Taught by Craig Smith
Thursday Evenings starting March 5th, to May 7th 2020 (10 sessions). 6PM to 10PM
A $100 deposit is required to confirm your reservation.
In this class, we will be building a ‘braced fan-back arm chair’, as seen in the picture above. The chair is quite large and characteristic of designs from the later 1700s and might be considered as the equivalent of a modern easy chair.
Students will work with a time-tested selection of woods chosen for their characteristics of strength, workability, and weight. The result is a surprisingly light yet strong chair. Some of the chair parts will be riven from green oak. Other parts will be hand carved using traditional tools including spokeshaves, drawknves, scorps, travishers and tapered reamers. The chair also features decorative carving on the ears of the crest and on each of the hands on the arm rests. While this class focuses on a particular chair design, the techniques learned in this class will be applicable not only to other styles of Windsor chairs but to other types of woodworking in general.
Over the duration of the course, each student will build their own Windsor armchair. Every session will be filled with brief demonstrations and much hands-on work. There is quite a bit of work involved in building a classic like this Windsor, so expect to be kept quite busy during this course!
In addition to the tuition, there is a materials fee estimated at $225 which includes all the materials needed to build a chair. It includes a completed set of turnings plus all the information, patterns and knowledge to build another chair on your own. While it is not necessarily encouraged, if you prefer to complete your own turnings the material and patterns will be made available to you and a small credit on the materials fee will be issued.