There is a certain amount of panic in the workshop at the moment. Usually we are running around like headless chickens trying to get work finished but this one is really serious. It's all to do with my forthcoming wedding. I know you could say I am panicing about this and there may be some truth in such an unkind accusation but the real panic is that I have promised my bride to be that I would make a pair of chairs that we would get married in. My idea was that I would make a chair with a male character and a chair with a female character. Each would be totally independent objects which would stand alone each in ifs own right. But the chairs would be designed to come together and create a third identity, a relationship, a partnership. The Rector of my local church also suggested that we could put the chairs in the aisle of the church and use them during the Service of Blessing. Another idea that I had that wasn't so well received was that I could put a "For Sale" sign on the back of one of the chairs as we were going to have such a large congregation. It is by having daft ideas like this that my fate has been well and truly set. Not only would I have the pressure of organising a business to run for two weeks while I'm away on honeymoon and helping to organise a wedding, I also have to design and make two very important chairs with a rather serious deadline.

The chairs began with lots and lots of little doodles in my sketch book. None of them really made much sense but I knew I needed fairly complex shapes and fairly simple construction as I didn't have much time. Also the nature of my day which is chopped up by clients and administrative duties and students means that I can't take on intensive cabinetmaking that demands total concentration. This had to be quite a free and expressive design. My first step after the drawings was to make a small model. There is a wonderful material for model making called the foam board which is a white light card material about 3mm thick with a foam inside and a thin card surface on either side. This card surface is wonderful for drawing on and the foam cuts very easily with a scalpel. It is ideal for making models and setting up small sculptural ideas very quickly.

Because these chairs were to be very sculptural, a small model is a far more effective way of developing an idea than working out loads and loads of two dimensional drawings. With a model you can walk around it, view it from what will become the eye level when the real object is made full size. You can photograph it and see it from a different view point. It is possible even to cleverly light and photograph a model so that it looks pretty much like the full size thing.

The terrible thing with models though is that they are very toy like. They almost invite the onlooker to pick them up and play with them. I have in my time made many models especially when presenting ideas to architects and they all get broken by some ham—fisted architect picking them up by the corner and spinning them around in their fingers. It seems that they can't resist playing with them, but I digress.

Having got the idea, I went straight to the timber. I decided to make these chairs in English Elm and in English Ash. I was using Elm for the chair seats as Stephen Bedford one of my timber merchants had saved a really beautiful board of English Elm for me. This was wide, clear and long enough to make certainly two, maybe three, chair seats without a joint. In this way the figuring of the timber can run through the two chair seats. I tried very hard to enlarge the model fairly accurately because ones first idea always tends to be the true one. Marking the curves was a lot of fun. Usually I work from a known radius but this time it was a curve created by bending a thin Rosewood strip to what appeared to be an attractive form then drawing around it. I think at this stage without the help of Philip Molyneux I wouldn't have been able to do the job. It takes one person to hold the curve and another to mark the line. No amount of careful placing of the left foot would free up a hand in order to run a pencil down the curved Rosewood strip.

I then cut in to the Elm seat and thought about how I was going to shape the curved bum depressions in each seat. The purists amongst you will be saddened by the fact that I didn't do it with an "adze" and an "Inshave" but apart from valuing my toes I really didn't have the time to learn how to use an "adze" so I got hold of an Australian gadget called an "Arbortech". This is a tool like a small circular saw that fits on to a angle grinder. The teeth of the "Arbortech" are shaped like those of a chain saw. It is a typical Australian approach to woodwork, totally revolutionary, very effective but lacking in finesse. The "Arbortech" in use is quite spectacular as it will remove a large amount of wood very very quickly. It is possible to control it restricting the depth of cut by using the guard of the angle grinder resting against an adjacent land. It did strike me while using this tool that it was a pretty dangerous piece of equipment as it is almost totally unguarded and in unskilled hands, capable of doing an awful lot of damage in a very short time. They do sell a guard for the "Arbortech" which I didn't buy on the advice of the man at Axminster Power Tools but maybe if I was doing a lot of work with the "Arbortech" I would go for the guarding system as well.

Having carved out most of the waste of the seats, these were sanded to final shape using a disc sander and a drum sander. The legs were shaped to a template using the ring fence on our spindle moulder and finished off using the bobbin sander.

The design of the joints attaching the legs to the chair seats is a straight copy from Sam Maloof. I have always been impressed by Sam's chairs but what I found most useful was the idea that one could have a solid Elm seat in the same way that a Windsor Chair would be made but with a one piece rear leg. Windsor Chairs have legs dowelled into the chair seat from one side and the back support dowelled in from another side whereas a cabinet makers chair has a long one piece back leg running from the top of the chair down to the floor. What Sam has done is develop a joint which will enable cabinetmakers like me to use a cabinetmakers chair design with a solid wood seat and a relatively straight forward joinery system. This joint was a great success being extremely simple to make but also very strong and versatile. It allowed me to place the legs exactly where I wanted them at varying angles within the design. This was achieved by firstly notching out the chair seat with a notch 1/4" smaller than the size of the leg that was fitting to it. This can be done

CRAFT OF CABINETMAKING NO 34 first published by David Savage in The Woodworker Magazine

Love chairs 2 made a few years later

go to see love chairs 3 being made

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