Cherry rocks!

A taster of the batch of chairs I'm currently working on for the Fisherton Mill Gallery in Salisbury's Out of the Wood exhibition coming up in June.

This little fellow is my first attempt at a rocking chair. It's made entirely out of wild cherry, also a first for me. Cherry is both a joy and a frustration to use: a joy because it's a pleasure to work with and smells nice, and looks gorgeous after a coat or two of oil, when that lovely mellow colour leaps out at you; a frustration because it can also be a nightmare to work with, often growing with a twist and with a grain that's liable to tear out. Maybe it was just this tree!

Still, the overall effects are really pleasing, I think, and it works well with the grey hemp seat.

If anyone's interested in the exhibition, I'll be demo-ing there on Saturday 9 June. Hope to see you there...

Bodging in Brixton

Last Saturday I ran a fun little workshop for Brixton's Transition Town group. They've developed a really interesting spin-off project called the Brixton Remakery, which is in the process of transforming some derelict council garage units into a base for what looks set to be a really inspiring community recycling and skills-sharing programme. The garage units will be converted into workshop spaces for local creative businesses, and there will be a communal area for workshops and other creative community events.

After approaching Hannah Lewis, who runs the Remakery, I was invited to run one of a series of workshops they've been organising over March to give local people taster experiences in new skills.

Setting up three lathes in a little community building on the hottest day of the year so far got me into a bit of a sweat, and the equipment only just fitted in, but the people who came to have a go all got stuck in with great gusto, and turned out some lovely rolling pins.

The gritty urban environment seemed an incongruous setting for a craft that has such rural connotations, but it just goes to show how versatile green woodworking is and far it's come from the days of the bodger. Cities seem to me to be the great unexplored frontier for the onward march of the pole lathe.

Watch this space for more...

Steaming girt arm bows

After several weeks in the making, I've finally got together my new rig for steam-bending arm bows. It's based on the method developed by James Mursell, and does away with the need for several guys and girls huffing, puffing and sweating away to bend the bow blank around the jig. Instead, all the bending force is provided by a winch that pulls the bending strap and blank around the jig.

Worked a treat first time, and produced me four very nice arm bows that now await use in future projects. Essentially it's like a very large crossbow, and it's very scary how much tension the whole rig develops when you crank that handle. I was just waiting for something to go 'ping' and for a large piece of something hard or possibly jagged to go hurtling across the workshop. Luckily it didn't.

Something for the purists to gnash their teeth at: I used a bandsaw to cut the blanks... Cue sharp intake of breath... Well, it takes a lot less time than shaving them, and you never quite know when a bow's going to work or not work, so the less time spent pre-bending the better I'd say, especially when you're doing a batch.

Adzing

Adzing out a chair seat is by turns my favourite and least favourite part of chairmaking - favourite when it goes right, least favourite when it doesn't. Either way, it's also very hard work. I favour the old-fashioned tool-between-the-legs method (not as rude as it sounds), which can put a lot of strain on the back after a while.

So the key for me is a technique that wastes as much wood as quickly and accurately as possible. A method for achieving this that I've been using recently takes away the tendency to hack away with an adze until something vaguely resembling a chair bottom appears and makes it a much more refined process that minimises generally bodily pain and makes the final smoothing much quicker.

Stage one involves a series of chopping stop cuts, in which the angle of the cuttting edge of the adze is held at a steeper angle to the surface of the wood than the more sweeping cuts employed later on. This stage breaks the fibers of the wood and make stage two easier. I find if I get into a good rhythm with this process, it's possible to make cuts at a surprisingly uniform depth, which, again, helps with the next stage.

Stage two involves the swinging, sweeping cuts more normally associated with the adze, with the cutting edge now held a shallower angle. You should now be able to be fairly aggressive with your cutting as the stop cuts already made should limit how much material is wasted with each swing. As always, keep legs and other fleshy parts well out of the line of the swinging adze! 

If you've been fairly uniform with the depth of your cuts in the first stage, you should end up with some fairly smooth hollowing once you've been through the second phase. This should mean only minimal use of travisher or in-shave to smooth out the seat....

On the subject of in-shaves, do people still use these? I find with my very nice James Mursell travisher, I don't really need an in-shave. Plus I've never got on too well with in-shaves anyway, but that's another story...

Inaugural blog

This is the first post of my new blog, which will contain musings on the craft of green wood chair making. Hopefully there will be something you find interesting here - or at least disagree with for the purposes of healthy debate. Happy reading!