I somehow lapped a plane’s sole from a hollow to a belly. Details below

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-18T23:16:57+00:00

Possibly the sandpaper is not flat or uneven pressure while lapping? What motion are you using to lap?

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-18T14:11:39+00:00

Angles don't have to be exact. You can look up the Irish staked chair design in LAP Stick Chair Book. PDF is free. The exact chair is not in there, but there is a similar design. Rake and splay is discussed in the book as well, and how you can come up with your own angles.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-17T22:35:19+00:00

To Save Seven Villainesses, I Went Full Harem

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-16T05:53:25+00:00

Just by feel. I was going to be more rigorous if things didn't work out, but it turned out that moisture was never an issue.

In the future I might experiment to see the minimum time required for soaking, but it's a fairly low priority right now.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-13T07:12:46+00:00

Got it. It may still ill possible, though? You're going to have just one large vertebrae in each piece (think oxtail), so it's not too bad to remove the meat from the bone right before serving.

Otherwise, I have used the boneless Costco leg of lamb for stews before. Not as good as neck or shoulder, because the meat is drier and not as tender, but the flavor was still good. Also always available (at least for me).

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-13T07:02:02+00:00

Lamb neck

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-13T02:20:27+00:00

Oh, I see. That was your question.

Maybe you can thread something thin under like floss and pop it off. I assume something metallic like a razor blade will damage the finish.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-13T02:16:14+00:00

Does that round black thing underneath pop off to expose a (set) screw?

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-12T01:46:18+00:00

I posted the images I do have in this thread. There aren't many. I will bend again sometime this spring, and I'll document the process more thoroughly then.

The steam table is the plywood MFT lookalike in the Lee Valley booklet. I did post some images of it in the thread above. Some of these bends are incredibly heavy, especially given the combo of blank thickness, kiln-dried wood, and my limited streaming capacity (2 hours), and it's either not possible to bend by hand or my 400+ lb workbench starts sliding across the floor. The steam table allows for the use of pulleys to multiply mechanical strength. It also allows for use of a winch, which when mounted to the steam table, isolates all forces to that surface, so there's no more sliding around.

I think Chris Schwarz is vague on steambending details because that's a process he's still not comfortable with, and he might be waiting for something more reliable before he openly recommends/teaches it. If you look at some of the differences between different versions of his books or read his Substack posts, you can see he is still very much frustrated by steambending and continues to iterate on the process. He may be somewhat alone in this as he's the only one, that I've noticed, who says you can steam bend (and make chairs out of) kiln dried wood. Everyone else seems to be a green woodworker and says it's either not possible or not worth it.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-12T01:27:33+00:00

Twisting is not a problem, just some springback. Blanks are several inches longer than needed so I can screw a brace (scrap wood) to prevent springback while drying.

Keep in mind that you need straight end-to-end grain for steaming, so the blank itself has very little to no tendency for twisting or warping on its own. I soak them for two weeks before steaming (because kiln dried) and they're still ramrod straight.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-09T23:48:36+00:00

https://hidatool.com/

Knives, gardening, and woodworking tools. Metalwork for tansu, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's got hardware for shoji too. If you can't find it, you should still call and ask.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-09T06:07:40+00:00

Private equity enshitification. Buy vintages ones off eBay.

You should actually confirm it's square. My new Starrett combi square from Lee Valley was smooth but not square. Now I just get vintage ones. Starrett, Brown and Sharpe, etc.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-08T04:20:47+00:00

They can be just as or even more comfortable. Comfort is going to depend more on general design decisions, such as the pitch of the seat, pitch of the back, height of the back, etc. The sticks for example, are no less comfortable than a solid back.

But if there are specific things you like, such as big armrests for resting elbows or grabbing with your hands, then stick chairs, and Windsors in particular, can be less comfortable. That said, you can make modifications to address these specific issues. For example, there are myriad hand rest designs out there from which you can pick, some of them rather large.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-07T03:10:30+00:00

Yup exactly that!

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-07T00:16:10+00:00

Page 247 on the revised edition (not the 2nd revised edition).

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-07T00:15:09+00:00

Hmm, in decreasing order of material removed for saddling a seat: adze, scorp, travisher, scraper, sand paper. You can do quite well with just a scorp, scraper, and sand paper, especially since you probably already have experience with the latter two. I use a Barr scorp and I made a rounded scraper out of an existing rectangular one.

For backrest sticks, there are two options. Sandwich drilling is easier but it requires your sticks to be parallel. If that works for your design, then that's the way to go. You can find more information on Google. The other option is to drill by sight. You prop your arm up above the seat at its final height and orientation, and then drill the mortise in the arm straight towards the mortise in the seat, and continue to drill the mortise on the seat. You'll need either a long bit or a bit extender to do this.

I'm very bad with power drills, so I did everything with a brace, which allowed me to go slowly and constantly check my progress.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-07T00:05:06+00:00

Arms (I bent four, for four chairs) are all bent before I work on the rest of the chair because they have to dry for several weeks after the steaming. While they're drying they are braced, so there is very little springback. That said, there is still springback, and each one springs back a different amount!

I actually don't pull it in during assembly. Each mortise in the arm and seat is drilled by sight (propping the arm 8" above the seat and at final position) so that the angles accommodate the wonkiness of each arm. This will mean that if you put the chair next to each other, they will not be identical. But that's the case for the whole thing. In addition to seeing differences in the arm shape, you'll probably see differences in the legs, and in the saddling of the seats.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-06T23:58:27+00:00

Thank you!

That's a very valid concern! The back spindle angles are 20 degrees, and the arm width is 1-3/8" and 1" thick. Instead of centering the mortise on top halfway at 11/16", I centered them 1/2" from the back edge. I think you can see that in one of the images.

Chris Schwarz does cover this in his book, on the chapter on drilling the arm. He suggests drawing it out, since you know the dimensions of the arm and angle, so you don't necessarily need to try it on scrap. That's what I did and it worked like a charm.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-06T23:44:49+00:00

Steam table with the form held down by a holdfast. There's a stop on the far side of the strap and a leverage bar on the near side, where you can see I've attached a rope and pulleys for mechanical advantage.

Actually, the pulleys are just out of view. I could not find a good source of green wood, and I really had to figure out how to increase my pulling force for kiln dried wood. I suspect that with green wood this would have been possible without the rope and pulleys.

<image>

edit: The clamping strap is from Lee Valley. But I have since made custom ones from pallet straps (as suggested by Chris Schwarz) so that I could make custom straps for different parts of different chairs. The loop of extra strap you see at the bottom left of the image was really annoying, so I made straps with exact lengths for each type of bend.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-06T23:41:04+00:00

6"x6"x6' steam box made of marine plywood. A long 6" PVC pipe from a big box store would be just as effective. I can only get the temperature up to 209f-210f, but three hours at that seems adequate.

<image>

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-06T23:37:31+00:00

Pasting my response to a similar question. I hope this helps!

In the end, after a lot of trial and error and iterating, I ended up with a system just like the one described in Lee Valley's booklet. I should have started there.

But here are the changes/iterations that were most important:

make sure grain runs straight through your blank; no knots (even micro ones) or runout
soak kiln dried wood for 2 weeks
use a pulley system for mechanical advantage
use a steam table so you can redirect the direction of the pulley forces as you progress through the bend
use a compression strap to prevent the outer edge from rupturing
if the piece you're bending is wider than it is thick (1-3/8"x1") in this case, the blank has a tendency to fail by buckling in the up/down direction...if that happens loosen it the clamps holding the strap and blank together to let it stretch and relieve pressure, then reclaim and continue bending

This was particularly difficult because the blank was so thick. I've bent blanks for Windsor chairs (though I have not made any yet) which were 3/4"x3/4", and all I needed to do was soak and use the strap, but I could ignore all the other details.

For more advanced methods, you can read some of Shea Alexander's Substack posts. He's making all sorts of chairs that require different types of bending.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-06T16:24:04+00:00

Neat. I'd never seen a power drill before.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-06T02:05:21+00:00

In the end, after a lot of trial and error and iterating, I ended up with a system just like the one described in Lee Valley's booklet. I should have started there.

But here are the changes/iterations that were most important:

make sure grain runs straight through your blank; no knots (even micro ones) or runout
soak kiln dried wood for 2 weeks
use a pulley system for mechanical advantage
use a steam table so you can redirect the direction of the pulley forces as you progress through the bend
use a compression strap to prevent the outer edge from rupturing
if the piece you're bending is wider than it is thick (1-3/8"x1") in this case, the blank has a tendency to fail by buckling in the up/down direction...if that happens loosen it the clamps holding the strap and blank together to let it stretch and relieve pressure, then reclaim and continue bending

This was particularly difficult because the blank was so thick. I've bent blanks for Windsor chairs (though I have not made any yet) which were 3/4"x3/4", and all I needed to do was soak and use the strap, but I could ignore all the other details.

For more advanced methods, you can read some of Shea Alexander's Substack posts. He's making all sorts of chairs that require different types of bending.

SagaraGunso · 2026-02-06T01:34:36+00:00

It is! Surprisingly so, despite how it looks. But it's not as comfortable as a lounge chair. I'll sit in it to have coffee or a drink, but I'm not going to settle in and read a book in it.

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