Wild and Woody

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"I'll tolerate anything in my chairs that's not a hazard to my body."

Making a rustic chair that is also comfortable, however, can be like asking a bear to dance. There's a possibility it will happen, but an extremely remote one. It's probably wiser, at least at first, to put comfort toward the bottom of your list of priorities. I'll tolerate anything in my chairs that is visually pleasing and not an obvious hazard to my body. In planning your creation, for instance, try to make sure that the back slants backward and that the back decoration and support structures don't protrude into the sitting part of the chair. Plan to put a comfortable seat in later, or simply use pillows. But also think of all the other uses of a chair: for looking at, for throwing clothes on, for newspapers, magazines, and sleeping cats. If these functions don't make sense to you, don't make a chair. Try a rustic table or ladder instead-objects in which comfort plays only a small role.

Getting It Together

There are a variety of ways to put rustic furniture together, depending on the skills of the maker, the use of the piece of furniture, the tools available, and the wetness of the wood.

Mortise-and-tenon joinery is peg-in-hole joinery. I use 5/8"-diameter tenons that are 3/4" long. I've cut hundreds of tenons with my pocketknife, but I presently use an antique tenon cutter, the hollow auger, which fits on the end of my hand brace. You could use a hatchet, a lathe, or a saw to score the depth of the tenon, a chisel or knife to chip away the excess, and a rasp to round it off.

I now cut mortises with a spur bit on my drill press. Before that I used a hand power drill with a similar bit, and I know many makers who prefer to use a hand brace and bit.

Among the problems with rustic mortise-and-tenon joinery is the shrinkage of the tenon in the mortise and the subsequent loosening of the joint. If both members are dry, this rarely occurs. But there are two ways to get around this potential problem. One avoids it; the other attempts to work with it. The first is the blind dowel tenon. Mortises are drilled both in the post and in the end of the rung. A single length of kiln-dried hardwood dowel is then fitted and glued into each pair of mortises, and the joint is established. The tenon won't shrink, though there is a chance the mortise might crack around the dry tenon.

The second method is the "wet joint." Here tenons are cut on the rungs, and care is taken to make sure the tenons are drier than the wood of the mortised piece. When the piece is assembled, the tenon will absorb moisture from the mortised wood and will swell. When all the wood finally stabilizes, the mortise will have neatly shrunk around the tenon, more than the tenon itself may have shrunk. No glue is used, and a firmly woven seat provides the final insurance for a tightly constructed chair.

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