Thoughts while chairmaking
I’ve still been only part-time in the shop lately - the reason being my wife is headed for hip surgery (her 2nd, so we know what we’re in for...), but for the past month or more, all the driving, errands, etc has fallen to me. Which is fine, but it cuts into shop time like mad. Yesterday I logged maybe 4 or 5 hours, but in 5 different sessions. Hard for any momentum that way.
Because I knew I was going to be interrupted a lot, I switched gears to chairmaking, instead of making chair parts. I dug out some chair parts made back in March, set up to chop the slat mortises, and from there carried on to assemble the chair. Got half of it done Wedmesday…
…then the final assembly Thursday. Slats today. This is where it all really began with me, I made my first chair from Jennie Alexander’s book when it came out in 1978. The whole process of making the JA chair got refined over the years, mostly through Jennie and Drew Langsner teaching it at Drew’s school Country Workshops.
Chopping the slat mortises is one place where things have changed since the beginning. In JA’s first edition she’s sitting on a low bench and using both mallet and hand pressure to chop (or dig) out the slat mortises. I had never chopped mortises before reading that book so did just what the book said. Much later, I learned about joinery and chopped hundreds and hundreds of mortises. That made me both better and worse for cutting those in the chair posts. Faster, easier. But more slap-dash. In joiner’s work that doesn’t much matter. The tenoned rail covers the mortise, so you only see the shoulders of the rail meeting the mortised piece. I got real fast at those mortises, knowing I could hide any sloppiness. That’s part of learning what you can get away with.
In the chair, there’s no place to hide - the slat has no shoulders. So neatness counts. Here’s a look while I was test-fitting a slat-tenon:
In addition to trying to be neat, there’s the reminder to not chop all the way through to the other side. So I’m trying to slow down from my joiner-mentality to chop these slat mortises. Once those are done, it’s spokeshave work to round off the posts and get them to their finished surface prior to boring the mortises for the rungs.
When I got to the first sub-assembly, I got to thinking about how we make JA’s chairs - assembling the sides first.
This order of work started at Country Workshops. It’s pretty much guaranteed that anyone making chairs this way is following what Alexander & Langsner taught all those years - whether they know it or not. Andy Glenn noted in his book Backwoods Chairmakers that none of the other chairmakers he met worked in the same order as JA & Drew. You might be interested in how it came about.
