One example that often puzzled people is the three-legged turned chairs that we see frequently in Dutch genre paintings of the 17th century. There are many of these chairs surviving in English collections, some quite elaborate, some fairly simple. The principal feature is a board seat secured in grooves plowed in the seat rails. For this sort of seat to work, the rails have to be at the same height, unlike a woven chair seat in which the side and front rails are staggered. In the board-seated chairs, the seat rails intersect inside the chairs’ posts. Often there is a rectangular tenon that is pierced by a round turned tenon. Some chairs have large and small turned tenons. There are...
“I am not very good at visualizing the final outcome of my projects. Unless taking the time to make a detailed prototype is justifiable (almost never in my case), I often employ what programmers and software designers have come to call “iterative design” – a cyclical method of tweaking and refining the product as the user provides feedback. This is merely a fancy-pants way of saying that I make it up as I go along. So, seeing the bench at its final height, I decided to remove some of the bulk in the middle. I laid out a relief where my legs will be, and sawed several relief cuts, then chopped out the waste with a chisel. The top and...
“As a couple well-meaning colleagues and concerned friends told me, taking a detour to teach hand-tool woodworking in a high school English class was a bad idea. Regardless of how enthusiastic I felt about it. I’d be adding even more chaos into the classroom, like tossing another flaming chainsaw to someone on a unicycle already juggling 10 of them. Ask a teacher you know, and they’ll tell you that on any given day, they wear a lot of hats. They pivot between being a public speaker, a cheerleader, a counselor, a lion-tamer, an event planner, a hostage negotiator, a psychological puppetmaster, and (thankfully, not often) a triage nurse. I don’t mean to complain – the unpredictability of my career is...
