Boring Chair posts: Lots of ways to get there

my boring setup for an Alexander-style chair

[First off - thanks to all of you who support my work here, I do appreciate it. I’m putting most of my writing efforts into this blog now, knowing people have committed to supporting it. Today’s post relates to one from a month ago, about boring chair posts. The previous one is how I do it now - this one is about other methods Jennie Alexander and others used - methods I learned when I was new to chairmaking. I’m making this post available to all subscribers - free & paid - If you like it, please consider subscribing - $5.00 per month/$60 per year. There’s more where this came from…]

I bored and assembled one side section of a Jennie Alexander-style ladderback on Sunday, in preparation for the class this week at Pete Galbert’s. It’s the demo chair I’ll work on during the week. I bored it using the new system that developed out of teaching up here - and as I did so I thought of the various systems I’ve used, Jennie used and others too. If you want to skip the details - the punchline is: “they all work.” 

In April 2022 Charlie Ryland, then working with Galbert, assisted in the class and showed me his idea for a boring jig. I knew right away I’d adopt it and since then we’ve tweaked it this way & that. So now the way I bore this chair is unlike what JA described in the 3rd edition of her book - but that’s all right. The method outlined in the book works fine. As do all the earlier methods that she and others used. Lots of ways to get there. In an earlier post, I discussed the details of how I use this new setup https://peterfollansbeejoinerswork.substack.com/p/boring-the-ja-chair

Here’s JA in 1977 shooting stuff for the first edition of Make a Chair from a Tree - boring chair posts by leaning over a low bench, pressing down on the head of the brace & bit.

1978 JA boring a post

This is a very old method for boring chair parts - I bored my first couple of chairs on a drill press, then switched to this method and used it for several years. The adaptation in the JA photo is the JA-designed rig for fastening the posts to the bench. She had a period where she was making wooden screws and nuts like mad, using them in many configurations. There’s a diagram in the 1st edition showing this yoke system. 

But in a October 1977 letter to her editor John Kelsey, Jennie recorded where & when she got the idea to switch to the 3-peg & wedge system of fixing the posts to a low bench:

“Just spent 3 days from tree to chair being subjected to hundreds of photos. The tops of my shoulders ache under where my epaulettes would be if they were where they should be. John Robert Vincent said why not use 3 pegs & a wedge on the low workbench - it’s simpler than screws or clamps. It really is.

The pegs work well if square & tapered to fit the holes in the bench and long enough to be easily driven up and out from the bottom of the bench. Boring downward is no problem and you mortise in the direction of the wedge.”

Vincent wrote his master’s thesis on Ozark woodworkers, including many chairmakers. [John Robert Vincent, “A Study of Ozark Woodworking Industries” (master’s thesis, University of Missouri at Columbia, 1962)] - I have not seen an incoming letter to JA from Vincent, but this note Alexander wrote is very clear and it should have spelled the end of the wooden-screw-gizmos - but they made it into the book. Where I fell for them in the late 1970s. But right there beside them is Vincent’s suggestion:

the simplest

I used this arrangement a lot, most recently a couple of years before I built my shop - boring parts for a firewood carrier.

But back to chairs - not long after that JA was completely absorbed in the 18th-century French work by Hulot about turners and of course, chairmakers. Here’s a low bench from that work, complete with pegs and wedges and chair posts. (more detail here https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/05/16/more-translated-text-from-hulot-on-the-roman-workbench/ ]

JA kept her wooden screws around for one thing or another, but shifted the low bench to this 3-peg & wedge arrangement. Not just for boring the posts - but for slat mortising too. Some other sources JA studied in the early years were the Appalachian chairmakers, like Lon Reid seen in the 1972 edition of the Foxfire book and Chester Cornett. Clearly Reid used the pegs-and-wedges setup - here copied out of JA’s copy of that Foxfire book:

JA read about Chester in Michael Owen Jones’ The Handmade Object and Its Maker and later corresponded with Jones. She got to see many photos of Chester and his work, but never met the man. I don’t have a photo of Chester boring at the low bench - but he is seen in Jones’ follow-up book (Craftsmen of the Cumberlands) using the 3-pegs, etc at a low bench. Slat mortising and preparing to bore the back posts. 

Chester Cornett from Jones’ Craftsmen of the Cumberlands

Along with the books on those mountain chairmakers, JA studied the British works that tried to capture these old crafts before they vanished. Jack Goodchild was Windsor chairmaker - photographs of him at work just after the war were widely published. And there he is, boring by leaning on the head of the brace - his chair parts fixed to a low bench. 

Jack Goodchild, High Wycombe 1948

But she was keen to work on horizontal boring - with a bit extender to help align things properly. Many of JA’s adaptations and improvements came about through the teaching she did with Drew Langsner at Country Workshops. In the first class there in 1979 students did some of the boring horizontally - fixing the (stool in this case) post to part of the barn itself. 

horizontal boring at Country Workshops, 1979 photo Drew Langsner

Eventually JA began holding the chair posts in what she called “Brian blocks” - a pair of V-blocks, pinched in a vise that held the post horizontally. The idea came to JA through Brian Boggs, who years later said he used those blocks once in a pinch - but they became the standard for JA and Drew. A bit extender with a level attached help sight the boring. Angles were determined with a seat plan with small levels attached to it. It worked fine, Drew taught hundreds and hundreds of students that way. Here’s Jennie boring a stool post for Fine Woodworking - electric drill & all!

Alexander boring horizontally

I won’t even bother to talk about the drill press. Go see Tim Manney’s article in FWW about chairmaking for that. He knows what he’s doing, me talking about drill presses would be a joke. I gave mine away in 1985.