- A Walnut Windsor Chair – Introduction
- The Log
- Transport
- Rough Lumber
- Seat Blanks
- Legs
- Arm Posts and Tapered Holes
- Carve the Seat
- Turn the Undercarriage
- Assembling the Seat and Undercarriage
- Spindles
- Arms
- Assembling the Spindles and Arms
- Crest Version 1 — The Form Bent Laminated Crest
- Crest Version 2 — The Steam Bent Crest
- Final Assembly
- Detailing
- Finishing a Walnut Windsor Chair
- Final Notes
Entry 11
Spindles – 1/11/2008
Time to start on the upper part of the chair. The back spindles are hickory. Boards are selected for straight grain and cut into blanks for the seven long and four short spindles for each chair.
The spindles in the back of a windsor chair are thin. They are made from a wood that is both strong and will bend a bit. When a person sits in the chair, these thin spindles will flex. This is a part of what makes the chair comfortable. This means that the wood must be strong and able to take a certain amount of stress without breaking.
Michael Dunbar likes red oak. He works with green wood and uses a draw knife for shaping. In my case, I use thoroughly dried lumber. Four woods have the combination of strength and flexibility to handle the stresses of a long spindle: ash, hickory, red oak and white oak. I’ve used all of them. Hickory and ash are my favorites, mostly for their color.
The walnut windsor gets hickory spindles. The cream to yellow-tan color is a nice contrast to the dark walnut. Hickory is traditionally used for handles such as hammer handles. It is hard and heavy, but also strong and flexible. Given the slimness of the spindles, the weight is not a problem. The boards are straight grained. This makes the fabrication fairly straight forward and yields strong spindles. Curly or wavey grain would create weak spots where the grain runs out of the side of the spindle. After cross cutting and ripping (on the bandsaw), the blanks have their “corners knocked off” using a router in a table. Then, they are mounted on the lathe.
The short spindles, like the one to the right here, are turned on the lathe. The long spindles are only partly turned on the lathe. After mounting a long blank in the lathe, I establish a cylindrical area and mount a steady rest. This keeps the long spindle blank from flexing too much. Then, I turn the lower part of the long spindle as shown in the picture. I also turn the upper end, next to the tailstock, to a diameter of 3/8 inch. This is the diameter of the spindles where the are socketed into the crest.
I do not turn the long, thin upper part of the long spindles. Long, thin pieces of wood on a lathe flex so getting a clean cut is difficult. The flexing can also cause the spindle to come loose and fly off the lathe. I could continually move the steady rest so that I always worked on only the part of the spindle next to it, but that seems way too tedious.
Instead, the upper part of the long spindles is planed. I start with a smooth plane to remove most of the excess (see picture at bottom) and then use block planes for the rest. A little sanding removes most of the planing marks. The picture here shows the progression from coming off the lathe to finished spindle. One of the spindles has four of my sizing gauges on it. Scraps of plexiglass have holes drilled in them that correspond to the diameter of the spindle where it passes through the arm (1/2 inch), and then gets progressively smaller till it is 3/8 inch at the end. The gauges help in establishing the taper as the spindle is planed and sanded. At this point, I do not use these gauges very often because I’ve gotten used to eye-balling the slender taper of the spindles and I establish the 1/2 inch diameter at the height of the arms and the 3/8 inch diameter at the tip on the lathe.
Although this narrative puts all of the process of making the spindles together as one step, I do this fabrication in parallel with other parts of chair construction. Its not that this step takes a long time. Rather, doing 24 long spindles (3 chairs) and 12 short spindles is a bit boring. I intermix the spindle fabrication with other parts of the fabrication, mostly the making of the arms. Note that three chairs only need 21 long spindles. I make more because in doing the long, thin upper part I occasionally encounter a knot or other defect. This means that the spindle would be more likely to break. I set these “defective” spindles aside. They may become short spindles. If I have extras, they will get used in the next chair project.
The last picture is another of my gerbiling pictures. It shows the shavings that come from using a smooth plane to do most of the shaping of the upper part of the long spindles. I think that the pile represents 7 spindles (one chair). (February to November, 2007)
Spare Time 