It rarely happens, but I sold this chair before the glue was dry. On Wednesday, I was remaking the chair’s backrest to provide some more shoulder support, when an old friend stopped by the workshop for a visit.
He saw the unfinished chair on the bench and asked to sit in it.
My friend weighs about 360 lbs., but that didn’t make me flinch. This chair can easily handle that weight (and more). He sat in the chair, smiled and said: “I want it. How much?”
The Stoutback chair is a small attempt to provide an attractive-looking wooden chair that is comfortable for large people but doesn’t look cartoonish.1 I accomplished this by carefully choosing my raw materials and by adjusting the sizes of the joinery and parts to add strength.
This chair sits much like my Irish Armchair, with a 20° tilt to the back and excellent support for your shoulders. The seat is 16" deep and 26" wide, which is 6" wider than my standard chairs. All the joints and part sizes were increased by about 1/8", which adds considerable strength without adding visual bulk.
The other key to this chair is the wood. The seat and arms are made using red elm (Ulmus rubra), which resists splitting. This makes it the perfect material for these components. The rest of the chair is shagbark hickory (Carya ovata). Hickory is insanely strong, which is why we use it for hammer handles at Crucible.
These species are surprisingly visually compatible. After adding a coat of soft wax, the two species blended together, except for the sapwood hickory I chose (on purpose) for the sticks.
I don’t know if this chair will become a regular part of my output for sale. I’m going to make a few more Stoutbacks for sale and see how they’re received. Some chair forms (such as the Hobbit-y chair and lowback) are more difficult to sell. These chairs are as much work (or more) as a comb-back chair, but they never seem to fetch as good a price.
After making up a set of permanent patterns for the Stoutback chair, I drew them up in CAD and prepared a sheet of full-size patterns on a 36" x 24" sheet (which can be printed easily at any place with large-format printers). Paid subscribers can download the PDF of the patterns below.
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