January 2026

Winter, Stick Chair Progress

Feb 01, 2026

This has been a cold winter! In January I have been reading books about farming and building, planning projects for next year (more on that later), and spending a couple days every week in the workshop in Beverly. My main focus in the workshop has been my stick chair, but I managed a few other small projects. I also moved my table saw out there, which ended up taking a few days to get all set up. Cleo has been working her new job providing free immigration removal defense through MACI, and we have been working on wedding planning every Wedding Wednesday.

Large Print

Cleo and I decided that the space above our couch needed a large painting. I had seen some things online about ordering high quality prints of paintings and mounting them and wanted to try it out myself. I ordered a 54”x36” giclee print of Marry Cassatt’s Lydia Sitting on a Porch, Crocheting, one of Cleo’s favorite artists, and mounted it to a sheet of 1/4 inch plywood. I then glued some boards to the back of the plywood to keep it flat and nailed some strips around the edge to simulate a frame. I like the way it looks on the wall but am a little disappointed on the finish of the frame edges. I was feeling a little rushed on the day I did this and it shows. Still, I think this is a good proof of the method and a great way to get high quality prints on your wall for not too much money, the project cost about $150.

Table Saw

I also moved my table saw and all my other tools from Worcester to Beverly. I got this Craftsman 113 table saw at the Re-Store two years ago for $25. It is from the 70s or 80s. When I got it, the motor was running rough and the pulley was missing, but a new blade, motor capacitor, and pulley got it working for just another $40 or so. Pretty great deal for a saw with a heavy cast iron top. There are things I love and things I hate about this saw. It has a belt-driven blade which helps to isolate a lot of the motor vibration compared to the modern direct-drive saws, so it’s pretty quiet as far as table saws go. It is very heavy which is great until it’s time to cary it out of one basement and into another. The fence is just awful and I hope to replace it one day. The wings are nice and wide but difficult to get in plane with the main table. Basically this saw has a lot of potential but takes serious effort to get set up properly, I spent two or three days just getting it to a workable state.

I also used this opportunity to make a good cross-cut sled. I love using crosscut sleds. They make the table saw into the most versatile power tool in the shop. The sled allows you to safely crosscut boards of any length and pull back the offcut keeping your fingers away from the blade. You can set stops on the fence for repeatable cuts and add angle blocks for repeatable angles. A good crosscut sled is safer and more accurate than a chop saw and there is no reason to have both.

I wanted to make a really nice sled this time so I bought a machined aluminum rail and was very careful to flatten and square the fence boards with my hand planes. You can see the two rulers I am using here to test if the board has any twist which a hand plane can correct but only if you know where to cut.

Stick Chair

The main project has been the stick chair. I started splitting logs for this project back in August and am still working on it. A stretch project like this can be very frustrating to work on. I am just at the stage of conscious incompetence. I feel like the parts of the chair are crude and misshapen in ways that I can see but don’t yet have the skill to correct. Seeing is the first step. This is the pain of learning something new. Of course I know that this is just my first try at chairmaking, but putting all this time into something I know I won’t be satisfied with is discouraging.

It is important to remember what’s exciting about learning a new skill like this. One of the things that is so compelling about hand tools is how they respond to the skill of the user. A simple plane can flatten a board perfectly in the right hands. I felt that when making the fences for the crosscut sled. A spokeshave can make beautiful curves and cut perfect ribbons of wood if your hands know just the right pressure, speed, angle, movement. The round-bottom spokeshave can do the same but it takes more skill, the scorp takes more yet. More and more I am learning that a hand tool only does what you tell it to, it won’t do any work on its own. Knowing what work to set it to starts with seeing: seeing the grain of the work, seeing the shape as it is and as you want it to be. The work is a palimpsest of your intention while you were making it, and it can sense frustration. The most important skill I am training is to stop and observe.

This month I finished shaping all of the sticks, made the arms, and finished the crest. I am getting close to the time when I can assemble it for the first time and finally see its shape.

I am most excited to start on my second chair, second most excited to paint the first chair, and third most excited to sit in the first chair and think about the second.

Scorp

This project finally gave me a reason to restore this scorp or inshave. I know how fun it is to say the word scorp and I hope you have some fun with it too. This the last piece from the collection of furniture making tools we found in my grandfather’s house. Nobody seems to know who they belonged to, perhaps his father who was born in 1893. A scorp is a curved drawknife for saddling seats and carving concave forms like the crest of the chair. I just cleaned it up with some ballistol and sharpened it. (side note on ballistol: all over the can it talks about how natural and safe and carcinogen free it is but every time I use it I start coughing uncontrollably, anybody else?) It is pretty tricky to sharpen, I used some sandpaper wrapped around a dowel to grind the inside bevel. It has been pretty abused and I was only able to get it so sharp in this first session but it will improve with use.

Using the scorp was tricky at first but can be hypnotic once you figure out its tricks. You can get some beautiful shavings with it but need to constantly move around the work to chase the grain. The crest I was carving also had pretty tricky grain surrounding a nasty knot. If I had another piece to use I would, but I don’t want to wait another 4 months to cut and dry one out, this knot will have to stay. I used a gouge to chop out the area around it.