It's still chairmaking

making parts instead of chairs

[If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ve heard me talk about my Craft Genealogy project - a book about the people who taught me “green” woodworking. Last week I did some more research and photography for that project and can now pick up my draft and start to fill in some blanks. I’ll never get the whole story, but there’s enough there to get a sense of these people and their stories. Chairmaking figures prominently in the overall story and this post features some notes left by Daniel O’Hagan and a photo of one of his chairs. We’ll see more of these as that project moves along.]

I wrote two posts last month about some work I did with Elia Bizzarri when he stopped here on his travels. Our focus was his research and experimentation regarding the chairmaking of Samuel Wing of Sandwich, Massachusetts (1774-1854). We worked on a chair together, but shortly after he left I put together a small bowback chair using some of his “new” old techniques and some more standard modern-day methods. I didn’t make Elia’s chair, nor Samuel Wing’s - but took bits and pieces from both of those as well as some of what I know from working with Curtis Buchanan and Pete Galbert. And one piece from notes left by Daniel O’Hagan. 

PF bowback chair, June 2024

The seat shape was taken from Elia’s Wing-studies. Small, shallow. Not much shaping, works up quickly. He had developed sightlines for boring the leg and bow mortises - because he teaches this chair from time to time, he decided that he needed sight lines rather than telling students to just develop the muscle memory to bore angles by eye. Hard to train yourself to that degree in a one-week class. 

I had some baluster legs I had turned for another chair, but shifted them to this one because I wanted to get right to work assembling once I shaped the seat. Likewise, I had a bow already - based on Daniel O’Hagan’s notes. He saw a chair in Pennsylvania and recorded details of it on a pocket-sized note-pad. Then later transferred those details to his index card file system. 

Daniel O’Hagan’s undated note on a bowback Windsor chair