I made my first sackback in early 2023. With a steam bent arm bow and back bow the sackback is a bit more complicated than a conventional stick chair. I made a few mistakes on the first sackback and I was interested in another attempt, There was some green garry oak on hand that seemed just right for the project.

I’ve successfully steam bent garry oak for an arm bow before. But it was just not going to happen this time. I made two attempts and broke both. The first time I got a couple of small cracks, the second attempt resulted in a bigger failure. The problem might have been related to the tight grain on the wood that I was using.

My supply of garry oak was running low, and I did not have any wood left with grain that was clear enough for another try at steam bending. However I did have enough scrap to cobble together a crest and a four-piece arm bow. The sackback that I was building suddenly turned into a welsh stick chair. Welsh chairs are all about making do with whatever is at hand, so that was fine. Once all that drama and heartache was behind me the process of building the welsh stick chair went smoothly.

My other goal for this chair was to dig a bit deeper into John Porritt’s belligerent finishing approach. My last welsh chair worked out well following some of Porritt’s methods, but I took a bit of a shortcut by fuming that chair with ammonia, avoiding some of the funkier initial steps. My earlier attempts at belligerent finishing, including the first sackback, were half-hearted. I did not fully commit to Porritt’s process. The results were okay but I knew that this time I needed to be more focussed, more belligerent. I was still not going to follow his recommendation to use nitric acid, but fortunately he also describes a recipe which avoids that terrifying stuff. This time I was going to follow that recipe to the letter. Well, almost to the letter.

Here’s how it went:

• burnish vigorously between each coat using chain mail pot scrubber and a deer antler (I used the back of an old spoon instead)
• first coat: very strong black tea (I used quebracho instead) with ammonia added.
• second coat: vinegar with steel wool dissolved in it. That reacts with the tannin and blackens the wood.
• third coat: pigmented oil
• fourth coat: thick milk paint (I used barn red)
• intermission: vigorously rub out the milk paint in wear areas, burnish again, and use a wire brush to distress the paint where necessary
• fifth coat: seedlac (I used garnet) shellac ignited with a blowtorch (carefully! in small patches, what could possibly go wrong?)
• sixth coat: boiled linseed oil (Porritt calls for the addition of portland cement to the linseed oil, I skipped that part)
• seventh coat: wax (Porrit recommends adding roofing cement to the wax, I used black linseed oil wax instead)

It sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but the process moves reasonably quickly. As for the resulting chair, you’d never know that it was supposed to be a sackback, and the finish seems worth all the effort.

Garry Oak, proper belligerence.