Chair Build Days 4 and 5

Much has taken place in the shop since the last post two days ago.  Yesterday, I pulled another piece from the water and was quite pleased to see a 39% MC reading.  This meant it was time to steam and bend.

After soaking for about two and a half days.

First I had to do a little adaptation to my steam delivery system.  Up until yesterday I had used the 12' hose connecting to special fittings on both the steamer and steam box.  The problem is 12' of hose is 9' too much.  In the past I was unable to get my steambox up to 212 degrees, and I believe it was because of a heat loss in the hose.

Wallpaper steamer requires the fitting on the hose.

Hose fitting to connect the hose to the wallpaper steamer.

 After lopping of 9' of hose I was left with 3' of useable hose with a fitting on one end and open hose on the other.  What I discovered was a 3/8" ID hose inside of the black exterior hose.

Black hose acts as an insulator around the white hose that carries the steam.

 Next I removed the brass fitting from the steam box and on the drill press bore a 7/8" hole that provided a tight fit for the black exterior hose.

Brass fitting was required when using the hose as it came from the manufacturer.

While the steamer was bringing the temperature up in the box, I carved a piece into a 7/8" round bow. I marked the center with a line and an arrow so that I would know what side to put up.  It is best to figure this out before you have a very hot piece of wood in your hands that needs bent in 45 seconds. I mark the wood in such a way that the tangential plane is against the form.  The tangential plane is parallel to the bark and the radial plane runs from the pith to the bark.  This would mean the growth rings would be parallel to the bending form.  I am happy to report that my steam box made it to 212 degrees with ease.

The steam box actually held 212 degrees without a problem

  

The bow was in the box and the timer set for 1 hour.  When working with green wood I will usually steam pieces for 30 minutes.  Since I was working with wood that had been air-dried I rehydrated the pieces and doubled the steaming time, as suggested by Pete in his book Chairmaker's Notebook. While the steaming was taking place I prepared for the bending.  As I said before, once the piece comes out of the box you have a short bit of time to wedge the piece at its center point (arrow up facing the form), bend, pin and wedge the the ends before it cools too much.  When the hour was up I put the bow in the form and bent away.  I was so so happy with the results. It bent like I had just taken the piece out of a freshly cut tree.

The only place where a fiber or two raised , SUCCESS!

 
I attribute the success of the bend to being able to rehydrate the material and being able to deliver a consistent flow of 212 degree steam through out the steam box while using a defect free piece of oak. I was so psyched with the results I carved two more bows and put them into the steam box for an hour.  Well it would be great if I reported only my successes, but that isn't me.

The other two bows came from pieces whose grain was not as straight as it should be (understatement of the week) and as a result I ended up with a few small delaminations.  I was able to use some polyurethane glue and tape to repair those.  This morning I steamed and bent two arms that I carved and they were out of some wood that I most likely should have cut short of the wonky grain and used for spindles.  However I had to give it a go (I need help). One of the arms suffered major delaminations and required glue, clamps and then tape.  At this point this arm has become an experiment.  The other arm fared a bit better but I will most likely burn it also.  It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, well here you go.

Delamination in the bow caused a kink most likely rendering it unusable.  There is some extra material on the bow, therefore if I am able to fare the curve without loosing to much material it will be used.

This is the repaired delamination that caused the kink.

This arm bent the best but the wonky grained prevented me from being able to keep it flat in the form.  As part of my experimentation I have clamped it to my bench top with holdfasts to see if it will set in a flatter profile.

Moral of the post: If you find yourself wanting to bend pieces like these DON'T!  Seek help!

Five bends with one for sure usable bow and four ahhh maybe's.  I guess we will see how or if I am able to recover.

When the day ends it is time for the clean up crew.  My grandson Zane telling me "I help Pappy".

I have an arm that I had bent earlier so I am good to go there.  I usually bend more than one component just in case, and it appears it was a good thing.  Next I will be carving the spindles and then setting them aside to dry with the bendings from this past session.  Until the next time may you be blessed with straight grain always.

~ Ray Schwanenberger

Chair Build Day 2

The big white oak, as you can see it has begun to split by itself.

Above is the oak log that has been residing by my garage for what I have determined is almost two years.  I recruited my future son-in-law to split the white oak into a few manageable pieces for me. When I went out to make it accessible, and take the picture, I was happy to uncover previously split and rived pieces.  You can see them between the log and the wall.

Previously split and rived pieces I uncovered.

While I was unsure what the moisture content of the log would be I was certain that the previously split pieces would be too dry to work with.  I used my froe and rived the largest piece in two and then took a moisture reading from the freshly opened face. As I had suspected the wood was fairly dry, the meter read 18%.

Shavehorse doing double duty as a saw bench.

I cut the pieces for the arm/bow and spindles to their rough length and then using my froe and riving brake rived the pieces to rough size.  Click here to see a video of Curtis Buchanan demonstrating how a froe and riving brake are used.

Enough roughed out parts for uppers of three kids Sack Back Windsors plus some spare spindles.  The pile on the far left is the only waste from the riving process.  

Two arm/bow pieces with a bit of curve in the grain.

Two of the arm/bow rivings had some grain that was a little curvy.  I am not overly concerned with this.  I will carve these pieces following the grain, which will provide me with strong pieces.   Because I will have followed the long wood fibers the piece may not be straight, but it will provide me with the best chance for a successful bend.

Since the moisture reading was 18% I decided I was going to soak these pieces in water for a few days before working with them.  I want to give myself the best chance at making successful bends.  I also want to see, if after rehydrating, the spindle pieces are any easier to carve than they would be at 18% EMC.  After 3-4 days I will remove one of the largest and smallest pieces and take more readings.  If I am able to get a spindle to 25% I will carve it and see how the piece responds.  I am hopeful to get the arm/bow pieces to at least 50%.  I don't know this is all an experiment on my part. I will be posting my not so scientific findings when I find them.

Pieces ready to be rehydrated in a freshly cleaned trash container.

I followed Pete Galbert's advice and sealed the ends of every piece with Anchor Seal.  After allowing them to dry for a few hours I placed all of the pieces into the trash container and filled it with water. As luck would have it I discovered a few holes in my rehydration device.  I have since sealed them with silicone and am waiting on it to dry while I make this post.

One problem, which I'm sure you have already figured out, is wood is buoyant and will not stay submerged unless it is weighted down.  I did think of this however, I figured I would "stir" the pieces every day, hopefully entrapping the floaters under the already submerged pieces, causing them to become floaters.  I did put a clamp on the hinged lid so as to keep a family member from blindly tossing a bag of garbage into my floating punji sticks resulting in something very nasty.


~ Ray Schwanenberger

Chair Build Day 1

Well as you might imagine getting around in the shop with a large medical boot brace on ones foot is cumbersome.  However, I must press on.  Usually I would split, rive and shave my arm and bow parts first. Followed by a good steaming then bending them in their appropriate forms and setting them aside to dry.  Then I would move onto the other greenwood work, the spindles.  But as I said in a previous post I am going to be doing things a bit out of order, due to my aforementioned state of gimpiness.  I am attempting to recruit a strong young person to split that big ole oak log for me.  So far no luck.

So I started on the seat blank.  I laid it out, drilled my center spindle hole and the four leg holes.  I then began to carve the bowl of the seat.  I am happy to report that the Sugar Pine carves very nicely. Like its cousin Eastern White Pine it requires sharp tools.  I started with my adze made by Tim Manney.  It works so nicely and made very short work of removing the bulk of the seat bowl.  I am a novice with this type of adze and am still learning the nuances of the tool.  Next I moved onto the scorp/inshave. Taking a skewed cut working downhill while paying close attention to the grain is paramount.  The wood will let you know how it wants to be carved.  It is very important to heed its warnings so as to avoid tearing out a deep hole that will be difficult to remove.  The last step was to move to my travisher made by Claire Minihan.  The travisher is a bit of a peculiar tool to learn to use, for me at least it felt a bit counter intuitive.  Again I used a skewed cut working downhill paying attention to what the wood would allow me to do.  Using my bandsaw I cut out the front of the seat in preparation to carve it.

Tools Left to Right: Adze, Travisher, Scorp/Inshave

Next I drilled the arm post holes.  To do this I used a square, bevel square and mirror to obtain my 17 degree angle along the sight line.  The mirror allows me to compare my drill bit to the bevel square with a glance rather than having to move my head around causing me to loose alignment with the sight line. I use a square lined up perpendicular to the sightline to help me stay aligned as close as possible to the sightline.

After drilling both arm post holes I turned the bamboo style arm posts on the lathe.  I do this before reaming because I want to assign and fit an arm post to a particular mortise during the reaming process.  The arm post will be marked for its particular mortise and that is where it will reside for the remainder of its days.

Bamboo Style Arm Post

   
Next I ream the arm post holes and make them into tapered mortises.  As when drilling, I use a square, bevel square and mirror when reaming.  My reamer has a 6 degree included angle, therefore I set the angle to 14 degrees, three degrees less than the 17 degrees used to drill the holes.  I align the blade of the square with the sightline and compare the top tip of the reamer with the blade of the square.  If it lines up with the edge of the blade, I'm spot on.  If the tip is left I must take more off the right side of the mortise and vise versa if the tip is right.

Reamer is in line with the sightline

 
Next I brought the bevel square up to the reamer and observed the gap between the blade of the bevel square and the tapered surface of the reamer.  If the gap is the same up and down the reamer, I'm spot on.  If the gap is larger at the top I need to take more off the mortise toward the square and vise versa if the gap is larger at the bottom.

Reamer is at the correct angle

So after reaming both mortises to the indicated correct angles one might think that it is a completed task.  Oh contraire!  What I have neglected to explain is that I actually don't ream the mortises to their final depth until after I check to see that both arm posts are in the same plane.  I feel this is one of the most critical stages of building an armchair.  If the arm posts are not in the same plane it will make it hard to get the arm to sit correctly at a later stage in the process.

Winding Sticks to check the plane of the arm posts

Even though everything appeared to be correct, a pair of winding sticks would let me know just how close or far off  I was.  At first check I was off a wee bit and it was close enough that a very minor adjustment, a half turn of the reamer to the left arm post mortise, was all it took to be nuts on.

The gap at the left is ever so slightly larger than at the right.  When the gap is even everything is copasetic.

Well that was all my foot could handle for the day.  Next I will be turning the legs and stretchers for the undercarriage.  All the while I will be attempting to recruit some help with getting that oak split.  

~ Ray Schwanenberger

June Chair Build

It is June 2nd and time to participate in the June Chair Build that has been promoted by Brian Eve. In case you are not familiar with our host allow me to give you a glimpse.  Brian is a woodworker who is living in Munich Germany and the author of the blog Toolerable.  Brian arrived in Germany in the 1990's while he was in the US Army.  Brian spent eight years in Bamberg Germany and a year deployed in Iraq.  After Brian's discharge from the Army he moved with his wife to Munich, where he is employed as an Army civilian.

Brian started woodworking at the Army woodshop building furniture for his barracks room.  Things like bookshelves, coffee table and blanket chest.   When he arrived in Munich, space was at a premium and it appeared there was no room for a woodshop.  Or was there?  Brian figured if he used only hand tools  he would be able to carve out 100 square feet of space in the basement storage area and have his shop.  Check out this short video of his tiny workspace here.  When Brian has to use machinery he uses the machines at the Dictum GmbH shop or the Army woodshop in Garmisch.

Brian says he especially likes building tools for the challenge and in the end you have a useful tool. Brian also likes blogging because it helps him to think through a project when he can't be in his shop. He also likes the camaraderie of the internet woodworking universe.  Thank you Brian for sharing your story with us.

I will be making a series of post on the chair that I am building and the experiences along the way.  I will be building, of course, a Windsor Chair.  This will be a child's Sack Back Windsor.  A while back a friend was soliciting donations to raise money for a mission trip to Africa.  I donated a certificate for a child's Sack Back, this is the chair that I will be building.

My lovely chair model Chloe

Unlike the chair in the photo above, I will be turning bamboo turnings for the undercarriage and the arm posts. These will be turned in maple.  The spindles, arm and bow will be made from white oak, and the seat will be carved out of sugar pine.

The maple rounds have been drying for a year or two and should be quite stable.  The sugar pine I purchased when Midwest Woodworking in Cincinnati Ohio went out of business.  I was told it had been drying for over 30 years, so it should be quite stable as well.  The white oak is in the form of a large log that has been drying next to my house for a bit over a year.  This gives me reason to pause. While I have used one section of the log to date the other unsplit section has been sitting longer than I would have liked.

Midwest Woodworking stacked wood

After splitting the log open I will take a moisture reading and see where I stand.  If the reading is below 25% I will be afforded the "opportunity" to experiment with soaking the rivings prior to shaping and bending the arm and bow.  Pete Galbert addresses working with air-dried wood in his book Chairmaker's Notebook on pages 146-147. If the moisture content is 25% or above I will make the parts without soaking them.

The only other thing/obstacle to slow me down is me.  I had to have a procedure preformed on my Achilles Tendon yesterday morning and I am to take it easy for the next couple of weeks.  While carving at the shavehorse fits the bill I'm not sure about splitting that big oak up.  In light of this situation I will be doing things a bit out of order from my normal process.

For all that are joining in on the chair build good luck and straight grain to you all.


~ Ray Schwanenberger

Missing In Action

It has been a month to the day since I last made a post, WOW how time flies.  I was released by the doctor to return to the shop and have been busy ever since.  So this is what has been going on.

I went back to work on the bed I'm making for Carol and me and after the long lay off I had to bring the parts back into true.  Deciding on the finish has taken quite some time.  Finishing not being a strong point of mine, I decided to dive into Bob Flexner's book "Understanding Wood Finishing" and rectify that situation, at least partially.  Some of the quarter sawn ash, I had been air drying for 2 years, had some spalting and needed to be covered by the stain and or dye.  So began the experimentation.

It took a total of 22 recipes before we were able to find one that we could agree on and that covered the spalting.  I will make a post later on recipes.  I will say this, the good folks at General Finishes are a great source of information and an absolute joy to work with.  When I called I expected to get "For this department press....", instead a real live human answered, and she was able to answer all my questions and offered some really great suggestions.

I used the badly spalted ash, pictured below, for my test pieces.  I figured if this could be covered the very minor spalting on the bed components would cover with no problem. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. 

I promise my next post will be sooner than a month and it will include "Leather"!


~ Ray Schwanenberger

Reading Lesson

It was a beautiful day here in Kentucky for a drive in the country.  The beauty of the sun glistening off the lightly frosted and very colorful leaves this morning, was absolutely stunning.  I started out this morning not to go leaf gazing, but to learn to read.  Yes, I made the 2 hour trip to Paint Lick Kentucky to learn to read, bark!  I met my reading instructor, Don Weber at his Paint Lick shop in great anticipation of learning the skill of reading bark.  For those of you who don't know Don, he is a chair and furniture maker, blacksmith, and a wonderful teacher.  Oh and a wee bit of a character, might I add.

After a tour of Don's shop and a look at the projects he has in the works, we headed out with trailer in tow for our reading lesson.  The wonderful conversation made the winding 12 mile ride to the classroom seem very short.  After turning down the gravel drive and cresting a small hill, there it was, our classroom.  Acres of logs loomed before us.  I thought, Don has led me to a chair makers paradise, I hope the reading lesson isn't going to be like my high school English Lit class and Milton's Paradise Lost.  The pile of logs pictured below is small in comparison to the multiple stacked piles behind me.

    

Well, I'm happy to report the lesson was great.  First was learning to determine the species of tree; we were looking for white oak.  Don showed me the scaly bark of the white oak and how verification can be made by looking at the ends of the log.  Next we looked at the bark to see if it was straight or twisting around the tree.  Straight bark good, twisted bark bad!  Don then peeled back some bark and examined the exposed wood.  The straight running striations confirmed the information put forth by the bark.  Next, we looked very closely for humps, bumps, and general malformations in the bark.  Malformations in the bark are indicators of likely flaws, such as knots or unruly grain in the wood that lies beneath.  I was amazed how quickly and how far away Don was able to spot these flaws. 

Armed with my new found knowledge, and Don's watchful eye, I was excited to put it to the test.  Mission: Take home a white oak log ideal for chair making.  I'm happy to report that I got the species correct on the first try.  It took sorting through several logs to find one with straight bark.  Next was to ensure there were no indications of hidden flaws.  Lets just say I'm hopeful that someday, I will develop Don's eagle eye.  After more show and tell instruction, we were able to locate an 11 foot long, 14 inch round white oak and deemed it worthy.  However, it did have a small hump in the bark 6 feet up from the butt end.  We bucked the log through the hump and it was perfect.  With the logs secured to the trailer and the ends sealed, I made the 2 hour trek north.  Upon my arrival, I was happy to find that my shop elf was all smiles and ready to give me a hand.  

After splitting the log open I will post on the results.