Making the 'Kanna' Chair - pt.1

The final chair, next to the very log I got the wood from

This is the first article in a 2 part series briefly covering how I designed and made these chairs from start to finish.

Making chairs seems tricky. Between the splayed legs, non-linear shapes and curved edges it seems like a massive undertaking to create one. Some of this is true, but much of it is negated by the fact that woodworkers have been making chairs for thousands of years and that has resulted in some ingenious ways of working around what would be otherwise difficult tasks. There's a lot of creative freedom when making a chair so long as you stick with some basics like keeping your butt of the ground and making it comfortable.

My favorite chair. At around 200 years old it is still rock solid and inspires me every time I sit in it

A few months back a large ash tree was blown down in the backyard of my parents house. Spying an opportunity for free wood and a good story I set to work hewing the beam every time I'd visit my parents. I didn't have a specific use for all of the wood but once I got a request to make a pair of chairs I knew I had exactly the right kind of wood on hand.

Rather than starting with a design ad selecting wood, this chair took on the reverse role; I designed the chair around the wood. I took a lot of inspiration from my chair I have by my desk. At 200+ years old this federalist style chair is a masterclass in proportions and construction, still holding up staggeringly well despite the centuries. Considering this design the first thing I decided was that the legs should be octagonal. Octagonal shapes feel wonderful in the hand and retain subtle but crisp edges that are quite satisfying. Additionally, they break up and reflect light in facets, similar to how diamonds work.

One of my designs for the chair. Ultimately I decided to have the legs taper down rather than up, as is traditional.

Since the ash was still somewhat wet I needed a wide piece of dry wood for making the seat pans. I had some very wide honey locust boards on hand that I decided to use. First thing I did was flatten them down, revealing some magnificent grain in the process. Honeylocust is surprisingly similar to elm, and I was pleasantly surprised by it

Honey Locust is a delightful wood. It's similar to elm but with more of an amber color. The wood glows bright green when exposed to UV light which is fun.

More than other kinds of furniture, making chairs requires lot of time and care measuring compared to cutting and assembling. Each hole requires it's own sightlines and angles that must fall in line with the greater curve of the chair. Even being 1-2 degrees off can result in large gaps over the course of a couple of feet of spindle length. For the shape of the seat pan I modeled it after the same shape as my favorite handplane blade as an homage to the blacksmith that forged it.

Lines must be clear- a mistake cannot be corrected and restarting with such a large piece of wood is expensive and time consuming.

Two of the biggest barriers to entry when it comes to chair making is woodturning and steam bending. Owning a lathe is a luxury, and steam bending wood can be very intimidating. With this design there is no woodturning needed and the steam bending is simple. To make the seatcrest, I drew out the curve and used nails and a sashigane to copy the curve onto the scrap wood that would be my form. With the curves marked out I could cut my clamping jig on the bandsaw and move onto making a steam box.

The curve of the seat comb was copied by using nails and bending my carpenters square around them.

The steam box couldn't have been more basic, and thats all this project called for. I nailed a couple piece of construction lumber into a box, drilled a hole in it, then used a clothes steamer to pump steam into it for an hour. Depending on the project, even a PVC pipe can be used to hold the wood and steam in a pinch. All that matters is that the wood is heated up completely.

My simple steamer box. An hour with the clothes steamer running and the wood was ready to be bent in its form.

Once taken out of the box, the wood was clamped in the form and left overnight to cool off, permanently bending its shape.

I mentioned earlier that there are some ingenious ways of working around the complex angles and geometry of a chair and one of them is a simple jig that I saw illustrated in Peter Galbert's The Chairmakers Notebook. Using a piece of string attached to a protractor a jig can be clamped to the seatpan, holding the seatcrest at exactly the height it would be once the chair is complete. Once held in place, the string can be pulled up and I can see exactly the angle I need to drill for the spindle to reach from the seatpan up into the seatcrest.

With the seatcrest held up, I can use the protractor and string to find the exact angle I need to tilt the spindle.

With the correct angle derived I can then line up my bevel gauge and drill my spindle hole at exactly that same angle, going around the seat pan and drilling every angle this way.

With the spindles and seatcrest done the next part of this series will be about the legs and assembly, so stay tuned.