My First Chair is Finally Built…

Turning recycled scrap wood into a bar stool/chair

Check it out duuudes! My very first chair!

First of all, in my lingo, duuudes is a non-discriminatory omni-sexual pronoun referring inclusively to the dichotomous extremes and anyone in between. But I acknowledge that most women, and actually most people, don’t like to be called duuude. I’m still working out the bugs in my communications app. Please be patient.

Second of all, in my duuudely brain a chair is anything more than a seat with legs. I have made simple stools and benches before like in the photo below. Those construction lumber stools you see there are a small step up from a Neanderthal duuude rolling a log up to the fire as he takes a long drag on the biggest blunt you’ve ever seen, the size of a club, man, because them Neanderthals grew pot plants with leaves the size of palm fronds and… oh, sorry. I got distracted. I’m supposed to be talking about… logs and stools and chairs. Well, there you go. The Darwinian evolutionary sequence: log to stool to chair. And I think my project, photographed above, sits proudly one step ahead of the humble three-legged stool.

Thirdly of all, this is a prototype, a trial, an experiment, using pretty ratty discarded scrap wood. So, although a lot of total effort went into this, the quality of the materials and the quality of my workmanship puts this project smack into the “one step short of the dumpster” category. But I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.

It has taken just about a year. This chair or stool project is now officially done as of today (Feb 10, 2021). Woohoo! Small feet-shuffling celebration…. You don’t want to see the dad dance. The kids put on this show of mortification and drama when dad does his dance thing. Shuffle shuffle, gyrate, gyrate, ooooh, ohhh stoooop, not good, cover the eyes…

Actually, it takes about three days for the Danish oil to dry, which makes its real completion date Feb 13, and that would be exactly one year after I started this project.

One year ago, in mid-February, just as the pandemic was getting warmed up, I was still down in my basement shop futzing around with wood. As the weeks rolled by, the fatalities accumulated, the virus spread around the world, and eventually I stopped working in the basement, drained of motivation. I continued to go into the lab where I work, since I was tapped as an “essential worker” responsible for keeping the lab in operational order until things “returned to normal”. I wrote about that here:

I didn’t know how to react. I continued going into the lab, but otherwise I started to shut down. Instead, I began writing here on Medium starting around May. Medium became my way to cope, to relieve stress, to process. So, most of the delay on this chair project was me not working on it.

Unlike most of my projects, I had no plan, no sketch, no ideas. Just a vague concept, a chair-ish thing, something to sit on and take on a Rodin-like sculptural pose, the duuudely thinker…

I compensated for my dearth of mental material with a plethora of recycled scrap wood. On my way to work, there is a small business selling truck caps. In the grassy area bordering the small parking lot is a pile of pallet wood and a sign: Free Wood. That’s my signal to go to work and pile the wood into my car and get busy recycling.

This was the exact pile of wood I worked with to make the chair, photographed a year ago on February 14, 2020:

The good thing about identifying WHAT to work on, even without a plan, is that the what often immediately identifies the key features. In this case, the seat and legs. The seat in this case was the conceptually easiest part to make. It’s a flat square of wood. I just had to glue a bunch of short pieces together.

But that’s boring. Because of the raw materials. I wanted some visual interest in the otherwise plain white softwood. I had plenty of scrap walnut, so I decided it might look interesting to have a line of thin walnut glued between thicker pieces of softwood.

Once I had the seat, I started making the legs, the next logical part of the chair.

Almost all of the rest of the pieces are round. That’s a bit of a challenge here in the duuudely woodshop. That’s because I don’t have a lathe, the usual machine for making round stock.

Instead, this is how I do it:

I take a board, and I make it into squares with either my bandsaw or a track saw.

Then I make the square into an octagon by knocking down the corners of the squares.

Then I make the octagon into a 16-gon (is there an official Greek-sounding name for a 16-sided polygon), then a 32-gon… then I just go by feel and keep knocking corners off until I have a mostly round piece. None of the pieces I make this way are anywhere near perfect rounds.

This is a pretty sucky way to make round stock. But I do get an odd sense of pleasure from it. My masochistic process of making round pieces is one way I can zen out. Stress leaks out with repetitive manual labor. I also sand all my pieces by hand. I don’t use an electric sander.

I do dream of getting a lathe. Ahhhhh… the things I would make… like a Harry Potter wand… OK maybe not. But bowls! Beautiful wooden bowls. And of course, legs and stretchers (the horizontal pieces between the legs of my chair) and spindles (the cage-like back of my chair).

Once I decided on plain round legs, I simultaneously decided in the moment that they would be long legs making the chair more like a bar stool. With long legs, I wanted stretchers between the legs to minimize flexing.

Here again are smaller squares going to the next progression towards round stock:

I also decided that I wanted a spindle-back with some kind of a top rail for this chair. I made the spindles tapered. The next photo shows the five spindles mostly done before the four stretchers.

So, these are among the many reasons, aside from the pandemic pause, that this chair took a year to build. It is a pile of poor-quality crack-ridden scrap wood, and one good topple or roughhousing among my kids, and this will become firewood.

But that’s OK. I feel like I learned a lot in the process, and I’ve extended the skills and methods I’ve learned on previous small, prototype stools.

I hope you enjoy this and get inspired to go make things, to recycle stuff, to learn and try things, to fail and fail and keep trying. Like this darn writing stuff!

Best to you from my woodly heart to yours! SD