Hey Folks,

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that for the past two months I’ve been working on a set of dining chairs to go with the staked leg tables that I have for sale at the shop.  The chairs (and tables) are the design of Christopher Schwarz, from his book, “The Anarchist Design Book”, available from Lost Art Press.  This is the same design as used for Le Chaise d’Enfer.

This is only the second set of dining chairs that I have built, the last one was thirty (yes 30) years ago and is still functioning well, so that’s an encouragement.  The big difference is that these chairs require a great deal more hand work than most as they were designed to be built by hand.  They also have a number compound angles that complicate their construction.

Normally, when building repetitive objects, there is some saving in cost or labor in scaling up production.  In building these chairs however, making five chairs really is five times the work!

So to tally up, that’s:

 Five chair seats.
Five steam bent crest rails.
Twenty back spindles.
Twenty legs.
Twenty wedges.
Twenty pins.
Eighty holes bored.
Eighty tenons turned.
Twenty holes taper reamed.
Twenty matching tapers turned.
Forty tapers planed.
Forty additional facets planed.

Did I leave anything out?  Oh yeah, there’s a couple of spares of most everything in case of accidents.

As I mentioned, assembly comes next then finishing.  This is not over by a long shot, but perhaps, “…it is the end of the beginning”.

Cheers,
Tom