I was down to the last bits of that rambunctuous rescued garry oak which arrived in the shop last fall. There was just enough for a small mid-winter experiment.

The proper way to shape the seat of a wooden chair involves arcane handtools with strange names: adzes scorps and travishers. I don’t have those tools in my shop but I do have a nasty ten-dollar no-name angle grider and a toothy wheel that can chew through wood in a hurry. So I glued-up a small seat and attacked it with the grinder. To atone for that sin against traditional woodwork I finished the seat with a homemade coopering plane and a curved scraper.

The project also involved some interesting compound curve bandsaw cuts, and then butterfly keys to fix a crack that opened up along the way. Legs and spindles are rounded and tapered.

The woodworking gods are surely not amused by the leg geometry, which was vaguely inspired by the Eames DSW . Worse, the spindles and crest look like they lost the mid-century thread and took on a traditional windsor comb-back form.

The result is a diminutive mutant time travelling side chair.

Garry Oak, Poplar, Milk Paint