Beechwood bodging - pt.3
shaping the seats
[ soundtrack : Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares - Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir ]
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As so often, the necessity of making filthy lucre tends to get in the way of wholesome blogging, hence the limited scope of today’s post.
In part 2 of this bodging bonanza I managed to drill angled holes (mortises) in the seats. Never having made a chair stool like this before, I was unsure of which angle to use, and how far in from the edge I should drill the holes. I decided on 10° and 50 mm in from the edge - on the underside, obviously - just to start somewhere (you can tell by the numbers that I’m a metric boy :-)
It didn’t look quite right to me …
The stance seems a bit ‘uptight’ and bowlegged at the same time, so I tried increasing the angle to 12° …
… and the ‘inset’ to 65 mm.
I think it made for an improvement, but being new to this chairmaking business I have not developed any strong preferences yet, I just go by eye.
The fit between the cylindrical tenon and the hole (mortise) in the seat was tight; not because it was precise, but because my shitty green Bosch drill press has a degree of sideways play and shifts as it bores down, making for a ‘snaking’ hole. I detest sloppy machines — they just make more work for you! I had to knock the leg home with a lump hammer and knock it out again using a big, old bolt as a punch, and yet there was a gap between mortise & tenon.
The shitty green Bosch’s days are numbered.
Next up was lightening that slab of a seat; it’s made of 48 mm beech. If my thicknesser were wider I’d have reduced it to 40 mm or thereabouts before even beginning, but it’s not, so I had to find other ways to lighten the seat — both visually and by weight.
I began by dividing its thickness by three (48 mm / 3 = 16 mm) before scrub-planing a convex slope on the underside, towards the edges of the seat.
Beech is hard and needs keen steel to cut clean, so I gave the scrub-iron some rolling licks on my new stropping blocks before beginning on each seat.
The stropping blocks worked a treat — I’m very pleased with that!
As I mentioned previously, I usually make things that are straight and square, so it’s a joy to shape wood.
When the bulk of the underside was reduced, I routed a 16 mm roundover on the upper circumference, using my small routing table and a ball bearing bit.
I set it to cut a 3 mm deep step …
… because I wanted to give the upper side of the seat a slight camber, too. This 3 mm ledge would be my ‘reference depth’. Any hollow saddling on such a small, tri-directional seat would just be silly.
Then, some spokeshavin’ to round over the underside edge …
… before planing a slight camber to the sitting side.
I’ve come to enjoy working with beechwood; I’d say it’s an acquired taste. The stuff I’m using here are leftovers from a wheelchair-threshold job; from German forests, ‘boiled’ and kiln-dried. Boiled? As far as I’ve understood: Beech is dense, hard and a bastard to dry well — it’ll twist, crack and contort, leaving little usable lumber. To ‘tame’ it they heat it well hot with steam (‘boiling’) so that the lignin that glues the cellulose fibres together softens and ‘relaxes’, before drying and cooling it gently down to moisture levels us Tischlers can work with. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. Drying lumber is one of the black arts and anyone able to do it proficiently ought to be well paid!
Beech is hard, very fine-pored and homogeneous in structure; the growth rings do not advertise their existence; there are no strongly patterned ‘drawings’ on even the flatsawn surfaces. A bit boring, perhaps, but useful when you don’t need any bold patterns to distract from the shape you’re trying to develop. Highly figured woods can be used decoratively but are too often employed to garish excess — it tends to obfuscate the shape of a piece — a bit like tattoos clutter up the beauty of the human form.
They call it ‘red beech’ but I’ve been told it doesn’t get its pinkish hue before after it’s been ‘boiled’. Green (not kiln-dried) beechwood is fairly ‘white’, some say. I do not know. If any of my readers do, please leave your two cents in the comments! Oiled beech has the skin tone of a blonde girl who’s spent the summer sailing.
Handplanes will only take you so far. After that, it’s time for the abrasive caresses of a rasp.
My old, blue Bosch sander can always be trusted to smooth things over ...
… but nothing says ‘I love you’ like hand-sanding.
It’s hard to fake persistence when battling tedium. Nothing will happen at the push of a button — there are no buttons to press.
You can’t do stuff like this on anything you plan to sell to make a living …
… but sometimes it’s a joy to make something of wood that’s sanded sweetly semi-amorphous, like a flat river-stone that has tumbled all the way from the mountains to the sea.
A desire, hard to explain.
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I can kill two birds with one stone. I had a full stem of beech planked up for me at the estate back in 2022 and it's been sitting in the eaves of my workshop drying out. In 2023 I milled it down a bit into lengths for a series of doors for the workshop.
In terms of colour it's very light, nowhere near holly white, but it is very pale. I much prefer it to the pink steamed stuff, but, tap dancing christ does it move when it is drying. So unless I was buying it dry, I go steamed every time. The lengths I milled for doors are comically undulated and useless for their intended purpose, so they're currently being used as spacers on a king size mattress on an European king frame.
Drying wood is the darkest of arts, it makes no sense, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say the way the tree is grown makes all the difference when drying it out. There's a reason managed timber forests are grown in grids in tight spaces. You want arrow straight stems grown plumb to the ground, with no twist and no defects. The hardwoods especially need to be thinned and high pruned with the utmost care and dedication to the end product. The oak woodland I'm thinning is a great example. All the mutant oaks are thanked for their efforts and contribution to the ecology, and then I slay them and turn them info firewood.
Enjoying seeing these stools slowly come together!
I assume when using a rasp to shape wood you have to be careful of the wood tearing? Or is it inevitable?