[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] Welcome back to The Wordsmith Shop.

On today's episode, it's time to take a seat -- or better yet, make a seat.

We're looking at building a Welsh-style stick chair.

Now, these seats are very comfortable whether you're sitting at a table, working at a desk, or relaxing with your favorite woodworking magazine.

Chris and I are going to show you all the techniques, from power tools to hand tools and special personal details that you can add.

If you're ready to get started on your own, take a look at the plans.

They're at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

It's time to build.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond Wood Glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by... ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Building a chair is a fascinating project.

I think one of the challenges of chair is that it's a blend of both engineering and aesthetics.

We want the structure to be strong.

We want it to be rigid.

We don't want it to be too heavy, but we also want it to be beautiful.

We want it to be comfortable, and that's a real challenge.

In this episode of "The Woodsman Shop," we're going to show you how to build this Welsh stick chair.

It's a fantastic project that'll have a lot of challenges for you, but once you have a little guidance and a little understanding of how it's built, it's not hard.

It's fun.

So let's go ahead and get started.

For my chair, I've decided to use cherry.

So what I have here is a cherry blank for the seat.

And the seat's the place to start, because from the seat comes the legs and comes the spindles that support the arm.

One of the issues in making a chair is laying out all those spindles and the legs.

Usually, that's done with a bit of math, a bit of trig, and using sightlines.

I've got a little easier route.

We're supplying a pattern for this chair.

The pattern has the outline of the seat.

It has the whole locations for the legs and the whole locations for all of the spindles that hold the back up.

Also on this are sighting lines, and that is the key to helping you accurately position a drill and to get that splay for all the different parts that seem so intimidating when building a chair.

The back two legs are splayed at an angle of 10 degrees relative to their sightline.

The back spindle holes are also splayed at 10 degrees.

The front legs and the front spindles are splayed at 15 degrees relative to their individual sighting line.

And the sighting line, of course, is this red line that you see transversing our pattern.

To make things a little easier, I'm going to use this simple drill guide.

Now I have it set to angle back 10 degrees right now.

I have a 1 inch spade bit in here, so I'm prepared to drill the back to leg holes.

Using the sighting line, I'm going to align my guide with the little indicator marks that are on it.

That's going to position my drill of my drill bit in the correct position to get that 10 degree splay in the right angle relative to my seat that we want.

And it's really that easy -- set the angle on the drill guide, find the right sighting line.

We're ready to go.

Well, I've finished drilling out the holes for the rear legs, so I flip my blank around, and I'm ready to go ahead and do the front legs.

Now, before doing that, I went ahead and readjusted my guide to 15 degrees.

And you can see these are the sightlines which I'll be following.

So same procedure again, new holes.

Well, the legs are all done, so it's time to move on to the spindles.

So I've got two spindles here and two here, which are set at 15 degrees, so my guide's already set to 15 degrees.

I'm going to go ahead and take care of those.

And then these spindle holes in the rear will all be 10 degrees, so pretty simple stuff, but you got to pay attention to make sure you're drilling that angle from the right direction.

With all of the holes drilled, I've removed the paper pattern, and I spent a little time with a pencil and a compass, and I went ahead and laid out the outside of our seat, but also the inside profile of where we'll begin to shape the seat itself, and that's our next step.

Another thing I've done is you'll see this line here in this series of five holes.

These holes are depth indicators.

And so as I shaped the seat down, when I get to the bottom of those holes, I'll know it's time to stop, and that makes it a little bit easier to know that we've got a consistent pattern and a comfortable pattern, one that'll look good.

Now, there are really two ways to go about removing this material and shaping that seat.

One is with power.

One is with some very simple hand tools.

So let's take a look at the power method.

What I have here is an angle grinder, and it has a special attachment on it.

This disc, the spherical disc, is studded with carbide, and it acts like a rasp, and so it's going to remove fibers as it spins.

It really is a very efficient and a very easy way to shape a seat.

Now, since it is a power tool, I've got to be a little bit careful.

So it has a dust collection system, and I'm also going to gear up with a respirator, hearing protection, and a face shield.

This is a fantastic method if you have a lot of seats to do or you're working in very hard material.

So let's go ahead and take a look at how this will work, and then we'll move on and talk a little bit about hand tools.

Well, the power tool method with the grinder works great, but I'd like to use a method which is a little simpler, frankly, a little quieter, and for me, a little more relaxing.

And I'm just going to use a couple of simple gouges to shape the seat.

Now, because this is a piece of kiln-dried wood and the grain is sort of running in different ways, I need to have a strategy about how I'm going to carve the seat.

So what I want to do is to go ahead and lower this area here where I've got these holes, these depth indicator holes, and once I've lowered that area, I can begin to work from the outside into that, and also from the saddle region into those areas, and that'll make things a lot simpler.

Of course, it's carving, so we've got to really try and with the grain, and so sometimes we're going to be cutting across it, sometimes with it, and sometimes probably snarling our faces up a little bit and working against it.

But it's a great way to shape a seat.

It's a lot of fun.

So turn a ball game on or a podcast and enjoy a Saturday afternoon carving a seat.

To go from a gouged profile, which is kind of rough, to this, I used a series of different scrapers which helped a lot kind of maintaining my curvature throughout, and then a little bit of fine work with the broad, sweeping gouge and a bit of sandpaper too.

And that got us to where we are now.

So with all this done, it's time for a trip to the band saw, and I'm going to cut out the final shape of our seat, sand the outside, and then we'll proceed to a few finishing details on the seat.

Now that I'm finished up at the router table, adding the bevel on the bottom of our seat and the cove around this back edge, the next step is to ease this edge right here, which might catch the back of your knee.

And so what I'm going to do is just use a rasp and create sort of a crescent-shaped bevel on these two points.

Well, I think that completes our seat.

I'm going to do a little more standing on it, and then we're going to go to the table stall and get started making legs.

The legs start out as blanks about 1 1/2 inch square by 20 inches long.

And our first project is going to be to put a round tenon on the end of these like that.

That round tenon will go in the 1 inch hole that we board for each of the legs on our seat.

So how to do that?

Well, what we have here is a jig that's going to allow me to put that round tenon on the end of each blank using a dado blade and my table saw.

I'll feed the blank in.

Then with the saw on, I'll push my jig forward and I'll rotate the blank against the blade.

Back off, take another bite.

Finally, we'll finish out with the blank hitting the fence, which is the desired length of 1 1/2 inch.

And that is a super easy way to create a 1 inch tenon on the end of each of these legs.

With the tendons made on the legs, it's now time to turn our attention to creating the octagon shape that completes each leg.

The first thing we're going to do is cut four sides to a taper, and we'll leave the bottom wide and taper down toward the tenons.

To accomplish this, I've created a simple tapering sled, and I have some hold downs here to secure everything.

So the first two sides, I'll butt tightly against this wood fence.

But for the second two sides, I'm going to need to use a small scrap of wood to offset this end, to make up for the difference that we've already cut off, and that'll keep our taper symmetrical.

When I've tapered all four sides of each leg, our next step is going to be to create an octagon.

And to do that, I'll simply use a carrier board, some double-sided tape, I'll set my saw blade to 45 degrees, and we'll just pass each part through, creating that octagon.

And that is going to complete the overall shape of our legs.

And when we're done with that, we'll head to the drill press and drill holes, the stretchers that connect the right and left sets of legs.

To create the tenons on the end of the stretchers for the legs and on the spindles that support the rail, we're going to use the same process as we did when we created the tenons for the legs.

As you can see, I've got a jig here with some holes in it, and I merely insert the stretcher stock into it, and then I will rotate the stock as I advance it through the dado blade.

And by doing that, we'll get an exact tenon of 1/2 inch diameter which we need to fit into the holes of the seat.

The fence acts as a stop and so I'll get an exact 1 inch length, simple as that.

With our legs cut into the shape of an octagon, it's time to think about the mortises for the stretchers that will connect the front and rear leg sets.

Now the back legs are at 10 degrees.

The front legs, the mortise is drilled at 15 degrees.

You can do this in two ways.

One is to simply tilt the table of your drill press.

Rather than do that, I've just made a simple ramp that will hold my leg at the correct angle.

So this is the 15 degree leg angle jig.

Put my leg in there, I'm all ready to drill.

Well, it's time to go ahead and glue up the legs into our seat, so, very exciting.

Now to make things a little easier, I of course did dry fit everything, so I know it works.

I've got my legs laid out and I've got them labeled, too.

Got a letter for B, back, F for front, so I know where to put everything and I'm not going to get confused in the moment of trying to get this all together.

Also, I'm going to point out that I want ahead and cut a curve on the end of each leg, and that is for a wedge which we will put in once everything is together and we have the seat and the legs upright.

So I'm going to use hide glue to give myself a little extra time.

I'm going to start lathering up the joints, and we'll get them put home.

Now with chair legs and stretchers, you got to put everything in all at once, so it's kind of a juggling act.

So I'm just going to barely start my stretchers into the mortises, and get my leg tenons into the mortises, and we'll just start carefully working things on.

Next up, we're going to put the wedges in.

So I'm going to put just a small amount of glue on my wedges, and we'll tap them in, tighten things up.

Alright.

There we go, then.

So I'm going to clean the excess glue off, wait for things to dry.

I'll trim the top of these leg tenons off, and we'll be ready to move on to the spindles and the back rail.

My portion on making this chair is going to start with the arm bow or the back support, whatever you want to call it.

I have a plywood template here that we're going to use a little bit later on.

just to give you an idea of where we're headed.

It's got a wide arm supports, and then has the back supports where some spindles coming up from the seat are going to connect to.

Now, with such a wide, kind of awkward piece, we can't really glue it up like you would a panel for a tabletop, because you're going to get some grain direction issues that will cause weaknesses in the bow.

So what we're going to do instead is use these three wide pieces, and then join them at the corners with a miter.

Now, I did that over at the miter saw, just set it up, and then used the same angle setting for all of these cuts.

Now, the issue here, though, is when we go to glue this up first with the miters, is there's no real easy way to clamp these without the pieces sliding all over the place.

So we want a way to be able to register them.

And the joint on the miters is a lot of end grain, so it's not the best joint for glue strength.

To solve both of those issues with one pass, I set up a dado blade here in the table saw, and I'm going to cut a slot across the mating ends of these pieces.

We'll slip a spline into place there that's going to strengthen it and help register the parts.

So let's get started here.

Once you have the spline slots cut, we're ready to get started on the assembly.

Now, what I've done first, though, is taken my template that we'll use for laying out and then drilling the arm bow and laid it out on my three pieces here so that I could trace its profile.

And the reason that I did that is we really want to get a nice, tight glue joint where these three pieces meet together, and at an angle, there's no really good way to apply clamps to it without the clamps slipping off when you tighten it up.

So what I've done is gone over to the band saw and cut out some notches on this middle piece.

And the notches line up so that I can pull a clamp straight across the glue joint and help pull everything nice and tight.

So with that in place, I can take my two splines that I've cut to fit the slots there, apply glue, and then get everything all clamped up.

Once the glue is dry and the clamps came off, I spent some time planing and sanding smooth and level all the joints on the arm bow here.

Then it was a little computer time, to print off a paper pattern for the arm bow.

Not for the shape necessarily, but I need some reference marks for drilling the holes for the spindles so I can tape the paper pattern in place.

And what you have here are the locations for the five spindles on the back, and then the four spindles out at the hands of the arm bow.

Now what they also include are these red lines, the sightlines that Chris was talking about earlier.

So I've set up a bevel gauge here at 10 degrees that I'm going to use for drilling the arm bow holes and the back.

And I'm going to line it up here.

Chris used a corded drill earlier.

I'm going to use my cordless drill here and take care of all the holes.

Shouldn't go too badly.

One thing that you want to do, though, is make sure you have a backer board on your workbench, to avoid embarrassing holes being drilled in the benchtop.

Alright, we're closing in on the assembly for the upper part of the chair.

Now we have all the spindles taken care of, and we cut tenons on them using the same method that Chris showed.

But it's just a smaller jig, because the spindles are much smaller around.

Before we get to that assembly, though, I want to do a little bit of shaping on the spindles.

Now, they're starting off as octagonal pieces that you can cut at the table saw or, you know, just chamfer the corners at the router table, which is what I did.

But I wanted something a little bit different here.

And the spindles, as well as the legs, offer great opportunities to customize the chair and really make it your own.

What I'm going with is something that's a little rounder, but still faceted.

So if you look closely, you can see there are irregular facets that make it a little bit rounder, but also have a nice textural quality to them, rather than the real straight, regular geometry class octagons here.

The way I'm doing that is with a shave horse and a spoke shave.

Now, a shave horse is really like 50% chair, 50% clamp, 50% workbench.

And what I can do is put the work piece in the jaws, press down with the pedal, and it locks it in place.

Then I'll use the spoke shave to just peel away shavings right along the corners.

You can see real easily and feel when you start to go against the grain, like I did there.

So I can just go back and push in towards the work piece and just clean up some of those facets to however you want it to look so that it's more about how it feels and how it looks to you.

And you can go anywhere from perfectly smooth and round to more flat or oval-shaped, however you want this project to end up looking.

You can see, it only takes a minute or two for each of the spindles.

Once we're all done here, then we can get to work on doing the final assembly.

Alright, it's time to bring this together a little bit more.

After I drilled the holes in the arm bow, I went over to the band saw and cut out the final shape of it.

You want to stay close to the layout lines to make it easier to smooth out the curves.

Along the inside, I used a combination of rasps and a spoke shave and a scraper to get a nice, smooth, even curve, and then used an edge sander around the outside.

To start the assembly process, I put the spindles into the seat.

It's just a matter of dipping the end in, driving them into their holes with a mallet.

I'm going to do the same kind of process up top, but there's no way that I'm going to get all nine of these spindles into their respective mortises at one time.

So I'm going to start on one side, work my way around, applying glue as I go.

After getting the arm bow glued in place to the spindles, there's a little bit more work you need to do once the glue dries.

I installed wedges on the front spindles, and then cleaned up any areas where the rear spindles were sticking through the arm bow.

That's because what you need to do is trace the arm bow and add this thick bridge piece that goes across the back.

Adds a little height to the back, makes the chair a little bit more comfortable, and also covers up any flaws or missed drilling that you might have done on there.

Now, to shape this, I used a rasp and a gouge to create a little bit of a cove here that echoes the cove detail on the seat.

Now, I left the gouge marks in here, because I like that difference in texture there between the gouge marks and then the smooth cherry surfaces on other parts of the chair.

Now, speaking of the arm bow, this is really where you get to personalize the chair, not only in the shape of it, but also in its comfort.

I used primarily a spoke shave to do all the shaping on the sides, where I just added a chamfer or a slight round over in some of the surfaces.

Now, don't forget to do the bottom edges here, because you're going to pick the chair up from time to time, and you don't want to grab on to a sharp edge.

Now, when it comes to the front of the arms, this is where I spent the most of the time, where I want to have a nice, comfortable hand grip while you're sitting in the chair.

It just is part of a chair that people want to hold on to.

The other place that you want to spend some time detailing is the back here.

We're adding a little bit of a round over or a slight bevel so that when you're leaning back in the chair, it's comfortable on your back for a long stretch at the table or talking with friends.

So the last thing that I need to do here is to do some final sanding on all the surfaces and get this chair ready for applying some finish.

The final thing to do before applying finish to the chair is to level it and cut the legs to the right length.

Now, what I did is set a level across the seat and use shims to level it up, and then marked around the legs at the bottom with a pencil and a spacer block just to show a cut line.

I can cut those with a handsaw real close to the line, and I'm going to get right in the ballpark for having a nice, level seat.

I did prop up the front a little bit, just to give the seat and the chair a little bit of a lean back.

This is all up to you, so you can change that to whatever suits your need or comfort level.

Now for the finish, since I'm using cherry here on this chair, I think a tung oil is going to look really great.

It's going to bring out the warm tones of the cherry and make this chair really stand out.

After applying a healthy coat of tung oil to the entire surface of the chair, I allowed it to soak in for a few minutes.

Now I'm in the process of wiping down all the excess.

It also gives you a good idea to find out any places that you might have missed.

Leave this dry overnight and apply one more coat.

And I usually like to put on a coat of paste wax.

From there, this chair only gets better with age.

With use and time, it's going to take on a unique character and patina all on its own.

And it's something you made yourself.

A chair is one of the most personal kind of projects that you can make out of wood.

On today's episode, Chris and I showed you the techniques to make a Welsh-style stick chair.

There's a lot of room for personalizing it, from the materials that you choose to the details that you add to it.

If you're ready to get started on your own chair, the plans are at our website.

WoodsmithShop.com.

It's the place to find even more project ideas, techniques, and ways to get involved in woodworking.

And then we'll see you right back here in "The Woodsmith Shop."

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Every week, you'll receive an e-mail with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

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Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free Woodsmith book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD, or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- offering wood stains and finishes for the woodworking enthusiast and professional.

And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

Additional funding provided by... Titebond Wood Glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by... ♪♪ ♪♪