mark is no big deal.

The pics above and below show the small difference. The one above ( these are both back legs. Do not compare front to back...only front to front, back to back ) the shortest leg is the base line and the longer one, below, is turned shorter.  I have yet to install the rockers but this does make a difference in the final balancing of the chair.

Steamed Rockers

Beauty is whatever gives joy

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Maybe a little persnickety but the gaps when I let in rockers are driving me nuts.  I didn't photo the gap that was there but suffice to say it was unacceptable.  The problem was that that I must have mis-reamed the legs, leaving the routed slots for the rockers non co-planer.  What to do....

I thought long and hard and decided to steam the rockers and let them into their slots and see what happened. I usually deal with gaps with wedges but the gaps were pretty significant and honestly I wondered if steaming would work..

As you can see the results were spot on. Really good contact between the rocker and the routed slots.  All gaps eliminated and the rockers fit perfectly.

Anyway, I'm happy with the results.

New Blade

"God, how I ricochet between certainties and doubts"

Sylvia Plath

First off I have to apologize for my lack of substantive posts of late. Just life getting in the way I guess. Lots of personal stuff...waiting for sweet boredom. That'd be nice.

Anyway, enough about me. Above you see my three favorite spokeshaves. The one to the left is a Lee Valley round bottom, the middle one is a Lie-Nielsen, and the right one is a cherry one I built years ago before I even know how to build chairs. Its based on a kit from Daves Shaves as seen in American Woodworker years ago.  The Lie-Nielsen is a beautiful tool and I use it all the time. I'm not super crazy about the iron and will be replacing it come Christmas.
I love L-N tools, don't get me wrong and I have the credit card bills to prove it. I'm just not super crazy about the steel used for the irons. To me its just too hard. I like good old high carbon. Easy to sharpen and given it's small molecular structure it get wicked sharp. Or rather wicked shahhhp.

Which brings me to...my favorite spokeshave. Like I said I built this before I could build chairs. Back when I had a jobby job and all I did was build tools and jigs and such. Ahh the good old days. I don't build jigs or tools anymore. No time for that. Anyway, I built this spokeshave and despite all that is apparently wrong with it it works wonderfully.   The wear plate just ahead of the blade is maple and has a pretty significant groove worn in it from spindle work. If memory serves it had a brass plate but as the blade narrowed I switched it out for maple.

But all good things end. And the blade has been sharpened to the point of uselessness.  So I broke down and bought a new one from Ron Hock, making sure it was high carbon/. Above you can see the original (top) vs the new one. Quite a difference as you can see.

Here's a groove worn in the toe piece. While it opens the mouth, it hasn't proven to be a problem as it registers the spindle during the cut. 

New Old Digs

Time marches on. Don't waste it assuming you'll always have more.

Dr. Z

Some of you may have known but for the last 15 years I have been running dry kilns and a solid fuel low pressure boiler.  Above you can see the boiler house.

Here's one way to bend wood. This birch board fell out of a pack and was placed under the third pack.  As the wood dried it of course shrank and in doing so the board was bent.  Gives you an idea how much wood moves when it dries.

Above you can see the moisture meter I use to check the progress of the drying.  

Above you can see the control panel for one of the kilns.  Below is the write up of the schedule I run to dry birch and maple.  The air temp. is called the dry bulb and the humidity level is called the wet bulb.  These two values are relatively close initially and pull apart as the wood dries. Otherwise the wood would dry too quickly at first and the wood would split and develop stresses. 

Below a better look at the controller.  This one is a Partlow two pen ( top value is the dry bulb and the bottom one is the wet bulb) circle chart.  It tracks the progress of the wood as it dries.  While I never really wanted to run dry kilns per se, it has allowed me to learn how wood dries and how to use that  to my advantage when building chairs.

Student Chair

"Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too-that accident ruled every corner of the universe exceptt he chambers of the human heart."

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

Iv'e recently been building some rod back side chairs. I like the fact that the lower and upper turnings are basically the same...thin pieces that stylistically are very similar. But thin is the rub. Because they are very whippy and frankly and a pain in the ass to turn.  I guess part company with some builders in that I have no problem using a steady rest.  Guess I'm not a purist, or a Protestant.  One thing that does help a lot  is having two tool rests.  Before I would turn the left portion and then I'd have to disassemble the whole thing (tail stock, steady rest etc ) in order to move the rest to the left part.

After a big bench order I said enough of that and ordered an additional rest base.  I want to call it a banjo but I'm not sure that's right.  I like rodback spindles turned.  I built a big bench years ago and I shaved the spindles and I still don't like it. That's me.  I also like Tabasco and ketchup on my scrambled eggs.

Above you can see a rust eraser ( I think I got this from Lie-Nielsen ) and I use this thing all the time to buff up the tool rest.  I also use it to buff the part of the tool that contacts the rest.  I seem to get this weird black stuff that makes the tool sticky.

Below you can see Mark my latest student.  He picked a difficult chair, a Philly Comb Back Rocker and pulled it off swimmingly. He picked up the turning right off the bat and we had a great week.  One thing Mark allowed me to do was see how random I can sometimes be.  That is to say I know what the various processes and sizes need to be, but seeing the whole process thru a students eyes allowed me to see where confusion lies.  So after the class I spent better part of two days just organizing and labeling.  This has in turn helped me so thanks Mark.

And here's Mark and his chair. As I said he picked a very difficult chair and did a great job.