One More Time

First, a couple of announcements. A couple of spots have opened up in upcoming classes of mine. There is a spot in the August Continuous Arm class in August and one in the Birdcage rocker class in October, email me at peter@petergalbert.com if you wish to enroll. I will be announcing new classes for 2027 soon, the roster of incredible instructors is growing and I can’t wait to share it. If you have any requests for class topics, please let me know.

I had a visit from Jeff Lefkowitz the other day. Jeff took a couple of classes with me nearly 20 years ago when I lived in upstate New York. If you don’t know, besides being an accomplished chair maker himself, Jeff has created and incredible archive of chair plans from many current chair makers. It’s a resource that will live on and a real tribute to Jeff’s skill and generosity. Jeff and I talked at length about getting “split” wood from boards and rocking chair technology. At his request, I’m going to do a series on the rocking chair soon.

Below is a video on getting “split” parts from boards. I must confess, I have a hard time parsing what information I’ve put out there and what might be worth sharing. I know we live in the information age, and there is just too much of it flying about, but I still live in the stone (or paper) age in some ways. I find myself thinking, “Didn’t I say that already?”. The answer might be yes, but it was in an obscure blog post in 2012. Jeff mentioned that he still found my take on this topic a bit confusing, so I decided to show a bit more of it. I had a board with extreme twist that inspired me to dive back in.

Once I’ve located the twist of the board, I bandsaw the board into parts parallel to the new reference face. I hope this adds to your understanding of the relationship between a sawn board and a split log. This particular board is such a great example of the perils of simply sawing up a board from the edges established by the sawmill. The The parts sawn this way would lots of short grain and grain reversals, so shaving or turning the parts will lead to tear out and the parts will be weaker and more likely to break in the chair or when bending. The growth rings on this board look very much in alignment with the surfaces, which is why I bought it, but there is clearly more to the story.

Recently I auctioned off a chair and the winner of the auction was Sam Fritcher from Texas. Sam sent me this lovely video of his “unboxing”.

I must dispute one comment Sam made. He used the work “perfect” and I assure you, I’ve never made anything “perfect” in my life. While I am grateful for his assessment, like so many, I struggle with perfectionism in my work and never want to give the wrong impression. When I’m in class, I remind my students that it’s fine to shoot for perfection, but to be content once we hit beautiful. Thanks for taking the time to record the message Sam, I’m thrilled the chair has found such a great home.