Half A Chair 

A weekend of stool making with Don Weber.

Summer storms brought down a tree at the American Sycamore school.   Don Weber was out early splitting it into billets the morning his stool making class started. He hadn't planned for the windfall, so his own splitting tools were back at his Paint Lick, Kentucky shop. He was forced to borrow an axe and sledge from the school. 

Three years earlier, Weber had moved to the Midwest by invitation of the Kentucky Arts Council.  "The  Appalachians  speak the same language I do."   At a farm to retrieve a log, "I was going to split it out," Don told the farmer, "but I forgot my gluts (He explained to his students that gluts are splitting wedges, made of wood instead of iron. They keep the splitter's axe from striking metal.) The farmer left, returning a few minutes later with a hemlock log on his shoulder. "Here," he said, dumping it on the ground. "This makes a good glut." 

A family from Pennsylvania was the first to arrive at the school. They'd driven twelve hours to  rural Indiana  just for Don's two-day class. Don passed the splitting job to them.  As others arrived, he assigned tasks to set up a production shop, and by lunchtime, his crew had roughed out enough parts for everyone's stool. In the afternoon, each student settled in to his own project. Each had selected a variation on one of two designs that Don had sketched in chalk, either post-and-rung, or plank-and-stick. Don had brought along some mill slabs for the plank seats.  Some students were hand planing their seats. Others went to the shaving horses to work green posts with drawknives and spokeshaves. (Post and rung stools would have tape seats.) A dull plane made an opportunity for a quick lesson on sharpening. With everyone gathered around the shop's grinder, Weber remarked that he had thrown out the tool rests on his own grinder. "I replaced them with a steel rod. I can hook my finger against the rod and feel the angle I'm grinding."  

In mid-afternoon, Don announced that he would be quitting at five. The students could continue working if they wished. "I learned late to quit when I'm fatigued." He held up a hand. The tip of his middle finger tilted sharply northeast. "I was trying to finish one last part at the end of a day. I was tired and got into a tablesaw." He wiggled the finger and made a motion as if he would straighten it up. "The doctor gave me a choice of a crooked joint that worked or a straight one that didn't." 

By the second morning, the class was making tenons. Don lectures on and demonstrates traditional hand joinery, but he takes a pragmatic approach to work. If a power tool is the best tool for the job, he'll use it. The process, he says, should determine the tool and not the other way around. He had the class practicing on the school's lathes and with his set of Veritas tenon rounders, chucked in an electric drill. "Here's a trick for sizing your tenons on the lathe." He produced a 3/4" wrench, blunted on one tip and ground like a parting tool on the other. "Push this into your blank and when it bottoms in the wrench, you have three-quarters of an inch."

Don is an accomplished chairmaker. The plank stool is the understructure of Welsh stick chairs he builds. "My dad saw I was better with my hands than my head, so he sent me to an uncle to learn a trade." He apprenticed joinery in the uncle's shop in Wales.  Inspecting the lathes in the shop, Don pointed to the spur centers and asked if the school had any cup centers. No cup centers.  He broke into a story about how, when he worked in a production shop, the turners would use cup centers so that they could chuck up a blank or remove a turning without stopping the lathe. "Catches aren't as bad either," he said, "because the blank will slip on the center if the tool grabs."

By late afternoon on the second day, tenons were being wedged into their sockets and everyone had a stool in its final stage of assembly. Don roamed the shop collecting tools that he'd brought, returning them to his tool box. His parting advice for those with green posts was to wrap the ends in plastic or temporarily  seal them with white glue to keep them from splitting as they dried too fast. Don has a new wife at home. He tied the knot last May and was anxious to get home.