Getting Started

These Windsor chairs are made up of 3 distinct parts: the seat, everything below the seat (legs and stretchers), and everything above the seat (spindles and the bow). The legs and stretchers are turned on a lathe. The seat is prepped with a handplane, roughed out to basic shape on a bandsaw, and then carved with a variety of tools. The spindles and bow are split from green wood (red oak in this case), and then shaped with a drawknife and a spokeshave. For the most part, this is all handwork - although the lathe is powered by an electric motor, woodturning is most certainly a hand skill (and a difficult one at that).

The first Balloon-back I made on my own

I love a number of things about this process: seeing the wood change from rough to finished, the way the chair becomes an organic thing where you lose the feeling of it being composed of separate pieces, the many pieces of clever engineering which make these chairs last, the sense that even though the process is complicated and easy to mess up, it's also forgiving in many ways...

Future posts will jump around a bit, because that is the way the chair progresses. First, the seat blanks need to be prepped. Next the spindles and bow need to be shaped and bent. Then I turn the legs and stretchers - almost to their finished state, but not quite. Then back to the seat. Then back to the legs. Then back to the bow and spindles. :)

Fanback side chairs waiting for paint