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

Sizing A Chair

Recently I have experienced some neural oscillations about sizing chairs based on the users body dimensions.  I recall reading an article, a few years ago, by Jim Tolpin in which he stated; "The human frame can be roughly proportioned in whole-number ratios of eight".  The theory is this; By dividing the distance of ones hand span into eighths (8:8 ratio), you will then be able determine any dimension needed to design furniture to fit the user.  This led me to do a little research on Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and the proportions of the human form.  From this information one can derive that we are as tall as we are wide with outstretched arms.  Which by the way is equal to eight hand spans (64:8).  Our shoulder span is equal to two hand spans (16:8), our forearm (wrist to inside of elbow) is equal to one hand span (8:8), and the length of the lower leg (floor to middle of the knee) is a ratio of 18:8.  I know what you are thinking.  Very few people fall into the Vitruvian Man "ideal" category.  This is true and most of these proportions will not be exact but should be close enough to use in the design of a chair or any furniture for that matter.

Well, I had to put what I had learned to the test.  I got in touch with my good friend Dean and asked him to measure his hand span.  Yeah I didn't really think it through or look at the time before I initiated the conversation!  After a few questions about my activities that evening, he reluctantly took the measurement and advised me that the measurement was 8.75 inches.  I then asked him if the span of his shoulders was 17.5 inches.  This is when he accused me of drinking to excess and politely cut the conversation short.  Knowing Dean as I do, I knew this would eat at him until he would take the measurement to satisfy his curiosity.  I also knew that I would soon hear from Dean.  As suspected, he did take the measurement and confirmed my calculation, and was still of the opinion that I was drunk.

It is my hope that I will be able to use these whole-number proportions and the clients hand span dimension to design a chair that will fit the client for its intended task.  I especially want to employee this method with my guitar chair that is still in the designing/prototype stages.  Over the next several months I will be building and testing some prototypes using only this method.  If this proves to be successful, imagine how easy it would be to custom build a specialized chair for someone on the other side of the country.

I would deduce that the chair below belongs to someone with rather big hands, and you know what "they" say about big hands.  Big Chair?