One of the chairs I have started working on is a copy of this seventeenth-century original, now in a private collection. (Thanks to Gavin Ashworth of NYC for the excellent photo) the chair is made from ash, with an oak board seat. I have started with the spindles, there are 24 of them, in four different lengths. I turned a bunch of them today, but fell just short – got to 23. The shortest ones, below the seat, are only 5 1/4″ long…these are the toughest for me to turn…it’s hard to get the proportions correct. So naturally, I did them late in the day and the last couple were clunkers, so I’ll do a few tomorrow & have them done.
I have several turned chairs underway, all in ash. Two of them are the three-legged kind I wrote about earlier. The others have four legs, of these one has a board seat like the three-leggeds. The others will have either rush or hickory bark seats.
One ash log I have around the shop came to me from Rob Tarule. It is somewhat small in diameter, but has grown quite slowly, making for excellent turning stock. Shown in the photos is a billet that I have split into stock for turning the seat rails, or “lists” as they were called in the seventeenth century.
ash billet split into turning blanks
The lathe I use is a pole lathe, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, it is a reciprocal lathe, worked by a foot treadle connected to a springy sapling mounted in the ceiling. In the view of mine, you can’t really see the cord coming down from the pole, but you can see the foot treadle undereath the lathe. The period engraving is Dutch, by Jan Van Vliet, and is from the mid-1630s.
In all, there are five chairs total, but three different models; two pairs, and one lonesome armchair. The total grouping entails upwards of a hundred-plus turned pieces. It will be enough of a challenge keeping all those parts sorted.
The stock for most of my work is riven, or split, from a freshly-cut, or “green” log, usually oak. To get wide panels used in joinery, a large diameter log is best – I like them at least 2 feet in diameter. Here, the split is begun by driving two steel wedges into the end of the log.
wedges splitting white oak
Once the split is open enough, a large wooden wedge is driven into the split – this really does much of the work of opening up the log.
driving a wooden wedge
After splitting the log in half, one half is again split into quarters, then eights & so on. These are then worked into boards in the shop. This radial splitting results in the width of the board being along the medullary rays of the log. This gives a board that is very stable, there is minimal shrinkage across the width of these boards.
eighths and sixteenths of white oak
Wider stuff is split the thinnest, and used for panels or parts for carved boxes. These splits are done with a froe & club. The froe is wedge-shaped, but not sharpened. Once it’s embedded in the stock the handle is twisted to advance the split.
I hold larger stock in a “brake” – in this case, a wooden tripod. The brake serves two functions; it traps the workpiece at a convenient height to work from, and also allows me to exert pressure this way or that to manipulate the split if need be. If the split is going astray, I flip the stock in the brake, and apply downward pressure to the heavier half. This will often bring the split back on track – when you have a good quality log, and things are going well.
using froe to split panel stock
So these are the first steps I take to get the stock into workable sections that I then take into the shop to work with a hatchet and various planes. I try to only work one quarter of a big log at a time. This leaves the remaining stock in as large a section as possible, which helps keep it from drying too fast.
PETER FOLLANSBEE: JOINER’S NOTES 