The Woodshop Shed

Made a Chair from a Tree

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


I took a chair-making class in July 2022 with Kenneth and Angela Kortemeir at their Maine Coast Craft School, off-grid in the Maine woods. Kenneth makes beautiful stuff and knows how to gently help you do the same. We followed the method in the Make a Chair from a Tree book pretty closely. Each student completed a chair in seven days, using hand tools only, starting from a green oak log and ending with weaving the seat.We started splitting a large fresh oak log with starter wedges. You could see the moisture squirt out as the wedges went in. We used froes to further split the wood to try to get close to the size of the posts and rungs.Then the main work began with drawknives and shave horses. It took a while to turn out usable parts. We squared the posts, then made octagons, being careful to follow the fibers in the wood. This took days of intense work.We steam-bent the back posts to get a comfortable back angle. We chopped the back slat mortises with chisels. We bored the rung mortises with a brace and bit using levels and other tools. I tried to make a perfect tenon with a spokeshave, but quickly switched to Kenneth's hand-powered tenon cutter, which gave perfect results.On the last day, in the morning, we split the back slats, shaved them to 3/16ths, steam-bent them, and installed them with walnut pins. In the afternoon we wove the chair seat from Shaker tape. This was the best class I have ever taken. Finish is pure tung oil with a little citrus solvent. Thanks for looking.

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