Elia Bizzarri

A Fancy Chair

I got some photos back from my photographer of a reproduction chair I made for a collector in Kentucky, who owns the original of this chair. It is the only signed Windsor chair from KY known to exist, made near Lexington KY between about 1810 and 1830. The old chair...

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Spoon Bit Tricks

I got a bunch of questions about using spoon bits.  Here's the answers to a few of them. How do you get the spoon bit to start where you want it? My favorite answer is to adjust your expectations.  But there are some tips that will give you more...

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Dave Sawyer

"I was talking with Dave Sawyer last week and I asked him if you could go work with him.  He said 'yes.'" I was standing in Curtis Buchanan's garden, helping him pick vegetables. I had been apprenticing with Curtis for six years and he was worried that I was...

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Rare Treadle Lathes for Sale

My blacksmith friend Peter Ross called last week.  "I bought a couple lathes in an auction.  Could you help me move them this afternoon?" This can be a fearsome request, for Peter has a habit of buying machinist lathes weighing in the thousands of...

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German Rakemaker

Morgan and I got back from a west-coast vacation a couple weeks ago and I've been carving seats and gluing up chairs ever since.   I've got 18 undercarriages together and 22 to go.  I might switch to putting backs on for variety.  I've never had a...

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Choosing a Lathe

I've been turning a lot lately.  Five weeks ago I got an order for 40 chairs (28 loop backs and 12 Continuous Arm chairs)  for a Michigan hunting camp's dining hall. I've turned 250 legs, arm stumps and center stretchers on my 1800# pattermaker's lathe. Seth...

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Quaker John

This is a story for John and his family. It's also for Scott, who's Comb Back Arm Chair and Windsor Table were delivered last month. I wrote the story in the middle of January, when it happened: John Braxton died a couple weeks ago. A Quaker gunsmith, he machined...

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Growing a Loop Back Arm Chair

As most of you know, I'm at Curtis Buchanan's designing a Loop Back Arm chair. On the second day we had a visitor from NC, Reid Gamble who has been apprenticing with laddarback chairmaker Lyle Wheeler. First we bored for the bent stretcher. Curtis had to climb...

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