White pine is a very typical wood for stick Windsors. However, I’ve not made one with a white pine seat that lacks stretchers. These will have oak stretchers, spindles and crest rail. The arm bow is ash.

Sorry I don’t have a good answer for you.

Have you made these stretcherless stick chairs with a seat blank of EWP, and in your opinion, are they strong enough?

By the way, does the anarchist even have a jointer machine? I remember a planer, table saw, bandsaw, and drill press …

Good book, by the way. kudos

About 90 percent of the work will be by hand — saddling, shaving the spindles, boring, etc. etc.

But about those welsh stick chairs … a jointer? Will you be using a CNC machine to shape the seats? I wonder what John Brown would think? But seriously, it seems very incongrous to use machinery to form perfect tapered octagons on a form that is so rooted in its hand wrought nature. The charm of many such chairs stems from the quirks that happen in drawknifing, scorping, and otherwise engagin in the “workmanship of risk.”

Teaching craft is a difficult thing. Everybody has different ways of seeing and has different “hands”. To my mind there are two critical parts to learning anything. The first is having good information. Understanding the mechanics: how a process works, what are the critical components and what are they doing, and what is your relationship to the process. Real nuts and bolts stuff.

The second part is far more subtle and largly internal process. This part is about paying attention. It requires focusing on the task at hand and making connections between action and result. I am convinced this is where real learning happens. Through practice, repetition and FAILURE you gain the experience and confidence to work with consistency and quality.
Also you are able better equipped to diagnose and make corrections when something unexpected happens or something is broken. It’s usually not rocket-surgery.

One of the biggest challenges learning something new is to get frustrated when the results don’t line up with your intentions. It’s even more frustrating when you’ve spent a great deal of time and energy and the results are still disappointing. I see people get discouraged and give up before they step back and look at what they trying to do and how they were going about doing it.

I think the best advice you can give anyone is that failure is a constructive part of learning. Training the hands is as much about training you eye to recognize the hallmarks of success and error.
The key to NOT GIVE UP, learn from your mistakes, and move on.

Well, surely there’s some of that. But it gives me hope to know that there’s more for me to learn… some of those learning curves, takes time and experience and that’s what I understood when you said there’s no words to teach, but again, it really gave me hope that I can probably get better results from the tools I have by simply paying more attention and actually using it.

thanks!

As he put it to me; you are using a multipurpose machine to do a specific job. If you were building the machine to do this specific job, what would you add to it to make it work?

The answer, of course, is a pressure plate and feed drive. Calculating where you would place the mechanical device over the bed quickly tells you where to put the human pressure and how to handle the feed.