Today (Friday) was another half day (one of the perks of running your own business), so with the rungs and rails nicely dried out it was time to start assembling the side panels for the chairs. Over the years, I’ve experimented with all kinds of drills, both powered and manual. My current approach may sound time consuming and cumbersome but once in the rhythm, it doesn’t take long and it enables me to drill good deep 25mm holes into 35-38mm legs without having to worry about the drill popping out the far side. Having measured the distances up the legs (today I used 11, 29 & 47cm, which allows a bit extra for trimming the bottom of the legs after assembly) I drill a pilot hole with a 4mm bit in a cordless drill. I then do the bulk of the drilling with a 14mm auger bit in a hand brace. I stick a yellow tape at 26mm but this isn’t really needed because I actually count the rotations and stop after about 16.

I then finish each hole using a 14mm Forster bit in a mains drill with a lump of wood fixed to the drill to act as a depth stop – quick and reliable without any danger of bursting out the far side. Why don’t I do all the drilling with this? Too fast and scary. By using the brace and bit I can take care to judge the drilling angle by looking in a couple of large mirrors and using a wooden angle guide. Here’s a picture of the bench (taken when sharpening my chainsaw) with two large mirrors to judge the angle, when I’m using it for drilling. My grandfather is keeping a watchful eye on things. The picture beneath him is one of Philip Clissett in his workshop. I’d love to know how he did his drilling! I do know he used a brace with a spoon bit but there’s no sign of any mirrors – and certainly no chainsaw!

Having drilled 3 pairs of front legs, I then set up the back legs fixed to their bending jig on the bench. these holes are drilled at 30 degrees to the vertical, which gives the back of the chair a good splay.

I then gave the dry rungs and seat-rails a good clean and some sanding and squeezed together two pairs of side panels – after 10 years of using this approach it still requires some courage to see it through. Here’s a couple of minutes of film works taken during a course in 2011.

Apologies to all of you who are avidly following this unfolding story of the birth of a set of chairs – I missed my blog last night. Today I only got a half day in, so you haven’t missed much. Yesterday (Weds) I achieved my assembly of the two last panels in the allotted 3 hours (inspired by The Great Pottery Throwdown the night before), so I then had all 6 panels assembled.

In the afternoon, I took two of them to pieces, and with a spokeshave, a scraper and two Abranet pads (amazing pads with course and fine abrasive sheets held on with velcro), I then had to reshape and smooth each lath and the cross-rail. I have left cleaning up the crests until I have fitted the ends into the back legs, which is some way off yet. Here’s a pic of one set of laths shaped to fit into their mortices, and another set having subsequently been reshaped and smoothed off. Can you tell the difference? I bloody well hope so!

Today (Thurs) was the most dismal day so far this winter (only 0.2 KW hours all day from the solar panels capable of generating 2.75 KW/hour). Forunately the recent wind had died down so with the shaving-horse snuggled up close to the wood-burner and with the i-pod generating a good rhythm for sanding, I kept myself comfortably warm.

If any of you (either of you!) know the music of AltJ, try sanding a piece of wood while listening to this song of theirs: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/altj/thegospelofjohnhurt.html. I was off on a kind of red Indian – sorry – native American chant. I’ve no idea what the lyrics are about but they are very relevant to a green woodworker.

In the meantime, I had put all the rungs and rails made on Monday into the oven of our Tyrolia kitchen stove (wood-fired of course) just on tick-over. After a day at about 80 degrees C, they had dried beautifully, with the tenons shrinking to a good oval cross section of about 14.4mm by 15.3mm, pretty well perfect to squeeze into the 14mm holes I shall be drilling in a few days. I’ve put them back into the rack above the living room stove, so I can get a beef casserole on the go for Saturday, when we have friends to visit for lunch.

This series of blogs is partly a record for me and any interested colleagues of how I make lath-back chairs in a production run (albeit 6 at a time) and also for my customers to see how their chairs are coming along.

Yesterday I finished making the last of the parts for the 6 chairs, I intend to make before Christmas. Most of them have spent some time drying around our wood/burning stove. As well as the bits I have made over the last few weeks are 4 crests and cross rails I made 3 weeks ago.

So today’s project was to assemble 4 back panels while all yesterday’s rungs and rails are drying. I suggest starting with one of the crests, as the mortices will be less obvious, so by the time I get to the cross-rails (where the joints are more obvious) I should be in the flow. The mortices are spaced 6cm apart and marked with a bundle of nails (leftover from nailing floor boards) which punch a line 14mm long. A neat idea is to use 6mm drills at each end of the mortice with a 5mm drill for the centre hole. This removes a lot of the waste but minimises the danger of the centre hole being slightly out of line.

Using a 12mm chisel, a thin mortice chisel and a gimlet, I removed the waste from the mortices.

After running a spokeshave along the surface, the mortices were relatively neat.

After the 4th crest had been morticed, I started on the cross-rails. Rather than holding these using a shallow bending jig, I made a special grip to hold the cross-rail when carrying out the morticing. This held it more firmly, which makes a big difference.

With 40 mortices  made it was then a matter of shaping the laths to fit each one individually. This was the first time this project became rather tedious. Listening to BBC Radio 4 was not a good idea as I nearly nodded off at one stage. After a cuppa, and a blast of Bundhu Boys from the i-pod, things picked up. I thought of old Philip Clissett who is quoted as saying ‘if you are not singing, you are not happy’. He’d have certainly preferred the i-pod to Radio 4. I also thought of my son, Dougal on his X box game, going over and over the same challenge, trying to knock a second off here and a second off there. Refining the process is an integral part of any craft, be it Warcraft, chair-making or pottery.

Having fitted the end 2 laths and the bottom of the centre 3 laths, I could measure the exact lengths of the centre ones before wasting time shaping their tenons and then having to cut them to length. By the end of the day I had succeeded in assembling the 4 panels but there’s still a great deal of cleaning up to be done before final assembly.

Today I returned to the workshop to work on the other section of the tree that I barrowed up the the workshop on Friday. It was a quarter of the very bottom section of the tree, which I marked with the ‘curtain ring’. Unfortunately it just yielded 7 rather than 8, so I cleft it into 3 rather than the preferred 4. I then marked each third to give 4 legs.

After cleaving I had the front leg blanks for the 6 chairs, which I plan to make before Christmas.

While I was doing this, I had the chair legs, crests and laths from Friday, gently steaming away. Top right is the wallpaper stripper feed steam down the flexi pipe into the plywood steam box that I resurrected. In the woods we had been using a box made of 2″ insulation boards but that was in a poor state, so I’ve used those boards to lag the stronger plywood box. The big advantage of the foam box was that it was very lightweight and easy to lift on and off the wood-fired drum. Now the steam box is fixed, that’s not an issue.

Using pretty much the same jigs as in Going With the Grain 2nd edition, I bent 3 pairs of back legs, 3 sets of laths, 3 cross-rails and a couple of crests. These are now drying around our woodburning stove in the living room.

The afternoon was spent shaving the 6 pairs of front legs, following the gentle curved that came from the butt end of the tree. I tried using a 1 1/2″ tenon cutter to size the tops of the legs.

I concluded that was a waste of time and used the ‘curtain ring’ as with the back legs. These legs will now be dried gently along with all the steamed bits. The shavings will sit outside being dried by the strong wind and will be ready to use for kindling within days.