As I set off on my next chair, for me the obvious starting place is to make some templates. Whilst it might not seem like it, this could be seen as a fairly divisive statement in the chairmaking world. OK, maybe it’s time for some chairmaking smack talk. (full disclosure - it could be said I have a dog in this fight, as a former maker and seller of chair templates. I don’t think that colours what I say here, but make your own judgement). Anyway, here’s what I reckon.
I think there is a whole lot of horseshit spoken about the use of templates, and I count a rejection of them in the same category as the rejection of honing jigs for sharpening. I did promise myself never to write about sharpening on this blog, so to quote Forrest Gump “that is all I have to say about that”. I believe John Brown claimed he didn’t use templates, when he’s pictured quite clearly using them in his book, and has a clutch of them hanging on the wall behind him in another shot. So I call bullshit. I think the rejection of templates is an aesthetic notion that some makers might aspire to, as they perceive it represents greater skill and imbued knowledge as part of their artisan credentials. They might like the idea that they just turn up with an axe and chop away at the wood, removing all that is not a chair, until perfection results. But that isn’t the real world. And probably isn’t the truth for most of them either.
Let’s take a cooking analogy to explore this. I think it is true to say that most of us wouldn’t walk into a kitchen and make a perfect lasagne from scratch, never having done so before. Likely we would be taught by an older or wiser person (perhaps a parent), and if we didn’t have access to one of those, we would follow a recipe from a book (which in turn was written by an older or wiser person). The recipe is our template for the lasagne. Still with me? - the lasagne is a chair by the way. In time and with practice we become familiar with the quantities of the ingredients and the process, such that we no longer need to refer to the recipe as much. We might start to riff on the original recipe and add our own changes as we develop a palate that tells us what we like and don’t like. That said, if we hadn’t made lasagne in a while we might still refer back to the recipe to check we didn’t forget something.
And so it is with making chairs. But without the cheese. Templates open the door to new woodworkers to access chairmaking, so in my mind they must be a good thing. One of the criticisms often levelled is that they make all the chairs the same, without individuality. Anyone who has made a chair or two will attest that there are more than enough opportunities for variability to creep in, deliberately or otherwise. I’d say this ensures the chair cloning argument holds no water. I made my first stick chair in a Chris Schwarz class where we all set out our components using the exact same templates, but at the end all the chairs had their own quirks and nuances which made them individual. You could tell whose chair was whose. Mine was the one with a doubler that detached itself from the arm after vigorous striking when Chris used it for an assembly demonstration. Don’t worry, I put some non-artisan Posidriv screws in from the underside and it is still fine years later.
Experienced makers can go template-free commando if they wish, but to make the craft accessible I would argue it’s irresponsible to portray an impression that you just need to somehow have inherently absorbed the required chairmaking wisdom to even have a go. Or worse that you need to have studied under a master to gain that knowledge. For the rest of us, we need the underpants of a template to get us going before we can free-ball it with the big boys. In recent years there have been some excellent books that tell us what we need to know, the writers of which have done us all a service in committing their knowledge to paper.
So I suppose that is a long-winded way of saying I made some templates for my next chair project. I didn’t make a lasagne, but now I can’t stop thinking about it.
I’m making the six stick comb back from issue one of The Stick Chair Journal, by Chris Schwarz. This is a development of the six-stick comb back in The Stick Chair Book, which in turn could be said to be a derivative of the four-stick staked armchair in The Anarchists Design Book, both also by Chris.
I enjoy the process of reading and understanding drawings and then transferring the information into full size templates. I find doing so gives an inherent familiarity with the details of the design. You take in the key dimensions and angles in greater depth as a result of making the templates. Almost like a rehearsal before the real woodwork begins. Even with a chair I have designed myself from scratch, I make a full set of templates first. Often in this process, the transferral into full size highlights clashes or issues that weren’t apparent in a drawing, giving us the chance to rectify before we’ve wasted expensive wood.
I make my templates from 3mm MDF, in this case Medite Premier, but it could be any thin material you like. If you buy big enough boxes of Cornflakes you could do it with recycled cardboard, but I like something more robust so the templates last. Where there is a hole to be drilled, or a key point to set out, I drill a hole in the template so it can be marked through. I use a 3mm (1/8”) drill as I find that is big enough to allow the lead of a clutch pencil through, but small enough to remain accurate. Strictly speaking you only need half the seat, flipping it along the central mirror line to draw the whole thing. I made the whole seat this time as I wanted to see what it looked like complete. The seat template has marking out for both the top and underside of the seat on a single template.
In the absence of a bandsaw, this time I cut the templates out with a jigsaw. And I have to tell you it is a lot less convenient than using a bandsaw. Because the material is so light, I did find I could more or less hold the jigsaw still with one hand and slide the material around with the other, which improved things a bit. As the workpieces become smaller it’s harder to hang onto them securely whilst cutting. I aim to cut within a couple of mm of the lines, before refining to the final size with a block plane and spokeshaves. MDF doesn’t plane very nicely, so my lungs are not thanking me today for the dust that was created yesterday.
Next time I’ll be selecting the wood, gluing up the seat and potentially making cannelloni.
I have every template I've ever made in a crate in the cellar. Every one is covered in notes. And is dated. They are snapshots of what I was thinking that month of that year. And they are like visiting old friends. Many are dead ends. But sometimes they remind me of some shape I had meant to return to and open up an entire new path to explore.
Of course John Brown had templates. Chris Williams inherited them and I've pored over all of them.
The only thing I disagree with in this post is the 3mm material. Everyone knows you use 5mm raunchy underlayment for templates. It's practically written in luan somewhere.
I used to live near an abandoned old Welsh water mill which had saw mill and woodwork shop attached. They had made everything/anything for locals; farms, wagons, tools, simple furniture, architectural stuff, coffins etc. The whole back wall of the abandoned shed had templates hanging up all over it, all shaped and sizes, probably for everything they'd ever made.
I was given a welsh settle made by them and have made several copies. Had to make templates too for the curved arms. Templates are a very good idea and as old as the hills!