Scrub plane in a mountain of maple shavings

One of the joys of revisiting a furniture form you have previously built is the opportunity to explore the effect of small changes to either (or both) the process of building the new version, and also the design of the finished piece. This can either be intentional changes in design or process, or prompted by the material at hand. When I broke the maple seat blank for the Surprise Chair out of the clamps I decided to try a slightly different process for the build than I had for the Apprentice’s Stick Chair, and also to take a different approach to some of the design aspects.

Laying out the leg positions using the pattern for the Apprentice’s Stick Chair

Fundamentally this chair will be to the same design as the Apprentice’s Stick Chair – the same leg and stick angles, dimensions, and seat shape. But what I want to achieve is a different feel for this chair. With the Apprentice’s Stick Chair I deliberately went for softened lines, irregular facets on the legs, and a slightly folk craft feel which leant itself well to the oak I was using. The maple I am using for the Surprise Chair suggests crisper lines, with regular facets and chamfers. This has in large part been an idea prompted by the seat material. The oak I had for the Apprentice’s Stick Chair was 1 1/8″ thick in the rough, and finished out at 1″ thick, which meant that I did not have any depth to play with for chamfers on the seat. The maple stock for the Surprise Chair was 2″ in the rough, which meant that I had plenty of spare material to play with when it came to chamfers.

Drilling the leg mortises.

After cleaning up the top surface of the seat, I thicknessed the seat to 1 5/8″ thick using the Lie-Nielsen Scrub plane before shaping the seat. The scrub is the perfect tool for this sort of operation – it removes material at a rapid (but controlled) rate, and also leaves a delightful scalloped surface texture. With the seat at final dimension and shape, I flipped it face down on the bench and laid out the location of the legs and sight lines using the pattern I made from the Apprentice’s Stick Chair. After clamping the seat to a sheet of sacrificial ply, I drilled the leg mortises using a 1 1/8″ Wood Owl bit in my 1923 North Bros brace. Previously I had drilled the stick mortises for the Apprentice’s Stick Chair once the chair was legged up, but I was in a drilling mood (brace and bit makes for a very addictive method of boring holes) so I turned the seat the right way up and laid out the stick positions using the same pattern before drilling them with a 1/2″ Jennings pattern bit in my brace. I won’t know for sure until I’ve made the sticks and fitted them to the seat, but it did feel like drilling to consistent angles was easier with the seat clamped to the workbench instead of being on it’s own legs. So this is a process change which I may adopt going forwards.

Chamfering the underside of the seat

Now came the fun bit – chamfering the underside of the seat. The historic chair I have based this build on had a seat of 1 5/8″ thickness in the middle, with edge chamfers down to 1 1/8″ at the edges, so I decided to follow that example. I laid the chamfers out with my Bern Billsberry pencil gauge, and planed the three straight chamfers with the Lie Nielsen No.62 . The curved chamfer on the rear edge of the seat was cut with a Veritas spokeshave. As a final touch, I then chamfered the two front corners of the seat.

My favourite element of the seat so far – intersecting chamfers and lines

As I mentioned earlier, this is fundamentally the same chair as the Apprentice’s Stick Chair. But already I am seeing how small design changes can have a significant impact on the overall form. Next for this build is making the legs, and while I will be using  the same leg dimension as for my previous chair, I am thinking of tapered octagonal legs instead of the hand-rounded approach I used last time. That should support the deliberate clean lines of this chair, and I am looking forward to seeing how the octagonal legs interface with the chamfers on the underside of the seat.

The contrast between the smooth chamfers, clean lines, and textured underside of the seat makes for a very tactile seat.