Rietveld Crate Chair
Gerrit Rietveld’s simple design for a lounge chair is a great platform for exploring ergonomics. PROJECT #2005 • Skill Level:Beginner • Time: 4 hours • Cost: $50 Gerrit Rietveld was a Dutch [...]
Gustav Stickley Morris Chair
Sit up straight. Or lean back and relax. This Gustav Stickley Morris chair is an icon of American furniture design with exposed joinery and solid quartersawn white oak. Reproduce an Arts & [...]
Bob Erickson Interview
While visiting with chairmaker Bob Erickson (pictured above with his son Tor), it seems appropriate to ask, “What chair are you sitting in right now?” He explains it’s an [...]
Five Lessons from the Staked Chair Project
I moved to Kentucky/Cincinnati on July 1st, and by the 15th of the month, I was already starting out on building the furniture for my new house here. Josselyn (my partner) and I had committed to [...]
Shaving Horse & Drawknife Basics
Traditional chairmaking starts with a shaving horse and a drawknife. Used with both green and dried wood, woodworkers have relied on these two tools for centuries. Simple to use, there are just a [...]
Clamping a Chair is Like Hugging an Eel
One of the challenges when building a chair is clamping the dang thing down so you can work on it. I’ve seen lots of solutions that use band clamps. But I dislike band clamps (perhaps I had a bad [...]
Take the Fear Out of Chairmaking
When you make a table it’s fairly straightforward. Four legs (or some variation thereof) and a top. Not too hard. If you choose to splay the legs, then you’ve added some geometry and math to the [...]
Steam Powered
Successful wood bending with heat and water is more art than science. Long ago, some caveman made a curious discovery: Wood becomes pliable when it is both hot and wet, allowing it to be bent to [...]
Galbert Drawsharp in Use
Before you read beyond the first few sentences of this blog entry, there a couple things you should know: I have no problems sharpening a drawknife. Never have (except that time in the 1990s [...]
Scoop a Chair Seat on the Table Saw with Mario Rodriguez
Mario Rodriguez of the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop has an article in our August 2013 issue that shows you how to build a clever table saw jig he uses to carve the chair seat for his [...]
A Visit with Woodworker/President Jimmy Carter
No matter what your political bent, you’ll want to check out the latest episode of Charles Brock’s The Highland Woodworker, which Popular Woodworking proudly sponsors, and [...]
Chair Joinery: Tapered Tenons & Tapered Mortises
Because chairs take abuse like a rented mule, the simple mortise-and-tenon joint is sometimes not enough. In traditional Windsor chair construction, the legs and spindles are attached to the [...]
