Boring setup for JA chairs

“It used to be like that, now it goes like this” Bob Dylan, May 17, 1966

Dylan re-arranged “I don’t believe you (she acts like we never have met)” for his electric band and had to tell the audience that now it goes like this...and that’s how I feel about the way I bore the mortises for a Jennie Alexander chair. I learned to make them with JA and Drew Langsner and we settled on a method that worked well - using V-blocks in a vise and a level taped to a bit extender to guide the boring. It’s all outlined in JA’s video Make a Chair from a Tree, done in 1999 and in the recent 3rd edition of the book of the same name (shortened to MACFAT3). Minor tweaks here & there to the system over the years, but generally it stayed the same for a long time. (Here’s the “it used to go like that” part…)

After the 3rd edition came out, I got to teach the chair at Pete Galbert’s shop in New Hampshire. When I first got there, I told Pete and his then-assistant Charlie Ryland that once they saw this method, they’d tinker with it. And so they did. Charlie helped me teaching it there 3 times and he came up with some ways to simplify boring the angles. I adopted what he was doing right off the bat, then together we added small changes. So here’s how I do it now. 

I use this boring jig - it’s one of JA’s V-blocks, glued & screwed to a flat base and parallel to it is a ledger strip - the height of which is the same as the middle of the V - minus half the diameter of the bit extender. You rest the bit extender on the ledger as you bore - and it falls so the point of the bit is hitting the chair post right smack in the middle of its diameter. No more level attached to the bit extender. (Now it goes like this…)

The JA chair is built by boring and assembling the sides first. I start with a front post.