I recently broke out my new VEVOR Inflatable Paint Booth for the first time. My neighbor said it looked like the tent that the government set up in front of the house in the movie E.T. Just to clear things up, I am not harboring any stranded aliens. I'm just spray finishing furniture.
When my daughter was born, I had the idea to build chairs for her as she grows. Someday, this may leave her with a burdensome amount of chairs but that is her problem, not mine.
The Irish stick chair is moving along. Putting the details aside, the base is nothing more than some sticks mortised into a plank. Not overly complex stuff, although it took some creativity to deal with the stock at times. As you can see in the picture below, not all of the bolts for the legs maintained a consistent thickness along their entire length. This limited how much machining I could do safely, so most of the work from here on out was done by hand.
After beating my head against a wall for a few weeks, the scorp is back in working order. Historically, I've been a buyer of new tools and not a modifier of old ones. I don't get much shop time, and when I do, I'd rather spend it building furniture. This isn't truly an exception. Jason Lonon released a well-timed batch of scorps just as I was nearing my breaking point. I happily bought one but quickly realized I probably shouldn't use it to scoop out a hardwood seat until I was a lot more confident in my ability to resharpen it.
I haven't had much time to post over the past couple of months but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy. The flood gates will open once I find some time to document what I've been working on. After a mad dash to finish the first of four plant stands before Christmas (a story for another day), I'm turning my attention back to the Irish Stick Chair.
It’s time to wrap up the perch. Once the glue had set, I finished shaping the seat using a travisher and spokeshave, then smoothed everything out with a card scraper. It’s been years since I’ve worked with a properly tuned card scraper, and I had forgotten just how enjoyable they are to use. I also wanted to share the jig I’ve been using on to hold stools after assembly. I originally threw it together while building my first creepie to plane the seat post-assembly, but it’s become far more useful than I ever expected. For the perch, it worked especially well—the legs wedged perfectly between the jig's arms, holding it securely in place while I worked on the top. The soft pine arms hardly left a mark on the maple legs.
The Perch build is officially going the distance. Assembling the undercarriage was more interesting than I anticipated, so I’ll dedicate this post to that process and show off the finished piece in my next post.
The first step for my Irish Stick Chair build is carving the seat. I've been hesitant to start because I've never carved a chair seat before, and the oak that I'm using will not be particularly easy to carve. Fortunately, I found inspiration while reading through old Chair Notes posts for another chair to build, which will help me bridge the gap.
A "creepie" is an Irish or Scottish term referring to a rustic three-legged stool that I first stumbled upon in Chris Schwartz's Anarchist Design Book. I'm not well studied enough to say what, if anything, makes a creepie particularly unique but I find the term quite endearing. Most of the limited examples that I've seen have a large solid seat with through tenons and no stretchers, similar to many stick chairs from the same region. Since my plan is to build an Irish Stick Chair, I thought that a creepie would be a good first step along that journey and a perfect gift for my dad.
I haven't quite caught the "chair bug" yet, but the more I venture into chairmaking—Windsor and stick chairs in particular—the more intrigued I become. For woodworkers, such as myself, with a background almost exclusively in casework type furniture, chairmaking can seem like an entirely different discipline. Proficiency using hand tools is a transferable skill, but it seems like that's about it.
New posts land in your inbox. No noise, just the workshop.
