American Seat Woods
Nearly any wood will work for a Windsor chair seat. It depends on how much work you are willing to do and how heavy a chair you want to move every time you finish dinner. I refuse to use anything but the highest quality and most easily worked materials available. In my experience, this is even more important for the beginner; far better to start with the very best, for then you’ll know whether to blame the wood or another factor.
Easily carved woods like white pine are many times easier to carve than walnut. Walnut is many times easier to carve than elm. Woods with even density throughout (nearly all the woods in this list) are much easier to carve than woods that grow with hard and soft annual layers (yellow pine, ash, etc.). Power tools such as grinders and routers probably negate these differences, but I don’t care to find out. The quiet of my workshop is sacred.
Eastern White Pine
Eastern white pine is what almost all of my traditional chairs are made of. It’s a great carving wood and it’s readily available, though it does have problems with pitch and wind-shake.
Pros: –very easy to carve
–light
–common
–very stable
read more…
Turning Chess Pieces
Seth and his puppy Kodi
With the holidays, a new girlfriend and huge quantities of tool orders, I have been delinquent in my blog posts lately. This year saw a huge growth in my business, with Seth Elliott starting to help me make tools, refurbish drawknives and sell rivings. I wasn’t looking to hire anyone, but Seth does such good work and is so easy to be around that he just fit right in. He has also started helping procure delicious lunches for my classes, which has made the classes a much more congenial experience. Thanks Seth!
Turning Chess Pieces
This short video is from 1963 in Zsambek, Hungary in a small production shop making chess pieces. They are turning on a power lathe using what looks like a screw chuck. read more…
Chair stories: The flaky-bark oak
My student Christophe from Australia commissioned three Pete’s Stools with white oak legs and butternut seats. Here’s the story about his chairs:
I like the log yard when it is quiet, and the three-man crew is waiting for trucks to arrive. At those times, Junior might come down from the knuckleboom truck to talk. He’s a tall man with white bushy hair, blue jeans and a John Deere ball cap. Mostly he talks about wood — how it grows, how it’s cut, and how it’s sold. read more…
Milk Paint Viscosity Measure/Studio Tour
The viscosity of milk paint directly affects the ease with which the paint can be applied and the smoothness of the painted surface. True milk paint only comes in powered form and must be mixed with water before use (“pre-mixed” milk paints are really acrylic paints). Thick paint doesn’t flow off the brush easily and the resulting surface is rougher. Extremely thin paint leaves bubbles on the surface and is runny. Paint manufacturers often recommend a mixture of paint that is thicker than what I like.
For my milk paint DVD, I discovered you can make a viscosity measuring cup from a pepsi bottle. Drill a 5/32 hole in the lid of the bottle, remove any drilling burrs from the hole and cut the bottom of the bottle off. You now have a rough equivalent of a #4 Ford viscosity cup. It looks like this:
read more…
Turner’s Gate/Class Cancellations
I prefer to size stretcher tenons with a Turner’s Gate (Sorby calls it a Sizing Tool). It’s major advantage over dowel plates and tenon cutters is that the tenon shoulder can be easily removed using a skew, plus the tenons are always in line with each other.
A turner’s gate fits over a parting tool or bedan and can be adjusted through trial and error to cut whatever size tenon is required. Or if you want to get fancy, Tim Manney has come up with a way to add a micro adjust. If the tenon can be twisted 1/3 to 1/2 the way into the mortice without hurting your arm, the tenon is a good fit. You only drive the tenon in once, since you’ll never get it back out without breaking the stretcher.
Ring turning video
I had forgotten about this video till one of my students mentioned a similar idea in my class last week. This is a pretty cool greenwood cottage industry and an amusing video:
32″ Bandsaw for Sale
I have traded for a newer bandsaw and am selling my old one. It’s a Crescent 32″ Bandsaw built in 1919, babbit bearings, wooden table (old, but probably not original), new carter roller guides, new rip fence. The motor mounts on the floor/wall so you can easily put whatever motor you want on it. I will sell the 5hp single-phase motor that I’ve been using with the saw if you want it. The bandsaw is currently disassembled and will fit easily in a small pickup truck. It’s a really pretty machine – everyone who walks into the shop wants to know about it. read more…
Finding green wood
Green wood is everywhere. In fact, dry wood doesn’t usually exist in nature: trees are veritable pipes full of water and once they die the rotting process is fed by water. Yet finding green wood can be a daunting task for many modern woodworkers. Where to look?
Forest-Grown Oak
What kind of wood do you need? Different project require different kinds of wood. Spoons, bowls, and other food related projects are best made from tight-grained species that won’t absorb much food. They can often be made from branches and other small piece of wood that would otherwise go to waste. Chairs and riven chests need species that are strong and rive predictably: ring-porous hardwoods like oak and ash. Because the parts need to be long and straight, the logs need to be big and of the highest quality. read more…
Curtis’s Cradle
In June, Curtis became a grandfather. Since I’ve known him, he has wanted to build a version of one of the cradles in Santore’s book. He finally got the chance and what a beauty it is:
Milk Paint DVD
My Popular Woodworking Milk Paint DVD has just come out. While many paints hide the wood’s subtle surface quality or create a plastic looking finish, milk paint is an incredibly thin, natural-looking paint that allows every pore of the wood and every tool mark to shine.
The heart of this video is what I learned from Curtis Buchanan when I apprenticed with him: how to paint a black-over-red paint job (or other multi-colored paint surface). But I also did a lot of research for this video, learning how to make a viscosity measuring cup from a Pepsi bottle, how to make milk paint from scratch, trying different brands of paint and different painting techniques. I also explain how to identify fake milk paint, how to mix the paint, different brushing techniques, how to burnish the paint and apply a protective top coat, among other things.