Ladderback chairs for sale

March 24, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized Follansbee, green woodworking, JA chair, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chair, Make a Chair From a Tree

I’ve been pretty immersed in JA chairs lately, having just finished teaching it for 6 days. And talking about chairs most every moment of those 6 days. Above is a chair I just assembled back here at home. I had made part of it before the class, intending to use it for all the demos – but eventually I bailed on it – there was enough going on, I didn’t need to be making a chair too. But I had it all bored and tenoned – so just assembled it, then made slats yesterday. Today I began weaving the hickory bark seat.

I have two chairs for sale – both made leading up to the class. The white oak one I took with me, to serve as an example (I also brought one of JA’s last chairs for the same purpose.) Both of these chairs use a mixed bag of wood – oak, hickory & ash. Linseed oil finish. Over time all the different woods mute to a nearly single color – it happens pretty quickly.

If anyone wants to claim one of these chairs, leave a comment or send an email. I can send a paypal invoice (plus their fee) or you can mail a check – the old-fashioned way. Questions? – fire away. Peterfollansbee7@gmail.com

Ladderback chair
White oak posts & slats, hickory rungs, hickory bark seat.
$1,400 includes shipping in US

white oak chair, hickory rungs. hickory bark seat

it looks like red oak in the photo, but it’s white oak – a little browner than this reddish cast. The rungs are a mish-mash of hickory sapwood (the white ones) and heartwood (the cinnamon-colored ones) Here’s the bark seat on this one – my favorite, the inside half of a split strip of bark.

overall height: 33 1/2″ overall width (across front posts): 17 1/4″ seat height: 17 1/2″ seat depth: 12″

Ladderback chair –
Ash posts, red oak slats, hickory rungs, hickory bark seat
$1,400 includes shipping in US

The bark on this chair is the top half of the split – a different look, still a great seat. the more you sit, the better it looks.

Another view of the ash chair – there will be more of these, I have an ash log I have to open up before it goes bad…one of my favorite woods.

Meanwhile I’m writing up some notes about the boring method we used in the class – developed by Charlie Ryland. Those will show up here soon. I’m updating the chair-making video too – so people who signed on for that will get a notice when that’s posted. Then today I decided to re-shoot the seat weaving video section of that project. I made a few small tweaks to how I do that – one simple one being standing upright instead of hunched over. A world of difference. Below is today’s seat, now set to dry and shrink before I weave in the last bits.

recent JA chair class

March 21, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized Fine Woodworking, Follansbee, green woodworking, JA chair, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chair, post & rung chair

I just recently came back from a 6-day class teaching the JA chair at Pete Galbert’s shop in Rollinsford, N.H. Assisted again by Charlie Ryland – it went swimmingly. And of course, the teacher learns as much as anyone, maybe more. So now I am itching to make some more chairs – but can’t get to them just yet.

Charlie (r) helping Brett assemble his chair.

There were 8 students whaling away at some red oak and a little bit of ash – splitting & shaving for a couple of days, then boring mortises & shaving tenons. All the chairs went together fine and were really well-done. The slats in particular went off without a hitch. Always a relief.

I told “iron man” Russ he was my favorite student because he used the brace & bit – most others used a cordless electric drill. (actually used the brace & bit too – but I still called Russ Iron Man.)

Pete’s shop is in a huge mill in Rollinsford, right on the NH/Maine border. Upstairs is a semi-new tenant, but an old friend – Dan Faia. We took an early lunch break to go see Dan’s new setup there – he’ll be in the mill full-time starting later this spring, offering small classes and even one-on-one instruction.

For decades, Dan has been teaching at Nort Bennet Street School in Boston – and running the furniture program there for a long time. Now he’s going to be closer to home and avoiding all that traffic that he endured so long. His shop in the mill is spectacular –

Everywhere you look is inspiration.

We spent a bit of time learning about this chair he’s been building as a Fine Woodworking video – they’re just about done shooting it I think. It looks like Dan just waves his hand and there’s a walnut chair…

So if you are looking for first-class instruction in fine furniture work, take a trip to Dan’s shop – here’s his website, etc

https://danielfaia.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/danfaiawoodcarver/

Finished the bark seat

March 4, 2023March 5, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, hickory bark seat, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chairs, Make a Chair From a Tree, seat weaving

Well, a day or two turned into a week later. But I finished the bark seat I started a week or so ago. I have always woven these in two sessions, letting the first weaving dry & shrink before finishing the seat by adding more strips. I have no idea how other people do them, this method is what I learned & it works for me.

First thing is to let the first round of weaving dry. As the strips dry, they shrink in width. So then you pack them tight again, filling in the spaces that opened up between them. Below is the seat in the middle of this process – I was moving the side-to-side strips toward the back of the seat. You can see the rear-most 6 rows have less space between them than those toward the front. Notice how much space is opened – enough for another full strip. So I finished knocking these toward the rear, then the warp (front to back strips) moved over to our left.

packing the strips tighter toward each other

I’ve always called this “packing” the weave. It might be a basket-making term, I’m not sure. The seat is dry at this point and those strips are tough. So you can’t just slide them, I knock them with a short block of white pine. Top & bottom. It’s tough going.

The result is below – so there’s a good bit of space to fill. One full strip & two partial strips on the side. One full in front.

Re-wet it. I don’t wet the whole seat again, just the areas where I’m going to work. Top & bottom.

And then weave in the new strips, tucking them into the weave below as well.

Then snip off the last ends under the seat.

Then I wove the next one.

This bark had been split in half when we took it off the tree, but it was still too thick. So I thinned it with a spokeshave after soaking it. A little frustrating – but every time I try to use a drawknife when the bark is in strips, I slice through it. So spokeshave it is. I didn’t shoot any photos of that process – but here’s one from a few years ago. It’s a slow process, the bark gums up the spokeshave a lot. Sharpening helps.

The bark has a very different look from the first seat here. This is the top half of the split bark – the other is the inner-inner bark, if that makes sense. This is the part directly below the outer bark. Very stripey. Here’s the seat when I finished weaving it, as it dries it won’t be so bright. We’ll see it again when I finish that seat – next week I hope.

Ash

February 27, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized ash, chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chair, shaving horse, windsor chair

I’ve said it before, ‘ll say it again. I have great friends. Rick gave me an ash log last week – 8’ long. Straight & clear. One of my favorite woods, especially for chairmaking. I’ve spent parts of the last few days beginning to work up the sections into chair parts. Splitting and shaving, then more splitting and shaving. Here’s some sections waiting their turn. They don’t look it here, but the ash bolts are more than 5 feet long. (on the left side of this photo)

I split and shaved and then bent three sets of rear posts for ladderback chairs (two in this photo). There’s more of that to come.

I also roughed out a set of turnings for a Windsor chair – 4 legs, 3 stretchers and 2 arm posts. Those I rived, shaved, then turned just in a general way to get them drying a bit. Then I picked through the remnants from those two jobs – to shave what’s left into ladderback rungs and Windsor spindles.

These were all essentially leftovers – after I split out the other chair parts – so today I shaved them into 3/4″ square-sections. Random lengths. The longer stuff will be Windsor spindles. Any that already taper along their length – ditto. The stuff between 14 1/2″- 18″ will mostly be ladderback rungs. Some will be spindles. The shortest stuff there is 11″ – each Windsor arm chair has 4 short spindles. There’s more than a year’s worth for me! And the top of that heap are roughed-out stretchers for one of Curtis Buchanan’s democratic side chairs. I have the seat & legs made – but needed the stretchers. Now – big problem is where to put all this (& more right behind it). Today I committed a hideous sin – stuck them in a temporary place. On the lathe bed.

There was very little waste – a few handfuls of firewood so far. These two pieces (below) I rejected because they grew so slowly – there must be more like them, but I haven’t run into it yet. The green arrows show how the most recent growth was slower still. Weak as a kitten – if that’s really an expression.

At the end of the afternoon, I went outside and found one more off-cut. Stupidly, I cut whatever I needed & left this piece at 14″ – 14 1/4″. If it was even 1/2″ longer it would have been perfect for ladderback rungs. As it is, some will make it, but half will be too short. But it split like a dream. I got 14 blanks from it – didn’t lose one. One piece of firewood.

The picture below shows me splitting off the pointed inner bit. But I got one blank from that pointed side – the wood was so straight it split perfectly. (that’s how I ended up with 14, even though only 13 were marked out.)

I’ll shave those next time. Some will make it for ladderbacks – others will be good for something.

My next ladderback is going to have ash posts & hickory rungs. These posts were made long ago – the rungs are in the kiln. But I have to sort out the shop & clean it up before I can make this chair…

Ash – what a wonderful wood, but using it always makes me sad – millions of the trees have been killed off by the invasive Emerald ash borer – (this tree I’m working was dying from other causes if I remember correctly what Rick told me) – I don’t keep on top of that situation – but just now I found some encouraging efforts about identifying resistant ash trees – let’s hope they make it – https://www.monitoringash.org/lingering-ash-surveys/

seat weaving, slow learning

February 21, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, hickory bark, JA ladderback, Jennie Alexander, Make a Chair From a Tree

Sometimes I’m a slow learner. When I made the chair-making video this winter, I wove the bark seat as I sat on a stool – pinned between 2 cameras-on-tripods; and up against the workbench. I flipped the chair up & down in my lap as I wove the top and bottom of the seat. It all worked – but today I did another seat, mostly without a camera and it went swimmingly.

I set a board so it hung off the front of the bench – and sat the chair on that. This time I wove the seat before putting the slats in – that makes winding the first strips (the warp) easier because I didn’t have to fish them under the bottom slat. Also easier to flip the chair around without the slats. I’m more comfortable working while standing for the most part, so this was an improvement in that regard as well.

pulling the long strips through the warp

In the “I thought you were supposed to be good at this department” I had to twice pull some weaving out because I messed up the pattern. In both cases I didn’t see it until I went to weave the next row.

A butterknife helps fish the weaver through the warp when things get tight. Don’t use one from the kitchen, get one from a yard sale or somewhere like that. Your family will be glad you did.

This seat, done for now, took 2 strips of bark, each over 30 feet long. There’s one joint under the seat. When the strips dry in a day or two, all these strips will shrink in width. I’ll then pack them tighter again and weave in some filler strips to finish the seat. I put one of these filler strips in already, on our left here. There will be one at the front, and one or more on the right side. Then I’ll make the slats.

A few of these chairs in the works. Maybe even an extra video segment. We’ll see. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jachairpf

Chairmaking Video Trailer

February 4, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chairs, post & rung chairs

I decided to stay warm today in the house, rather than trying to get the shop warm. So I took this chance to go back to video-editing and made an actual trailer for my chairmaking video that shows some of the woodworking. (I had done two other excerpts – one 2 minute intro and another long one about Jennie Alexander and chairs.)

This one’s about 9 1/2 minutes long and shows some of the steps involved. The entire video is 8 1/2 hours long and shows you most everything I could think of about making this chair. It costs $75 and you can access it at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jachairpf

My Next Chair

January 29, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, Jennie Alexander, turning, windsor chair

I was going to call this one “twas in another lifetime…” just in case MR is still out there reading along. Thirty years ago I made this comb back Windsor chair. I got the details from Curtis Buchanan, I’m pretty sure it’s Dave Sawyer’s design.

I loved it then, I like it still. But a few things bother me about it. One – it survived (barely) some rowdiness that was a.) not mine and b.) part of a different phase of my life, best left in the past. I fixed it, but the fix was a bit hasty. The other points are the usual nonsense that we all engage in – pointing out the flaws of our work. Legs are too bulky and I wanted them kicked out more. But it’s still very comfortable – so one of those chairs that mocks me. I always wished I would made a new one. Well, the time has come, the time is now. I got the undercarriage assembled a couple of days ago. Ash legs, stretchers in maple & ash. White pine seat.

I bent and carved a couple of crests – doesn’t hurt to have an extra around.

I tried to take my time with the turnings. This was air-dried ash. Slow going but I like turning ash – it’s a lovely wood.

Here’s Curtis’ arm post in a continuous arm chair I inherited from Jennie Alexander – I aimed for this drama in my arm posts, but my pole lathe wasn’t having it. The stuff gets too whippy in the pole lathe when I try to take it so thin. But what I knew nothing about 30 years ago was old Windsors – and what I have found is the shapes/thicknesses and patterns are quite varied. So I relaxed and left my arm posts thicker than Curtis’.

I’m planning on making the top half of the chair this week. White oak arm, hickory spindles. Fingers crossed.

A trip down memory lane

January 25, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized chair slats, chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chairs, post & rung chairs, seventeenth-century reproductions, turned chairs

My kids, as part of an on-line history class, are watching the PBS series Colonial House. I keep interrupting to say “I made that [chair/chest/stool/table/bench/bed]” etc. The museum where my wife & I (& most of our friends) used to work collaborated on the project – the period carpenters built the houses, I made the furniture – that sort of thing. I think we worked on it in 2002/3.

I’ve been sorting through old files here at the same time – and have run into some turned chair photos from 15 or more years ago. The chair above (with a servant sitting in it, while the head of the household sits on who-knows-what) is made from ash, with oak slats and a rush seat. Here it is when I photographed it back at the museum – after the series was done shooting. I “made it up” – by that I mean it’s not a copy of any particular chair from the early 17th century. I measured chairs when I could, studied a lot of Dutch art – and then came up with something plausible.

It’s made using techniques I learned when making chairs with Jennie Alexander and Drew Langsner – some basic principles still apply. All the wood is riven and then turned green. I used to dry the rungs near the potters’ kilns then – and I bent those slats before they went in the chair. Below is a typical press or form for bending slats. JA didn’t use this setup because the slats of her chairs each have a different bend.

This is a different chair – but here I’m boring it vertically – with a spoon bit. Those large-diameter posts are an easier target than JA’s 1 1/4″ posts. More room for forgiveness.

Assembled the front & back first, then bored & fit the sides together. That top rung (in my hand) is not turned, but just shaved. The seating will cover it.

The other extreme is the shaved chair pictured here – another screen shot – same notion; using techniques from working with JA I often made these simple chairs – shaved & hewn posts, left square. Mortises made with a spoon bit and tenons shaved at a shaving horse. Rush seat. At this fellow’s right foot is something that never seems to have actually made it to New England – a three-legged board-seated turned stool. I got real interested in making them and the chairs with the same construction. But probably shouldn’t have. For whatever reason, they don’t seem to have been made here. The 3-legged turned chairs are found a lot in England – but not New England.

Four-legged versions are found in New England – some years ago I made this copy of a famous one at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth. Ash with an oak seat. Heavier than all get-out. Pilgrim Hall has a couple of them – worth a look when you’re in town – https://pilgrimhall.org/

I hope this photo below is a test-fit to get the size of the seat. The seat is a beveled panel that fits in grooves in all four seat rails, so it has to go in during assembly.

And for scale – here’s one of my JA chairs beside my copy of Bradford’s chair. Yes, that JA chair is the standard-size, 34″ tall. Note the seat height of both is about the same.

Chair video uploads are done

January 23, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chair, post & rung chair

My upload allowance renewed today, so I posted the rest of the videos for Making the Jennie Alexander chair. It’s now at 8 hours & 41 minutes. That’s a lot to get through, but less than a 6-day class. And the comfort of your own home, as they say.

I put the hickory bark harvest as an appendix of sorts – well, it’s the last video anyway. Not everyone has access to harvesting their own bark – and I touch on alternative seating materials in the seat-weaving section. Drew Langsner reminded me of his short description of making and using inner bark of the tulip poplar tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) – it’s in his updated book Country Woodcraft: Then & Now. Tulip poplar is more readily available than hickory in some places.

Making this video has brought up a lot of memories for me. I’ve been researching for a few years a piece that will be about the people who taught me green woodworking – and Alexander features prominently in that work. It’s a long term project, but I picked away at some of it recently. And found confirmation for what I have known for years – a note in which Alexander admits she loved hickory bark and hated hickory bark work! “TEDIOUS TEDIOUS TEDIOUS” was how she put it. Funny how some people take to one aspect of the work, and others are put off by it. I really like working with bark – both the harvest and weaving with it.

one of JA’s chairs – bark seat by Nathaniel Krause

I have some sorting & cleanup to do, but I’m going to make a couple more of those chairs while they’re on my mind.

Here’s the link again to the video series – https://vimeo.com/ondemand/jachairpf

some of my Jennie Alexander archives

January 21, 2023 pfollansbee Uncategorized chairmaking, Follansbee, green woodworking, Jennie Alexander, ladderback chairs, low bench, post and rung chairs, shaving horse

Having spent a chunk of time lately working on the chair-making video, JA has been on (or in) my mind a lot lately. After she died I ended up with lots of photos, notes, drawings, etc – even after we had sent decades’ worth of notebooks to Winterthur Museum’s library. That shaving horse above is an in-between version – here’s the 1970s version below – its origin story is in the 3rd edition of the book. https://lostartpress.com/products/make-a-chair-from-a-tree That first one was beastly heavy. I made one when the book came out. Huge drawknife too. Things change.

JA with 1970s version of the shaving horse

Alexander used to mostly bore her early chairs at a drill press. But for public demos – and maybe the earliest classes – it was done at a knee-high bench with a brace & bit. One of many ways to hold the posts for boring was a 3-peg & wedge arrangement. This is an ancient method – somewhere in the notebooks (I’m not going to look it up now, I’d get lost in there) is an entry of where & when JA got onto this method. Alexander went through many different holding systems, some more Rube-Goldberg-esque than others. But she really wanted to do horizontal boring – feeling it allowed for easier sighting to see if the angle is right. Very soon after she began teaching with Drew Langsner at Country Workshops, that became the standard.

It’s funny – the horizontal boring idea came from using the AA Wood hollow auger, a tool that gave JA & friends of hers fits back in the mid-1970s. She soon dumped the hollow auger but kept the notion of boring this way.

This photo of the chair below is in the 3rd edition of the book – but I don’t think we explained it. In the late 1990s, Alexander was designing a chair to be made in some program in Costa Rica – I forget why the chair was painted this way. There must have been a reason. Maybe because the posts were ash? I used ash a lot in my chairmaking & only heard JA complain about it. Recently I got an email from Larry Barrett, who worked closely w/JA while I was off in carved-oak land – and they made chairs from ash in the first class Larry was involved in. It must have been free is all I can think.

Here’s the specs if you’d like to make one – not to scale for some reason.

Below is a low bench that was one of JA’s favorite designs – the “captured” stretcher. It’s a variation on the H-stretcher system featured in American Windsor chairs. JA filled notebooks with ideas about how to make the under-structure of a Windsor chair. She only ever made one Windsor chair, in the first class Curtis Buchanan taught at Country Workshops in 1987. But she never stopped thinking about, and monkeying with, the 3-stretchers/4 legs arrangement of the Windsor chair. This bench stemmed from that work. Here, though, the center stretcher has holes bored at each end and the side stretchers slide through it. The side stretchers fit into the legs with a round mortise & tenon – then the legs are fit into tapered holes in the bench.

Here’s one that still makes me cringe. In this version JA had a large tank made of plywood & fiberglass – tight enough to hold water. In went the oak sections, to be stored so they wouldn’t dry out. And some sat in there so long (years) they got hideously slimy & disgusting. I finally told her I would never reach into that tank again. I’d rather work air-dried oak than deal with that stuff.