These two Welsh-inspired stick chairs were built earlier this year for a local furniture show, and I am now offering them for sale.

Prices and details on how to buy them are below. But first, some notes about these two almost-identical chairs.

These chairs are based on one of my favorite Welsh chairs, which was shown in Richard Bebb’s “Welsh Country Furniture” (Shire). Not much is known about this chair, so I call this form the “Bebb chair.”

Like many Welsh chairs, this one has the arm positioned fairly high above the seat (about 12"), and it’s quite comfortable. The dramatic rake and splay of the legs mimics old work as well.

The chairs are made from American black cherry and are assembled with animal glue so they can be repaired easily in the far future. The chairs are finished with soft wax, which is completely non-toxic, easy to repair and looks better with age. The chairs were exposed to full sun while in the furniture show, and so the cherry has already developed a nice rich tone, which will only improve.

Unlike the original Bebb chair, I shaved the arms fully round for comfort. And I carved in a “wolf’s tooth” protection symbol on both ends of the chairs shoes (right next to the decorative ogee).

The chairs are 37-1/2" tall overall. The seats are 17" off the floor. The backs are fairly upright at 9°, with a seat tilt of 6°. They are suitable for dining or working, but they are comfortable for long spells as well.

How to Buy the Chairs

We’re selling these chairs via a random drawing. All prices include packing and shipping to anywhere in the U.S. There are no additional charges. One chair costs $1,800. Or you can get both for $3,300.

If you wish to buy a chair (or the pair), send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Wednesday, May 27. Please use the subject line: “One chair” if you want one chair, or “Both chairs” if you want both. In the email please include your:

• Name

• U.S. shipping address

• Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)

Here’s how the drawing will work: If we randomly pick someone who wants two chairs, then they will get both. If the first person we pick wants one chair, then we will pick a second person for the second chair.

If someone who gets picked asked for two chairs, but only one chair is available, they will have the option of buying one chair or simply passing on the offer.

If you are the winner, the chair will be shipped to your door. The price includes the crate and all shipping charges. Alternatively, the chair can be picked up at our storefront in Covington, Kentucky.

A curious Frank Klausz picked up my panel plane – I’d made it from a kit. He turned it over and looked at its sole and its iron peeking out from the mouth of the tool.

“You have honed a straight bevel,” he said. “Good.”

Then he turned the plane back over and looked at the plane’s cocobolo infill, the brass lever cap and the iron. He shook his head and walked away from my bench. With my panel plane in his hands.

I wasn’t about to stop him. But I followed him.

He walked to his bench at the woodworking show where we both were exhibiting. He showed me a patch of rust on my iron. The rust was on the top of the iron and nowhere near the cutting edge.

He took the plane apart, cleaned off the rust entirely and put it back together. It took about 10 minutes. He handed the plane back to me and smiled.

“You can do better,” he said.

Frank was right. Until that moment I never thought much about how my tools looked. I only cared about how they worked. So I learned to sharpen, and I learned to set up my tools. But I didn’t care if they were a bit dusty or had spots of rust.

I mean, that’s patina, right? That is evidence that I used the tool and wasn’t just a collector.

Wrong. That day I realized and decided that my tools, my bench, my shop, my car and my work clothes were all reflections of who I am as a woodworker.

You can disagree with me and be 100 percent correct. I know plenty of woodworkers who are far better than me and have grimy tools and cluttered workshops. Some people can compartmentalize and do pristine work in less-than pristine conditions.

I apparently cannot.

Sometimes visitors and customers ask me why I keep the shop so clean. “Do you get any work done?” is a common way to put it.

The reason “why” comes down to self-respect. Why clean your face when you wake up each morning? It’s only going to get dirty during the day. Why wash your car when it’s only going to rain tomorrow? Why sweep up the floor when it’s only going to get covered in shavings the next morning (or the next minute)?

The only answer I have is self-respect.

Or put another way: Thank you, Frank Klausz, for setting me straight.

More Dutch Chest Improvements

After adding two lift-out trays for my chairmaking tools (see that entry here), I thought about what to do with the big open space in the lower compartment.

I need a place to store the tenon cutters, drill bits, level and some of the other bulky items I use when teaching chair classes. I decided to make a deep, removable drawer that could be put out on a bench so students could fetch the tools and put them back when they are done.

The drawer is 6-1/2" tall, 10" deep and 25" wide. I built it from some scrap pine. The corners of the drawer are rabbeted and nailed. The bottom boards are tongue-and-grooved and screwed to the bottom edge of the drawer box. The box runs on elm runners that are screwed to the sides of the compartment.

Once again, I divided up the interior spaces using 1/2" x 1/2" scrap pieces of cherry that I pinned in place. I added a couple wooden knobs to the drawer (we keep those in stock).

Then there was one last improvement to make.

I don’t like to travel with nice backsaws because the sawplates are too fragile. So I have some folding Japanese saws (a Dozuki and a Ryoba) that are good to go. I wanted to attach them to the inside of the chest’s lid. But I didn’t want to go all toggle-fest with it.

Enter the Olivia (no, not Megan’s cat).

One of our students named Olivia brought a Dutch chest to a class and was used elastic fabric to hold tools to the lid (and elsewhere). Pure genius.

1So I went to Michael’s craft emporium, bought some elastic from the sewing section and devised a simple way to hold both saws on the lid. I screwed two pieces of 1/2" cherry to the lid that were 4" apart. With some red elastic between them. It worked great. (I chose red to match the exterior of the chest.)

I have a lot of elastic left over. I plan to put it to good use when I return from this class. More tools need to be elastically restrained. Thanks, Olivia!

“I do not get your weird chairs,” exclaim about a dozen messages or comments every year.

I understand your bewilderment.

I remember being a prospective student at Northwestern University in 1985 where I had been paired up with freshmen journalism students. We were supposed to sleep in their dorm rooms and see what university life was like.

My two hosts sat me down on a bed and thrust a Budweiser in my hands.

“Drink it,” they said. “And you’re drinking 10 more. You are getting drunk. Maybe we’ll drag you outside naked.”

Up until that point in my life, I had taken one sip of beer. It had been my dad’s Coors Light, which had been poured over ice at the beach during a vacation. It was memorably disgusting.

I took a sip of the Budweiser, and I can still remember the metallic and bitter liquid spreading through my mouth and snaking down my gullet.

Beer is objectively nasty stuff. It’s basically watery bread. Fermented starch. And flavored with a bitter plant (hops) or worse.

I did not “get” this weird drink, and I took about four sips of it that night, each one warmer and worse than the previous. I did not end up naked and drunk in the quad.

Now, 41 years after that fall evening, I have changed my mind about beer. I am endlessly curious about the different forms of the drink and enjoy learning about its role in our culture and history. After listening to a podcast about beer in Biblical times, I was struck by the parallels between the history of the beverage and of the vernacular stick chairs I have been studying and building for many years.

I suppose these parallels shouldn’t have been a surprise. The stories of many good things in our world have a similar arc. And the turning point in the story’s third act is always the Industrial Revolution.

But it’s a good story, and it helps explain my love for both hops and these funky chairs that are “a smidgen off being ugly,” according to chairmaker Chris Williams.

For most of human history, beer was something you made at home. Everyone was a brewer. Beer was a source of nutrition and hydration. But ancient beer was unlikely to taste like the stuff you buy today. For a long time, the role of yeast wasn’t understood. And hops – the most common added flavor today – weren’t always used. Honey and other spices were common.

Commercial production of beer might have been an innovation of the Ancient Egyptians (you can read a history of beer and business here, which is where much of the following business data comes from). But up until the mid-19th century, most brewers were local businesses. There were no national or international brands of beer.

The rapid industrialization of the West allowed beer to be produced on a large scale and homogenized. Prohibition wiped out most of the local and regional brewers. And by the 1970s, 75 percent of all the beer in the United States was produced by only four monster corporations.

The product also kind of sucked. Coors Light over ice?

And while those macro brewers still exist (and are still growing through acquisition and consolidation), there has been a remarkable renaissance in small- and mid-sized brewers. In 1980, there were only 92 breweries in the U.S. As of 2024, there were 9,922 breweries. A hundredfold increase.1

Plus beer as a beverage is far more interesting and diverse these days.

The history of stick chairs is not as long as the history of brewing (as far as we know). But it also has some wild twists and turns.

The first image of a stick chair that I know of is from a Welsh book of laws from the 12th or 13th century called “Laws of Hywel Dda.” There are two images of stick chairs shown in this particular Latin translation. My favorite one shows a judge in the stick chair, and he’s pointing with one hand. His other hand holds what is likely a book (but which I prefer to think of as a cup of beer for the purposes of this story).

Stick chairs have been around for hundreds of years before mass manufacturing. We suspect that most were made by farmers in the off-season, so it was a household enterprise, much like making beer. Judging from the surviving examples, they were made by crafty individuals who likely made the chairs for their nuclear or extended family. Or for people in their village.

Because each stick chair is unique – I’ve never seen two that are identical – we can conclude that they were likely made one by one. Or in small sets at most. There are variations in the chairs that can place them in certain time periods or in certain regions. But there’s little to no evidence that these chairs were even a highly organized commercial endeavor. (Irish Gibson chairs might be the exception.)

These vernacular chairs show up in many countries throughout Scandinavia and the U.K. And stick chairs could be the ancient ancestor of Forest chairs (aka Windsor chairs).

Regardless of the shape or strength of that family tree, Windsor chairs appeared in the early 18th century and rapidly became a commercial enterprise that employed hundreds and then thousands of people. The city of High Wycombe became Britain’s primary chairmaking region. But the chairs were manufactured all over the UK and were a major export for the country.

The Windsor chair became so successful that today it is widely regarded as the most common form of chair.

“It’s been said that half of all wooden chairs on the planet are either Windsors or are directly descended from the style,” according to the Magazine Antiques.

While there are exceptions, most mass-produced Windsor chairs are unremarkable firewood and share little or nothing with their ancient ancestors – except for a name.

Evidence: All of the broken chairs that have been dragged across my doorstep have been factory-made Windsors. (I decline all chair-repair requests from customers – not because I am a jerk, but because chair repair could easily consume all of my waking hours. And it’s not what I want to do with my time.)

These factory-made Windsors are the Coors Light of the woodworking world.

Just like with the world of beer, however, things began to improve for the world of handmade chairs in the 1970s and ’80s. Mike Dunbar and Dave Sawyer began exploring Windsor forms, and both began teaching others, planting the seeds for thousands of other chairmakers. John Brown self-published his “Welsh Stick Chairs” book, which began to sketch in the early history of chairs from his part of the world.

Thanks to these people, we now have a second generation of chairmakers following in their footsteps (I count myself as a member of this generation). And if we do our job right, the third generation is getting started in the craft right about now.

So with any luck, we’ll never have to return to a world with tasteless beer and flimsy chairs.

Please join us if you can. In fact, if you join this week, we’ll waive the hazing (yes, of course it involves a tapered reamer).

2026: My Favorite Beers

There are so many good beers out in the world today that a list like this is almost meaningless. But if you ever see any of the following beers on draft, I recommend you try them.

1. Hopslam by Bell’s Brewery. A double IPA brewed with honey. It will mess you up. Sweetly.

2. Gadget by Urban Artifact. Urban Artifact makes the best sours I’ve ever had. And they use so much fruit.

3. Astronaut Food by Urban Artifact. The strawberry version of this is great. The blueberry version is impossible to describe.

4. Old Rasputin by North Coast. A perfect Imperial stout. Will mess you up good.

5. Pliny the Elder by Russian River. The single-best IPA I have ever tried. Perfect in every way. Balanced. Worth the trouble.

6. La Fin du Monde by Unibroue. I love Belgian ales. This one is proof that the New World can do them justice.

7. Delirium Tremens by Huyghe Brewery. One of these with some frites … heaven.

Despite all our efforts to keep our inventory under control at the Anthe building, we struggle to find space for our incoming new titles. So to clear some much-needed floor space, we are putting one of our biggest hogs of floor space on sale until the end of June.

“With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture Deluxe Edition” is just $85 until the end of June. The regular price is $125.

This is our nicest-made biggest book. And it’s one of the foundations of the written record of Western woodworking. Andre Roubo was the first joiner to ever write about the craft, and he interviewed fellow artisans to amass his massive work. He drew many of the illustrations. And he explained many things that had been secrets.

We spent almost a decade translating this work into English for the first time ever. And to meet that achievement, we printed this book oversized, with heavy and beautiful paper.

And for a short time you can get this book at a price that is a bit of a deal.

We are working hard on solving our space problem, including an overflow facility outside the city (if anyone has a pole barn in Northern Kentucky they want to sell us, send an email to help@lostartpress.com).

In the meantime, enjoy this book. It’s one of our best.

Until today, I didn’t intend to ever make a chest for my chairmaking tools. My inshave, travisher et al have lived peaceably with their carcase-making cousins for 22 years now. Why should I break up a family?

Here’s why: Last week while I was teaching chairmaking at Greg Pennington’s school, I couldn’t find a damn thing. “Where is my f-ing chamfer cutter?” I screamed (only in my head with a placid, stoned-monk smile on my face). “Why is my m-f-scraper on the damn floor?” I raged silently (while realizing that I had dropped it there).

My disorganized tools slowed me down and ratcheted up my blood pressure.

So today I had one goal: organize my chairmaking tools in my Dutch chest. And I did it all in two hours thanks to Mike Pekovich’s upcoming book “Benchwork” from Lost Art Press. What, you haven’t heard about the new book? Well now you have.

Last year, Mike approached us about publishing his third book. We said, “Hell yes,” and that was the entire negotiation. In late April, Mike turned in the fully designed and illustrated book, and we put it on a fast track. I read the book last week and gave it a light edit. Megan is editing it now. It should be headed to the printer in a few weeks and will be released this summer.

What’s it about? Like Mike’s other books, it’s a thoughtful approach to a certain aspect of the craft. In this case, setting up shop. Choosing the right set of hand tools for your work, then building wall cabinets and tool chests to protect them. A workbench on which to use them. And the jigs and appliances that make your tools easier to use.

The book is filled with good ideas that Mike has tested in his own shop and ideas from other woodworkers that Mike knows via his work at Fine Woodworking magazine. “Benchwork” is where Mike takes all these ideas and uses them to rebuild the core infrastructure of his shop. It’s a great book that will help many people.

Like it helped me today. One of the great ideas in “Benchwork” is to organize your tools on pieces of MDF that can then be inserted into your chest or cabinet. It’s not supposed to be a modular system. Instead, it’s just a much easier to divide up the space in a chest or cabinet. The MDF represents the footprint. You attach dividers to the MDF and drop it in the space. And you can remove it to change the arrangement in the future.

When I built my first Dutch tool chest years ago, I attached all the organizers to the chest itself, which is time consuming and fussy. This MDF thing is simply a fantastic idea.

So here’s how it went. I bought a section of 1/4" MDF from the home center and cut it down into two panels that fit nicely into the chest. One in the upper compartment and one in the lower. This leaves a lot of airspace above the tools, which I’ll talk about in a bit.

Then I arranged the tools on the MDF until they made sense and fit nicely. The dividers are simple 1/2" x 1/2" strips of scrap cherry. I sawed them to size on my miter box and shot them to fit on a shooting board. Finally, I fastened them to the MDF with 23-gauge pins.

Each panel took about an hour, which is a land speed record for building tool organizers.

With my primary chairmaking tools in place, I’m going to find a way to hang some saws on the lid and perhaps put a drawer in the lower compartment. When the chest is complete I’ll post some more photos.

You might be asking: How am I going to keep all my tools from jumping out of their cubbies during the road trip? Answer: my underwear (aren’t you sorry you asked?). In truth, I’ll have some tool rolls and stuff on top of the tools to keep them in place during the bumpy ride to Maine.

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As of Friday, The Stick Chair Journal No. 4 is at pre-press. So, we should see the final printed product by the end of June.1 If you are a paid subscriber to The American Peasant, you can download the entire issue (and the full-size patterns) for free below the paywall.

As always, the cover image (above) is a woodcut made by Rudy Everts (aka Underhatchet). Rudy has moved to the United States (yay!) and has started up a substack about his woodworking and art. I’ve subscribed. You should, too.

This issue of the Journal features the Bebb chair, which is the antique Welsh stick chair that launched the design cycle I’ve been in for the last five or six years. It’s a fun chair to build and sits beautifully.

Also in No. 4: Kara Gebhart Uhl profiled bodger Don Weber, who has led about five lifetimes (so far) of adventures and making. Kara and Kale visited Don’s shop in central Kentucky and came away with some gorgeous photos and a great story.

“The Southern Yellow Curve” is a detailed article about how I deal with using naturally curved wood in my chairs. The stuff can be tricky. But the results are worth it.

There’s also an interview with the founder of Layout Computer, the single best chairmaking site on the internet (and it’s free).

Plus an article on how to use India ink to get a deep rich black – hands down the easiest way I’ve achieved a non-fading black finish. And other stuff, including some Irish chairs you’ve never seen and a song about how an old chair can be worth more than an inheritance.

We’re already working on issue No. 5, which is going to feature a German settle on the cover.

Here are the files for the Journal.

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Bob Mould is 65. That simple fact brings me great joy.

As someone who has tried to remain creative into middle age, I am constantly worried that I will one day wake up and have nothing else to write. Nothing new to build. No areas of the craft or furniture left that I want to explore.

Yet somehow every day I am eager to pick up the tools, read a new (or old) book and try something I haven’t done before. Will this urge leave me?

Maybe. But maybe not. And so I put on Bob Mould’s album, “Blue Hearts,” and sit down with the LP’s lyric sheet in the library. I’ve been listening to Mould since I was 18, when I first heard “Flip Your Wig” thundering down the hallway of my dorm freshman year.

Mould’s band, Husker Du, was like nothing I had ever heard in Arkansas. And I would argue that he single-handedly changed the course of rock music while he was in his 20s.

Out of debt to this man, I bought every one of his albums when they came out. When he slipped into electronica and dance music in the early 2000s, I was almost done with him. But something on every album – maybe just one song – kept me adding the CDs to my collection.

In 2012, Mould changed gears – he downshifted back into first gear, and the noise was incredible. The album “Silver Age” rejected the drum machine and brought back the loud and distorted guitar that is the sonorous background noise in my skull. The album was as good as anything Mould had written in his 20s. And his following five albums each exceeded the previous one.

I have played his 2020 album “Blue Hearts” so many times I might wear through the 180-gram vinyl.

So anytime I worry about remaining creative into my late 50s and 60s, I remind myself that it’s possible to still stoke the ashes and find the same fire is burning hot below.

Recently, while lying in bed, the topic and structure for my next book came into perfect focus. When that happens, I scribble a few words in a notepad on my nightstand. And I roll over to sleep like a log.

Bob Mould is 65. That fact brings me great joy.

Megan and I are teaching classes in London this fall, and registration is now open. The classes take place before and during the London International Woodworking Festival, which is being held in the Docklands area in East London.

I’m teaching a four-day class in making an Irish stick chair and a second short class on peasant engraving.

Details on the chair class are here.

Details on the engraving class are here. (We’ll be engraving a sample board; the wall cabinet shown is an example of what you can do with engraving.)

Megan is teaching a Dutch tool chest class. Details on her class are here. Megan is also teaching a short seminar on getting the most from your Dutch chest (see details here).

The festival itself is well worth attending. It is easily accessible using public transport, plus there are lots of vendors and craftspeople exhibiting their work.

We hope to see you there.

Congrats to David H., of Colorado – the winner of the Swag Week No. 3 “By Hammer in Hand” poster!

At my first newspaper job, the entire staff was funneled one morning into a nearby auditorium to watch a slideshow put on by the owners of the newspaper. They wanted us to know what was important (to them).

Top of the list: revenue growth and profit.

No. 2: circulation growth and an increase in the paper’s “advertising percentage” (e.g. how much of the newspaper was filled with ads – 20 percent ads is bad; 50 percent is better).

No. 3: Something else, probably about keeping expenses down.

No. 4: A quality product.

When this fourth slide flashed on the screen, all the cynical reporters on the city desk – me included – roared with laughter. I think I blurted in my too-loud voice: “Quality is job four!”

This was during the era when Ford Motors claimed that “Quality is Job # 1.”

For the next year, “Quality is job four” was my mumbling mantra any time that management messed with the city desk reporters. Cutting our overtime pay? Refusing to pay mileage for driving to interviews? Cutting our ability to make long-distance phone calls?

Quality is job No. 4.

Now, 30 years later, I’ve changed my tune. And I am pretty damn sure that quality actually is job No. 4 when it comes to making things such as books, furniture, tools, a business and more.

Now before y’all jump up my butt, hear me out.

What is job No. 1? For me, job No. 1 is “job done.”

The writing/woodworking/toolmaking world is filled with people with big ideas who also have an inability to finish a project, book or tool design. When I taught at Phil Lowe’s woodworking school, he showed me a file folder filled with a book he had written but never finished.

This is Phil m-f Lowe.

He wouldn’t let me paw through the book’s folder, unfortunately. I often wonder: What would Phil Lowe have to say to the craft about furniture making and how to teach it (something he did his entire adult life)?

Second example: John Brown didn’t finish his book “The Anarchist Woodworker.” This book was a guide to setting up a hand-tool shop with basic tools. Parts of the book were excerpted in Good Woodworking magazine. Where is the rest? It’s out there somewhere, I’m told. Put away and unable to inspire a generation.

These are not isolated incidents.

A flawed work is better than an incomplete one. Once you release a piece into the wild, it gets a life of its own – separate from its creator. That fact is bigger than your personal assessment of the tiny details that keep you from letting it out of your hands.

Job No. 2: “Make 20, not one.”

When working with apprentices, I push – first – for quantity over quality. Making one box doesn’t teach you as much as making 10 boxes (and two of them are royally messed up). Write every day. Yes, some/most of it will suck. But when you write or build daily, the quality will improve quickly. Build, get feedback, build better.

Focusing on quantity also allows you to get through all the common mistakes much faster than if you spent one year building one perfect chair or writing one perfect essay. (Side rant: Let’s k-hole the one-full-year-to-make a chair/cabinet/essay. Those pieces have been overworked and have had all the spontaneity drained out of them.)

Job No. 3: “Make it pay.”

If you sell stuff to eat, you should get paid for your work (amateurs can ignore this job). If you produce things and produce things in quantity, money should flow your way. Never work for “exposure.” As one chairmaker quipped: “People die from exposure.”1

Job No. 4: Quality.

Once you are making lots of work and are getting paid for it, you can focus on quality. Relentlessly. I try to make jobs one, two and three automatic so that I can make job No. 4 the never-ending joyful task.

And in case you are wondering, yes, there is a job No. 5. But you can’t do job No. 5 until you have the first four jobs under control.

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What’s “Swag Week?” See the footnote.1

Shown above is probably the only poster we ever made money on. This letterpress poster was designed for us by Brian Stuparyk, who ran a letterpress shop in Newport, Kentucky.

He printed the first run of these posters. Then we did a second run (with Brian’s blessing) with the help of Boxcar Press. Both runs sold out.

A few months ago, I was digging through a folder of artwork and stumbled on an extra poster I didn’t know we had. And now one of our paid subscribers will get it.

The winner will be announced on May 5. See the terms below in the footnote.

When I am too exhausted, ill or busy to work in my shop, I will shuffle down the stairs to my workshop and simply stand there for a few minutes with my hands on my tools.

To be sure, I thought I was a touch nuts because of this personality quirk. But after reading oral histories and diaries of craftsmen from the last 300 years, I found it’s actually a common trait among artisans. I am drawn, married or perhaps addicted to the things that allow me to coax wood into new shapes. At the same time, my relationship with my tools is like a tumultuous combination of an Italian family drama, a bigamist’s decision about with whom to sleep and a careful gardener.

My wife, Lucy, suspects that I form closer relationships with inanimate objects than with people. And she might be right. I can’t remember the last time I raised my voice in anger or became emotional in dealing with friends and family. But I did grab a table leg once and beat the living hell out of a paper-folding machine that I had cleaned, lubricated and generally babied – and it still would only chew up my work.

On the other end of my stunted emotional spectrum, I have three tools that are so reliable that I have feelings for them that I should probably discuss with a therapist. These tools – a smoothing plane, a dovetail saw and a combination square – have become worn in the places where I grip them. They are always at arm’s reach when I build something, and they are the tools I reach for to help me diagnose and fix problems when things go awry.

“The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” is the result of my experiences with tools for the last 45 years, from the time I acquired my first coping saw at age 11 until the day I decided to sell off many of the tools I’d amassed as an adult. It is the tale of my sometimes-rocky relationship with my tools and how these handheld pieces of iron, steel, brass and electrical wire have changed the way I approach my work and my life.

And I hope that this story helps guide you in acquiring a set of tools that will stick with you for the rest of your life. And when you are too old to wield them, I hope you’ll still wander down to your shop in the evenings and lay your hands on their warm and worn wooden totes.

I chose the title of this book with care – it wasn’t the decision of some cynical marketing department. Each of the three important words in the title “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” has a part in the story beyond this page. And when you put the words together, my hope is that the result is greater than the individual components.

The “anarchist” in the title is me. I dislike that word quite a bit, but it is the right one. I hope to make the case that most woodworkers I’ve met are “aesthetic anarchists” – people who work with their hands, own their tools and seek to live in a world where making something (anything) is the goal of each day.

Woodworkers generally labor alone, producing objects that are the result of just our tools, our minds and our hands. And the objects that we build are a slap in the face of the chipboard crap that is forced down our throats at every turn.

So though woodworking might seem a traditional, old-time skill, it is weirdly and wonderfully radical in this consumerist age where buying stuff is good and not buying stuff is considered fringe behavior.

The “tool” in the title is the heart of the book. Tools allow us to shape the world around us. But buying the wrong tools is a monumental waste that could drain your bank account, slow your progress as a woodworker or even sour you on the craft. In the last 25 years, I’ve studied and used more tools than most people see in several lifetimes. Though that sounds like boasting, it’s not something I’m particularly proud of. And you don’t have to make the mistakes that I made.

And the “chest” is the logical result of the first two words. After realizing that I was an aesthetic anarchist and that I didn’t need every tool in the damn store, I built a chest for the tools that I really needed (using the tools I really needed), and I stocked it with this essential set. If the tool doesn’t fit in the chest, then I probably should get rid of it.

In addition to fulfilling the promise of the three magic words in the book’s title (“Klaatu barada...”) I also hope to convince you of one radical notion that has seeped into my life and I hope will infect yours, too: The mere act of owning real tools and having the power to use them is a radical and rare idea that can help change the world around us and – if we are persistent – preserve the craft.

You can read “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” for free, here.

2026 Update: How to Write Good

There isn’t much to add to the text above. I wrote it in a hotel in Deggendorf, Germany, while teaching my first classes overseas. Every night after class, I took a Weissbier up to my room and spent four or five hours writing and rewriting the entire text of “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.”

Somehow, being away from my family, friends, workshop and job coerced me into creating my own connective tissue. And that week in Deggendorf is when “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” went from being an OK book to being a pretty OK book (in my book).

This wasn’t an isolated incident.

Since then, I have found that traveling to far-flung places by myself, usually places I have never been, is the best tonic for my writing. “The Anarchist’s Design Book” was reconceived and rewritten while staying in the tiny village of Sheepwash in Devon. And “The Anarchist’s Workbench” got its sharp edge during my first trip to teach in Florida. (“What,” you might ask? “Florida is in the United States.” To which I say: “Maybe. But it is the strangest place I have ever lived or worked.”)

All this is to say that I’m not writing a book at present. But when I do, I’m pondering a trip to Scotland (perhaps the Orkney Islands), Hungary or Romania.

You’ll thank me for it later.

The best Welsh stick chairs were made using naturally curved timber to make the arm. Because the tree grew in a curve, the arm has no short grain, it doesn’t need a shoe on top of it and the grain runs continuously from hand to hand.

These chairs are rare in the historical record because the curved material is scarce, it is difficult to dry and it’s tricky to work because of internal stresses. The results, however, are worth it.

This chair is made with three pieces of naturally curved yellow pine from a farm in Xenia, Ohio. The tree’s trunk grew with several curves. It grew slowly, and the wood is heavy and dense. The three pieces are joined with long (4") scarf joints and tapered wooden pegs.

The design of the chair follows the old Welsh ideas. The shape of the arm – determined by the tree – is used to lay out the size and shape of the seat. This seat is somewhat harp-shaped. The armbow also determines the placement of the back sticks (you want a stick to go through the center of each scarf).

After many years of studying Welsh forms, I included negative space between the short sticks and long sticks, which are ash. And I placed the arm higher above the seat (about 11") than is typical. This detail adds to the comfort of the chair.

The elm seat is saddled slightly and is 17" off the floor. And the oak comb is steambent. There is no fragile short grain in this chair. The seat is 22" wide, which is 2" wider than usual. The overall height of the chair is 38-1/2". The chair is set up for either lounging or dining. The back sticks tilt 11° off the seat. And the seat tilts 6°.

All the joints are assembled with animal glue and wedges, so repairs will be easy in a couple hundred years. The finish is a completely non-toxic mixture of earth pigments and purified linseed oil. The chair also has a thin coat of beeswax on it to impart a little shine.

I hope to make many more chairs like this in the future. But it really depends on the supply of naturally bent timber. As of now, I have enough in my basement for two more chairs. But they will be different because the curves are different.

How to Buy the Chair

We’re selling this chair via a silent auction. The starting bid is $700. The final high bid is the price you’ll pay. It includes crating and shipping anywhere in the lower 48. There are no additional charges.

If you wish to buy the chair, send an email to lapdrawing@lostartpress.com before 3 p.m. (Eastern) on Thursday, May 7. Please use the subject line: “Welsh chair.” In the email please include your:

• Bid in dollars

• Name

• U.S. shipping address

• Daytime phone number (this is for the trucking quote only)

If you are the winner, the chair will be shipped to your door. The price includes the crate and all shipping charges. Alternatively, the chair can be picked up at our storefront if you prefer.

When I teach, I’m not trying to get you to join a cult. I’m not great at inspiring speeches or blowing students’ minds with insights that move them in the emotional/bowel territory.

I am not trying to create ecstasy in the classroom.

Years ago, I figured out what I am good at when it comes to teaching. And that’s this: Getting shit done. When you take a class with me, I promise that you will finish building your chair, stool, peasant cabinet or tool chest. You’ll have time to paint it or apply finish, too. And no, we’re not working until midnight.

How do I make this happen? Three ways.

1. I don’t like the sound of my own voice. I have figured out how to teach every operation by speaking the fewest words possible. I will not compare sharpening methodologies in the classroom. If you want digressions, let’s do that over a beer. Instead, I’m going to describe the shortest way for you to get from Point A to Point Finished Dingledong.

2. I have carved out every minute of class time in high relief. I know what it takes to get a chair legged up with the stretchers installed (plus or minus a few minutes). I give everyone enough time to do that task. But no more. I draw every step of the process on the board. I invite you to record every lecture (they’re short). I know how many strokes it takes to taper every facet of every part. I force students to stop paying attention to dumb stuff. Are you measuring the width of every facet as you taper a stick? You are going to end up in the ditch. Set your jack rank and plow.

3. I put students on the correct starting line. I don’t teach classes on stock prep or sharpening at the same time I’m teaching an advanced cabinet class. Those are separate classes, worthy and worth taking. When we start work at the bench, everything we’re doing relates to the task at hand (building an XXXX). Meaning: You start class with parts that are perfectly sized and shaped. This isn’t a class in cutting basic curves on the band saw or ripping stock to width.

Instead, I want to teach you how to skew your tool to take a massive and controlled cut to create shapes you didn’t think were possible.

Oh, and when students show up with dull tools, I give them a sharp one and say: “Let’s go.”

If this sounds like a brutal march through the mud, you’re wrong. Students want waypoints to hit, with a realistic time allowed to get there. I give them that goal every morning – first thing. When they start hitting their waypoints with ease, their confidence soars. And they focus on the right thing – the next waypoint.

(What do I mean by that? Some students try to taper their legs with a finely set smoothing plane. Nope. Stop. Use this jack. Yes, it will tear the hell out of the leg in places. You’ll have time to fix that later. Job No. 1 today is: Get the wood out of the way.)

I find the classes to be a rather relaxed affair when everyone works together toward the goal of the day.

So what happens when someone ends up in the ditch? Perhaps they signed up for a class they weren’t ready for. Or they have physical limitations they didn’t expect would be a problem. Or things just go sideways for no good reason.

That’s why I have a capable assistant, even in small classes. Assistants are there to help anyone who needs an assist with a leg or a sightline. Sometimes the assistant has little or nothing to do during a class when students are on the ball. Other times, they have to juggle a little.

Oh, and there’s one more thing about my classes that are weird. I always build the project alongside the students, as does the assistant.

I do this because sometimes – once in 50 classes – someone’s project will fall to pieces at the end. I then gladly sacrifice my piece. “Here. Finish mine.” But when disaster doesn’t happen (it rarely does), then I have a piece I can sell or auction off for a charity or give away.

I think it also shows students that what I’m asking of them is realistic. I can teach a class, build the project and deal with all the little problems that come up in class. So of course you should be able to get this done, too.

So if this doesn’t sound like fun to you, I’m sorry. It is fun, because I try to go out to dinner with the students in the evenings so we can talk about all the dumb stuff that woodworkers love to babble about when they meet other woodworkers.

Please, talk about “back bevels” and “wear bevels” until you are cross-eyed. Ask me whatever questions you like that don’t relate to the class – I don’t have a lot of boundaries or topics that are off-limits. Yeah, I’ll critique your original designs on you phone. And yes, Jell-O shots are a weird and disgusting form of hide glue1.

And the next morning, we’ll all gather at the workshop again with a tight schedule to hit. But we did it yesterday. So there isn’t any reason we can’t hit it again today. And do it all over again tonight and tomorrow.

At the end of the week, the only really “big lesson” I can impart is this: You had this ability in you already. You just needed someone to push you into the pool.

Here’s a schedule for a five-day chair class. You can do this, too.

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When we teach people to cut dovetails for the first time, I like to say that everyone on the planet is born with a certain number of sets of bad dovetails in their hands. And the only way to get rid of those bad dovetails is to make them. Eventually, you run out of bad dovetails, and you’re set for life.

The same is true with writing a book. Every time I start writing, there are at least three or four bad chapters that I have to write in order to get to the good ones.

When I say “bad” I don’t mean they consist of dirty Esperanto limericks or are written from the point of view of the wood (“Oh Reginald, plunge your chisel into my lignin and make my mortise walls tremble”). Usually the chapter is fine in the noun and verb department. It simply doesn’t fit in the book. Square-peg-round-hole stuff.

As I wrote the last few paragraphs in a chapter of “The Stick Chair Book,” I realized it was going to be recycled. The tone was wrong. Part of the tone problem was that I had come up with a better title for the book, and the chapter’s meta devices (there are three points of view) were just wrong.

So here is that now-orphaned chapter. Note that I threw a few placeholder images into the text to break up the grey scrolling. Normally a chapter like this would have 15 to 20 images.

How to Build Any Kind of Chair

At Popular Woodworking Magazine, we had an intern in our workshop who was an odd duck. He was – by the numbers – smarter than anyone I’d met. But when it came to the real world, he had difficulty dressing himself each morning or making sure there wasn’t a piece of scrambled egg on his mouth.

I’ll call him John.

We always insisted our interns build furniture during their summers with us, and the interns sat in our planning meetings each week and were told: Come up with an idea for something to build. You can build it, write a magazine article about the process and end up with a nice piece of furniture and an article with your name at the top. A good deal.

At his first editorial meeting as an intern, John had an idea.

“Have you ever thought about doing an article on how to build a chair?” he asked everyone assembled around the table.

I stifled an immense snort. I asked him: “What sort of chair?”

“Any kind of chair,” he replied.

There was an awkward silence. What John proposed was like writing a bi-fold pamphlet on building a nuclear weapon, or publishing the IKEA directions for ending world hunger. The topic of chairmaking is so huge and complex that writing a 2,000-word magazine article on how to build “any kind of chair” was the most ridiculous proposal I’d ever heard.

And that’s why, more than 20 years later, I can’t stop thinking about it. So, with all apologies to John, I present a magazine article submission titled: “How to Build Any Kind of Chair.”

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How to Build Any Kind of Chair

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A chair is a platform for your butt that also offers support for your back. It may or may not offer support for your arms. That’s all there is – that’s the end of the definition of a chair.

Though the idea of a chair is simple, the thought of building one intimidates many woodworkers.

Once you understand how chairs work – there’s zero voodoo in it – I think you’ll find making any sort of chair to be straightforward. First you need to understand the numbers that make a good chair. Then the materials that make it durable. And finally, the joinery (if the chair has any – it doesn’t have to).

(Ed: No joinery? Are you not going to explain?)

Before we start talking about this stuff, here’s a trick that will help you remember these lessons. Find the most comfortable wooden chair in your house and fetch a tape measure, sliding bevel and protractor. As we talk about the numbers, the wood and the joinery, measure and examine the chair so you can compare it to your “ideal.” You will learn a lot.

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Chair by the Numbers

The seat should be between 15" to 18" from the floor. While 18" is the modern standard, that’s too high for short people. It pinches off the blood supply to the thighs. A height between 16-1/2" and 17" suits a wider range of people without making the chair uncomfortable for the gangly bunch.

(Ed: Need to attribute to “Human Dimension and Interior Space” by Julius Panero and Martin Zelnik.)

A chair that’s too low can be difficult to pull yourself out of (which is not always a bad thing). And a low seat can encourage the sitter to kick out her heels. That posture might not feel as stable as when you have your feet flat on the floor. But I think that a too-low seat is better than a too-high seat. So, I always err on side of making the chair a little lower than a little taller.

The size – width and depth – of the seat is important. The seat should be about 16" deep, from front to back. Deeper seats stop the blood flow behind your knees. Shallow seats are not as big a problem as deep seats. I have made chairs with seats that are 13"-14" deep that sit just fine. Shoot for 16". A little less than 16" is fine; a little more is not.

The width of the seat should be between 20" and 24", unless the sitter is a pencil or an entire package of jumbo magic markers. If you make an armchair too wide, then the armrests will be too far apart to be comfortable. If you make an armchair too skinny, then the sitter might get wedged into the chair. This happens.

The seat should not be parallel to the floor, when measured from front to back.1 Instead, it should pitch backward a bit to encourage the body to slide backward against the backrest of the chair. If the chair is intended for typing or eating – where an upright posture is preferred – pitch the seat so it falls 3/4" from front to back.

(Ed: Are you sure that seats should never be parallel to the floor? What about stools? Swing-out seats? Might want to qualify your statement.)

If you want the chair for reading or conversation, double the pitch so it’s 1-1/2" from front to back.

If you make the seat parallel to the floor, the sitter might feel like he is being pitched forward. On the other hand, if you make the seat so it slopes 2" (or more) toward the back, you can force the sitter’s back into some unnatural positions, depending on the shape of the chair’s backrest.

I do not expect you to believe that such small changes make a huge difference. So do an experiment. Take a wooden chair in your house and prop up the front feet on 3/4″-thick blocks. Sit in the chair for about 15 minutes. Move the blocks to the back feet and sit for another 15 minutes – if you can stand it.

Oh, while we are putting blocks of wood under the legs, what about the angles of the legs? Aren’t they important? Yes and no. They can be straight up and down and still work, depending on the chair. Think about it this way: The footprint of the chair is what’s important. Think about the sitter and where her feet are and where the small of her back is (that is a sitter’s center of gravity). If the front legs jut out forward of the seat, her feet might get tangled up in them. Or she might snag a leg as she walks by the chair.

For the back legs, you have to look at the backrest (more on those numbers shortly). If the chair’s backrest leans out a lot past the back of the seat, but the legs do not, then the chair will be tippy. Put another way, the feet of the back legs should be roughly under the small back/lumbar of the sitter.

So, the angles of the legs are important. But mostly they control how the chair looks.

(Ed: But can’t you give a range as to what’s acceptable? What’s too much? 20° 25°? And don’t you need to say these angles don’t apply to ladderback chairs?)

The seat of a chair – what we call the saddle – can be scooped out so it’s curvy like the human buttocks or it can be as flat as a board. A little curvature improves comfort. A lot of curvature turns the chair into a Jell-O mold, which is uncomfortable. I aim to scoop out 3/8" to 1/2″ of the seat. But I don’t have a lot of cushion on my pelvis. You might want more or less scooping.

In the end, I err on a shallow saddle as it’s called. You can always add a cushion or sheepskin to a seat to make it more comfortable. A deep saddle cannot be fixed with fluffy accessories.

(Ed: Again, shouldn’t we mention ladderbacks here? The seat is neither flat nor “scooped.” It has some give to it because of the material. Might want to add something about this.)

Now let’s move to the backrest. Every chair has one, otherwise it’s just a stool. The backrest can be as simple as a flat board or a steam-bent slat. Or it can be as complex as a curve of bent and shaped spindles. In general, the backrest is designed to touch the back at one or two places: the lumbar (or lower back) and the shoulders. There is no rule that says which arrangement is best. As a chairmaker, I say that it’s easier to make a chair comfortable when it supports the shoulders. Chairs that support the lumbar only are trickier to make.

The backrest is rarely at 90° to the seat – thank goodness. The backrest should angle back. I think 10°-15° is a good place to start for chairs made for eating or typing. For chairs designed for lounging, try 20° to 25°.

(Ed: Are you saying that ladderback chairs with 90° backs are uncomfortable? You are going to catch flack for that.)

For chairs that support the lumbar, the sitter’s back should encounter the backrest about 9" or 10" above the seat. For chairs that support the shoulders, the sitter should encounter the backrest between 16" and 22" above the seat. How they encounter the backrest is up to you. It can be an array of spindles, a curved piece of wood or even a cushion.

The armrests (if your chair has them) should be about 8" to 12" above the seat. Luckily this height is similar to where the lumbar is, so you can make the backrest and arms as one piece that does two jobs.

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Wood for Chairs

It’s easy to become a fundamentalist about how the wood in a chair must be perfect and straight and strong. Not every chairmaker works this way. If a batch of wood is weak for some reason, you can overcome this by using thicker stock. If, on the other hand, you have perfectly rived stock, you can make it pencil thin and the parts will flex but not break.

The goal of all chairmakers is to avoid “short grain,” which is where the grain doesn’t follow the shape of the part. Short grain makes the part prone to splitting. You can avoid short grain lots of ways. The bottom line is to pay attention to the wood and adapt your plans to suit it.

Let’s talk about the different parts of a chair and the kind of wood that’s ideal for each.

For the legs, spindles and stretchers, the grain should be as straight as possible. Ideally, the wood fibers should run dead straight through every piece. That’s why many chairmakers prefer rived wood, where the wood is split along the fibers.

Not everyone can get rived wood with ease. The (not always mentioned) alternative is to saw the wood along the grain to get the straightest grain possible. This produces excellent results. For these straight components, many chairmakers prefer oak, ash or hickory. You can use other species, such as walnut, beech or cherry, but you should consider beefing them up in size.

(Ed: Can you say how much you should beef up the spindles when they are walnut etc.? Maybe 1/8" in diameter? Or is there a test? Maybe striking them with a small sledgehammer?)

For a solid plank seat, it’s best to use a species that doesn’t split easily. Pine and poplar are popular choices in the United States. The elms are excellent seat material. But really, anything will do for a plank seat. You can also make a seat by creating a joined frame and wrapping it in a fibrous material (such as bark or cloth). Or upholstery.

(Ed: Really, pine? White pine? Aren’t you worried about a lawsuit here?)

The arms and other curved components can be sawn out of solid wood or steambent to shape. You also can use a modern cold-bend hardwood (which works a lot like steambent wood without requiring heat).

(Ed: Can we give a source for this “cold-bend” stuff? A search turns up “Pure Timber LLC” in Washington.)

If you saw a curved component out of solid stock, you definitely risk it splitting because of short grain. You can get around this problem by laminating three or four pieces together to reinforce the short grain. Yup, just like plywood. This is an old trick.

A lot of would-be chairmakers get worked up about the sizes of all the components. How thick should each component be so the chair is strong enough to hold a person without breaking? Just like with casework, chairmakers use woods in fairly standard thicknesses.

Legs, stretchers and seats are made from 8/4 stock (which is 2" thick in the rough and finishes off at 1-5/8" to 1-7/8"). Arms are typically made from 5/4 (1-1/4" in the rough that can finish out at 1" to 1-1/8"). Sticks or spindles are usually 3/4" at their thickest and taper to 5/8" at the seat and maybe 1/2" at the top of a tall chair. However, sticks are usually cut from thicker stock (such as 8/4) so you can straighten the grain and get a strong component.

In the end, almost any wood can be used to make a chair. It might have to be a little thicker than what you see in the woodworking magazines. You might have to glue up a few thicknesses of wood to avoid short grain. And the wood might be so ugly that you have to paint it. But know that even construction lumber can make a good chair. I’ve done it. You just have to be smart about it.

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Chair Joinery

There are three (no four) kinds of chair joints:

1. A squared-off mortise-and-tenon joint – the same joint used in casework. The only notable difference is that chairs require better-quality fits than casework. Unlike a cabinet, chairs are tortured by children and won’t hang on the wall in peace.

2. Cylindrical joints. The mortise is round, as is the tenon. The fit needs to be snug. And there are tricks to make a wet mortise tighten up on a dry tenon. Truth: Dowels are cylindrical joints, though they are often used poorly.

3. Conical joints. These joints are typically used where the legs enter a plank seat. They tighten the more you sit on the seat, but they require special tools to ream the hole to the conical shape.

4. Mechanical fasteners. Some chairs – particularly commercial ones – are joined by screws, nails or fancier hardware that provides a mechanical lock. To be honest, if you throw enough wood and metal fasteners at any object you can make it sturdy. But it is unlikely to be graceful. In general, metal fasteners play a limited role in traditional chairmaking. Except to repair old chairs, which is where they often make things worse.

No matter what sort of joint you use in chairmaking, the fit between the components is the key to the joint lasting a long time. Tenons should require effort to enter the mortise. Wedges or pegs should be used whenever possible to reinforce the joint. And use glue. Some purists insist you don’t need it. While that might be true, glue is dirt cheap and doesn’t hurt the strength of the joint. So why not paint some on during assembly?

<ED: Rough transition here. Can you add something that eases readers into the final grafs?)

Of course, none of the above information tells you how to make a chair that is attractive. That is the hard part. And unfortunately, there isn’t a magazine article out there with the headline “How to Make Any Chair Look Good” to help you.

(Ed: Maybe this is a possible article for the June issue?)

So how do you make a good-looking chair? The answer might be right in front of you. If you took my advice above and examined the best chair in your house while you read this article, then you took an important first step. To design nice chairs, you need to look at lot of chairs – old, new, ugly and gorgeous. Find out what separates the fantastic from the flatpack. Measure the angles – your eye can be easily deceived. Make sketches of the chairs you like the most.

But most of all, build chairs. The next one will be better.

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Christopher Schwarz is a woodworker and writer in Covington, Ky. He is currently at work on his next chair, which really will be beautiful this time.

I don’t teach furniture design. Someday I might scribble my ideas and processes into a pocket-sized book, but for now I prefer to cede the mic to people who have spent their lives studying history, modules and proportions, such as William H. Varnum, George Walker and Jim Tolpin.

But by mentioning the word “design,” I have opened a can of worms, so now I must lie in it.

Today I want to warn you about a common mistake made by furniture makers and chairmakers who set out to design original pieces. I’ve made it. I see it on the internet, in my classroom and in the design classes I’ve observed at schools all over the world.

It’s a problem that began in 1923 in Los Angeles.

That’s when Walt Disney began his animation studio and unleashed a visual style on the world that has become engrained in most human minds. Few Western children escape Disney movies, which are watched on repeat for years of their early lives.

I’m not criticizing parents. My kids saw more Disney than most. And I’m not here to judge whether Disney is bad, neutral or benevolent (nor do I want to debate it). Instead, I’m here to talk about the furniture in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of Disney cartoons and how it has infected the real world.

Like most things in cartoons, the furniture in Disney cartoons has a grounding in reality. You’ll see Chippendale legs, Queen Anne beds (pretty much anything Rococo), 17^th-century style chip-carved trimwork and what I fondly call “cottage core.” This is because – of course – animators know about furniture styles.

But what Disney does to furniture on the screen is same thing it does to the characters: It exaggerates one key feature. The same way Pocohontas (a complex historical character) gets boiled down into Hot Native American Good Person, a wingback chair in the Disney world gets drawn with wings that would keep a 747 aloft.

And if you’re thinking “So what, Swartz. It’s just a dumb cartoon,” I agree with you. The cartoons are the cartoons.1 Instead, what’s interesting to me is how Disney’s ideas about cartoon furniture (e.g. exaggerate one feature) seep into the real world.

When students bring their own ideas about chairs into the classroom, I can see Walt Disney at work. The students will take a regular chair design and exaggerate one aspect of it. One student decided to exaggerate a chair’s geometry in the extreme (you know who you are), and he designed a chair that almost couldn’t go together in our three-dimensional world.

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… then they would have had joints that failed suddenly instead of slowly and gradually – like a mortise-and-tenon does. I know this after dropping an anvil on a lot of joints.

If they’d had a router, they would have used it – unless they didn’t want to sand out all the machine marks on the mouldings.

If they’d had a dovetail jig, they would have used it – unless they didn’t want the jig to dictate the height of their drawers (and they didn’t want to spend four hours setting it up).

If they’d had a random-orbit sander, they would have used it – unless they were skilled with a handplane, which would make them faster than the sander. And they might not have wanted to spend the money on sandpaper, which has always been expensive.

If they’d had PVA, they would have used it – unless they wanted their joints to be reversible and unless they wanted to dial in the gram strength and open time of their adhesive.

If they’d had dowels, they would have used them – unless they preferred a joint that wasn’t mostly end grain.

If they’d had a table saw, they would have used it – unless they wanted zero grain runout on their stock (which is what you get when you rive your wood) so it was as strong as possible.

If they’d had a drill press, they would have used it – unless they wanted to drill a hole at any other angle than 90°.

If they’d had a chop saw, they would have used it – unless they wanted to saw something angled or compound.

OK, I’m sure you’re sick of this line of thought. I am. Truth is, I dislike talking about this sort of stuff. Work wood the way you want to. But when you get assaulted by people who say that power tools would rule if they were sent back in time through some wormhole, I have to laugh.

I have access to a CNC machine. I would never use it for building furniture.

I have access to fancy word processors that will correct my grammar, spelling and punctuation, but I never use them. They slow me down, try to correct things I don’t want to correct and generally get in the way of good writing.

I could buy a car with an automatic transmission, but it would interfere with the amount of control I want when I drive.

I prefer vinyl over digital music. Et cetera.

We all make choices about the technology we employ in every task we do. So why would we assume that the people of the past would like to do things the way we do? I sure as heck don’t want to “print” a piece of furniture using a 3D printer. Or “grow” it using intelligent polymers. Trust me, that’s coming.

When that day arrives, then maybe all woodworkers will stand united. Until then, let’s allow the woodworkers of the past to enjoy the rest they earned.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Be sure to read Peter Follansbee’s take on this topic on his blog.

When I quit my day job in 2011, my plan to make a living was:

1. Grow Lost Art Press (that year I made about $30,000 from the press before taxes).

2. Engage in non-embarrassing freelance work.

3. Teach a few classes.

4. Sell furniture through commissions, craft shows and juried shows.

The plan worked. And my commission book got backed up so quickly that I didn’t have the time to do craft shows or juried shows. Until now.

I entered my work in the No Coast Furniture Show, which is sponsored by the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). My work was accepted (whew), and so I had to build two pieces for the show.

I made two Bebb chairs in black cherry. I had two weeks to build them, which I thought was plenty of time (it wasn’t). But this evening, Katherine and I dropped off the chairs (plus the plinth that Kale and Katherine built) at the gallery space. And tomorrow, the show opens for a three-week run.

Even though I’ve been selling furniture for a long time, entering a show is a different thing. There are 40 other woodworkers there who are putting out their best work. And there is no hiding behind photography for any of us.

And what if my pieces don’t sell? Will that be embarrassing? Or will it make me try harder?

I guess we’ll find out.

The show opens at 6 p.m. on Friday, April 17, at 1800 Race St. in Cincinnati, Ohio. The opening night features drinks from Northern Row Brewery up the street. I’ll be there Friday if you’d like to come harass me and see the pieces on display. The show closes on May 3.

I’ve priced these two chairs below what I normally sell stick chairs for. So if you are looking for a bargain (or a matched set of chairs), this is your chance.

As I was building these chairs into the wee hours over the weekend, I asked myself why I entered the show and took on all the extra work and deadlines. The answer: You have to push yourself to get better. Do new things. Meet new people.

But that’s tomorrow. Tonight I’m taking a well-earned nap on the couch with Funky Winkerbean (a cat, you perverts).

Because hammers are simple (rock+stick+anger issues), people think it’s easy to choose the right one. They’re wrong. Many woodworking students show up with a ridiculous collection of striking tools. For the most part, they underestimate the weight and smack of the tools required.

Why won’t your chair/chest go together? Because you are hitting it with a balloon.

So let’s talk about striking tools: what you need and why.

Farewell to Plastic

There is no convincing argument to own a plastic striking tool in a furniture shop. Urethane or deadblow mallets aren’t necessary. They never have been. If you want to hit your work directly with a mallet, simply glue leather onto the striking face. Problem solved.1

I have worked with all the special polymers and chemically formulated striking faces on the Thorex mallets and other similar tools. I do not care for them because I do not like bald plastic. The plastic heads don’t do a better job than mallets made metal. And – for the most part – the plastic mallets do not have the weight needed to assemble and disassemble complex pieces.

People will tell you that you need a Shore A 63-73 head, plus four other heads for all your striking needs. You don’t. And you especially don’t need a lightweight plastic hammer for chairmaking. In every class I teach I have some poor soul who is unable to set their legs in place because they are hitting the legs with a rubber eraser. It doesn’t matter how strong you are, plastic hammers are not your friend. There are more elemental ways to get the job done.

Get Thee a Lump Hammer

You don’t have to buy our lump hammer (even though Queen Amidala fancies it for rock climbing). A cheap 1,000-gram (2.5 lbs.) lump hammer will change the way you do joinery. It’s essential for making staked furniture. You need some smack to get the legs into their mortises (and out of them, at times). And it will set the tightest dovetails in the largest case pieces. It is capable of great finesse, and it can unlock the tightest joints.

A lump hammer in this size is just right (this is not my opinion. This is from furniture making savants Alan Peters and David Savage). It won’t wear you out (like a 4 lb. sledge will). But it will solve all your problems when your joints lock up.

Here’s a bargain from Council Tools. A 2.5 lb. U.S.-made lumpy for less than $30. They aren’t pretty, but they do the job well. Or, if you don’t mind a few human rights abuses, you can buy one for $9 from Harbor Freight.

Or buy one used. I love the Japanese SECO hammers, which is what I used before we started making the lumps ourselves.

Right now, our shop has 1.5 lump hammers for every woodworker who works here. That’s about right.

A Good 16-ounce Nail Hammer

When setting wedges or big nails (6d and larger) a 16-ounce hammer is the answer. I like a wooden-handled one. The fiberglass ones are terrible vibrators, as are the metal ones wrapped in plastic or leather. Vintage is easy to get.

When I am looking for hammers for friends or apprentices, I first search out the red-handled Plumb hammers with an octagonal handle. There are millions of them out there. Online, expect to pay $40. In person, the ditch is the limit.

And while I love this size hammer, it is too wimpy to set legs deeply into elm seats. And it is overkill for small nails and for adjusting handplanes. But for driving big nails and wedges at assembly time, it is ideal.

(Why not use a lump hammer for these jobs? The head is so big that you cannot see what you are doing. That is, until you smash your fingers, which you could not see.2)

The 12- or 13-ounce Hammer

This hammer is what I have on my bench when building carcases. It is ideal for driving furniture nails (4d and smaller). And it makes small adjustments to handplanes. I like our Exeter hammer (duh) because it has a peen that helps me set small nails and adjust block planes (the peen sneaks into places the head cannot go).

Again, this hammer is so dang common you don’t have to buy ours. These hammers are as common as dirt. Which is the proof as to how useful they are. Get one.

Wooden Square-head Mallets?

Can we pause for a moment and say that I’ve never liked square-head joiners’ mallets? I have tried on many occasions to embrace them. I find their heads are too big. They don’t have enough “punch,” and they are fragile.

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Several years ago, I reached into the fridge while looking for a beer and found a Stone IPA. I used to love this beer, but I hadn’t had one in years. Why? I always seem to chase something new. Weirder. More IBUs. Odd yeast. Whatever.

I poured the Stone beer into a glass, took a sip and became 30 years old again. What an amazing beer. Why have I eschewed this well-made staple in favor of temperamental exotics?

It’s human nature, I guess. We are easily excited by things that are new and novel in comparison to things that are familiar and tried. Not just for beer. But for workbenches and vises as well.

This fact was driven home as I built the workbenches and workholding devices for “Ingenious Mechanicks.” As I put these “obsolete” designs to work, I was pleasantly surprised by how robust, straightforward and easy they were to use. If you have a modicum of hand-eye coordination, you’ll find that these benches and appliances work like old friends.

They have some advantages to modern vises. Their simplicity is at the top of the list.

In 2018, we had 10 workbenches in our shop in Covington, Ky. The earliest was from 79 A.D. and the latest was from about 1970. One thing we learned: the more modern the bench, the more maintenance it required. Modern screw-driven vises can suffer from all manner of odd problems. The more parts a thing has, the more things that can go wrong.

Oh, and metal parts that move have special requirements. Rust is a problem. Beyond that, metal parts are typically fit so closely that almost anything can gum up the works, including pitch, sawdust and shavings.

Too-obvious Solutions

For the first 1,500 years of the so-called “common era,” woodworkers used benches that were simple. They were mostly wood with very few metal bits. Instead of relying on brute mechanical force to hold the work steady, these benches relied on clever geometry, wedges and pegs.

As I folded these ideas into my work, they became second nature. And as I finished up work on “Ingenious Mechanicks” in 2017, I thought to myself: “This book is utterly stupid. All these things are obvious and not worth discussing.”

Good thing I have customers and friends. As I explained to them how these dirt-simple appliances functioned, I saw their surprise. It was the same surprise I felt when I first encountered the doe’s foot, the palm or the belly.

You Can Help

To be sure, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is an incomplete work. Suzanne Ellison and I scoured every museum, painting and old book we could find to offer a new look at ancient benches. But what is missing is the complete and unabridged instruction manual for these benches.

I built a lot of furniture using these benches and appliances, but there is still much work to be done. Every time I sit down on these benches and get to work, my head is filled with new ideas about how these benches work. I crammed as many of these ideas into “Ingenious Mechanicks” as I could, but there is lots of work to be done.

If you pick up this book and put its ideas to use, you will be part of a group of experimental archaeologists who are exploring the past – the largest undiscovered country on earth. Woodworking (and workbenches) didn’t begin in the 17th century. That’s just when the written record begins.

Like all my books, “Ingenious Mechanicks” is a free pdf download. You don’t have to register for anything. Just click the link and you’ll have a PDF of the book.Here you go:

Download “Ingenious Mechanicks”