The Stickley No. 306½ Dining Chair

BY PAUL SELLERS

At first glance I thought to myself, “Another broken chair.” The chair, I soon discovered, was an early Stickley dining chair, catalog #306½, with triple-hoop back rails tenoned into the back leg posts on each side, the top one of which had a vertical “green-stick” fracture that had sprung slightly apart directly in the center of the rail, rendering the chair vulnerable to further fracturing. “Can it be fixed?” I was asked, and I confidently replied “Certainly,” grabbing the chair by the post and spinning it around to get a closer look. “All it needs is to blow out any loose particles inside the fracture, make arch-shaped cauls corresponding to the hoop shape of the back to ensure even clamping pressure to both sides of the rail, inject some glue and it will be as good as new.” That’s what I planned, but when it came time to do the glue-up I found that the joint went together just fine with a simple application of cam clamps (1).

PHOTO COURTESY OF RAGO ARTS & AUCTION CENTER, LAMBERTVILLE, NJ

     Before I got around to making the repair, however, the chair sat for some while in the shop next to my workbench, and I couldn’t help but consider this simple yet compelling design. I became more and more intrigued by certain factors not so obvious to my first casual observation. The chair was extremely lightweight and yet it didn’t feel in any way flimsy. Indeed, it was 80 years old and was as stable and sturdy as the day it was made. The seat was comfortable and the angle of the back, the curvature of the rails and so on, fit my back most perfectly. I eventually concluded that the chair was as close as you could get to perfection as any I had sat in.

ALL PHOTOS BY PAUL SELLERS EXCEPT AS NOTED

     Considering when it was first conceived, the chair is wonderfully free of any of the stylistic excesses of the day, declaring itself eminently practical. There is nothing flamboyant about it, though nothing gracefully expressed in flowing design, either. Nonetheless, it is an impeccable concept meticulously thought through. The original statement? To build furniture in workmanlike fashion that is well-balanced, well-built, fully accommodating and capably functional. Pieces guaranteed not by mere words but by a built-to-last integrity that comes from careful thought in design concepts such as joint structure, wood proportions, wood choice, shape, strength and so on.

     After the repair and some initial scraping and sanding, I applied a tiny bit of touch-up color and finish to match the existing original. At that point you could scarcely detect any difference (2). I then worked on the overall surface surrounding the cracked area to blend in the repair with color touch-up and wax until the soft luster matched the original patina perfectly. All in all, I was pleased with the outcome on this Stickley No. 306½. Here are a few particulars for you to copy should you decide to carry on in the tradition of such simplicity and build it for yourself.

MATERIALS

     The chair is a fairly lightweight dining chair, also referred to as an occasional chair, unstained but lightly fumed to a golden oak with an oil tanned leather hide seat (this may not be original on so old a chair) over a wool and hair padding sandwiched between two pieces of muslin fabric suspended on 3″ wide webbing going across the chair from side to side with no gaps between each of the web pieces (see drawing detail). The muslin was tacked to the seat rail with 1/2″ tacks. The leather, cut to shape between the square leg sections, was also tacked securely in place with tacks on 1/2″ centers.

     I recommend that you use quartersawn white oak, the traditional wood for this style of furniture. White oak is resiliently strong, easy to work with hand tools or by machine, and fumes to a wonderful range of colors from light tan to deep dark brown. Unlike red oak, white oak has closed, smooth, even-grained fibers that plane and finish smoothly without the stringiness associated with its red oak cousin. You can buy the wood for a full chair for around $50 and the leather seat will cost around $30. Padding, cotton lining and common 1/2″ tacks will be a few dollars more. Otherwise you could forgo the original upholstering and use foam rubber padding available from most craft and fabric stores.

     The total board footage for this chair is 8-1/2 BF, which allows for approximately 50% wastage. Thin rails can be milled from thicker 6/4 stock, so you can buy 6/4-quartersawn oak for all parts except the front legs, which must come from 8/4 stock. You need only 1 BF for the two of these.

IDENTIFYING THE DETAILS

     When I make a furniture reproduction I always examine the components and design from two perspectives. First, I examine the piece from a distance and from various angles. I want to see what impresses me about the design; inevitably, the dominant features of shape, color, grain configuration and so on stand out more from a distance. From this vantage point I can also assess proportion, balance and so on. Looking from a distance helps me to “isolate” key or dominant factors so that I can determine how they impact the overall design as a whole.

     Features of the chair that stand out for me are the careful consideration and placement of the lower rails and their proportions. The wide lower rail on the front with its correspondingly wide shoulders gives the chair optimum lateral stability. The side rails, three of them if you include the upper pine seat rail, have the effective combined strength of an 11″-wide shoulder. This ensures the longevity of the chair, which is typically subjected to the most abuse of any type of furniture made.

     Secondly, I then take a closer look to determine the more critical construction details: factors such as shoulder lines to joints, stock sizes, joint choices, measurements, and so on. All of this I then record in my journal for future reference. At these close quarters I’m also looking for the less noticeable but telltale signs to determine whether the piece was planed and scraped only, or sanded too. Did they use a circular saw (the kerf marks of which might still be evident on the unseen surfaces of the rails) or did they use riven wood to avoid grain run-out? What kind of glue did they use? How thick is the veneer? Perhaps, as with some furniture I’ve been involved with, the craftsman has left a note inside the piece—an early time capsule, if you will—that offers greater insight. All of this helps me to see the bigger picture.

     Notice, for example, that the seat rails are made from pine. Two things occur to me in my initial examination of this feature alone. One, pine was then an inexpensive secondary wood well-suited to this unseen position in the chair (other inexpensive lightweight woods, such as poplar or fir, would work as well). Two, the lighter weight of the chair is important, and since tacking the leather seat requires a wider nailing surface, using pine allows twice the thickness of wood compared to oak or some other hardwood. I also concluded that the softer wood fiber of pine is much easier to nail into and possibly less likely to split. Furthermore, oak is high in tannic acid, which adversely reacts when in contact with steel, causing an accelerated rate of rusting in the upholstery tacks. All of these considerations no doubt figured in this use of pine.

PLANS AND PATTERNS

STICKLEY #306½ DINING CHAIR

CHAIR DETAILS

     This rest of this chair has the typical quartersawn oak preferred by Stickley and other makers of craftsman/mission-style furniture and accessories. All of the figured facets of the legs and rails face forward and/or outward to to best show off the grain. (Other heavier sections of furniture pieces, such as upholstered armchairs and couches, had legs made up of flat stock mitered at the corners so that the rays decorated every facet of each leg.)

     Studying the side elevation (3), you can notice other details that were equally well thought through. Each of the three front-to-back rails increases in length incrementally from the top of the seat rail to the underside of the bottom rail, yet these rails are all perpendicular to the front legs, which are tilted backwards at a slight angle. The extra length therefore is at the rear of the rails, which effectively increases the base depth of the chair from front to back. The slightly downward sloping rails, combined with the widened base, reduces the possibility of the chair tipping or kicking back, a typical problem associated with such lightweight small-framed chairs. Many Shaker-type chairs are known for this design fault.

THE TENONS

     So, the shoulders to the tenons at the back of the side rails are actually, even though only very slightly, compound-angled shoulders because the chair is also narrower at the back than the front by about 7/16″—it tapers 7/32″ front-to-back on each side. This is no minor consideration in chair manufacturing—it’s always much easier to make chairs with completely square shoulders rather than tapered and angled. To determine the angles and length of each rail, I suggest that you lay out the side elevation full-size on a sheet of plywood and then take the angles and lengths from this board. Make another layout as a top-view to establish the angles of the short shoulders. Set up a sliding bevel to get the angles and guide your knife cuts for the shoulders. You only need to lay out half the chair, left or right, working from a centerline; you can flip the bevel for the angles on the other side. You can also set a bevel for the in-line tenons if you lay out the tenon details on your story board.

     The shoulders to the tenons in the chair I examined were perfectly fitted, without even a hairline of a gap to any one of them, and reflect the quality of craftsmanship Stickley furnituremakers were known for. All four faces of the tenons were shouldered and the tenons drawn into the mortises with draw bore pins. The draw bore pins do not pass all of the way through; they stopped short of the outside face on the opposite side. I guessed the tenons to be 5/16″ thick and the draw bore pins are 7/16″ from the inside faces of the legs to the center of the bore pin holes. I suggest 7/8″ long tenons on all the back rails and 1″ long tenons on the side and front rails.

THE THICKNESS OF THE OAK RAILS

     The lightness of the chair is a joy too. The thin rails account for this. The thickest oak rail, the lower back rail, is only 9/16″ whereas the other rails are 7/16″. Not very thick, yet offering the same joint strength surrounding thicker railed chairs. Objectively, the Stickley designer thinned down the rails yet there was no compromise in the structural integrity of the chair. With a 1/4″-5/16″ thick tenon, the shoulders would be 1/16″ to 3/32″ on each side which, though seemingly small, really provided adequate buttressing. In addition, the 3/8″ shoulders top and bottom of the tenons added further buttressing that would resist any compression or fracturing of fibers around the mortise holes due to or during clamping (even though draw-boring actually required minimal or no clamping).

     The main advantage of such thin rail stock was the effective reduction of weight. A key goal in any chairmaking, particularly dining, occasional or working chairs, is to reduce the weight. Although the chair is the single most overworked, over-stressed piece of furniture in the home and workplace, it must be light enough to move under the weight of the person sitting on it, light enough to be carried single-handedly (if necessary) and rigidly strong enough to support at least 300 lbs. situationally and up to 200 lbs. dead weight daily. Add into the equation the sideways and lateral forces caused by simply scooting, rocking, pulling, shoving and so on, and suddenly each joint is then subjected to forces and stresses far in excess of the weights given above.

     The careful placement of the lower chair rails (4) show the thoughtful consideration surrounding the jointed areas in this particular type of lightweight chair. The slim sections of the legs give lighter weight, but joints laid out at the same height would effectively weaken the chair legs. The offset joint heights in this chair allow the maximum amount of wood to be retained around each of the joints. Had the legs been of larger section it would not pose the same problem, but of course the chair would be considerably heavier.

     Notice that the gap between the two lower side rails, 3-7/16″, is the same dimension as the width of the lower front and lower back rails.

THE BENT BACK RAILS

     Bending the back rails is a fairly simple procedure. You can either steam or boil (5) the wood to raise the temperature in the fiber and coax the fibers into a state of suppleness. Also, a simple method that works well if you don’t have a steam box is to suspend the blank above the water and allow the steam from the boiling water below to circulate around the blank (6, 7). That way the blank has no direct contact with the body of water itself. This seemed to me the simplest method for a small section of wood. All three ways work well.

     I experimented to see how much spring back recovery occurred after heating and bending. I found that both red and white oak yielded about the same results. If you bend a 7/16″ × 3″ board directly to a 22-1/2″ radius, the shape recovery results in a radius of about 28″, still comfortable to my back. I found that bending in cauls bandsawn to a 15″ radius recovered to a perfect 22-1/2″ radius that matched the original chair. This is no exact science; I’m stating what happened for me and I achieved fairly consistent results. After 30 minutes of heating I found that the wood bent easily in my large Record vise (8, 9) with no signs of any failure. The whole procedure from the trough to the vise took less than 30 seconds. I used 3-1/2″ × 4″ cherry for the cauls, but I have also had good results using Western red cedar. Any wood will work as long as it’s large enough to withstand the initial pressure in the vise. A good bandsaw will cut this shape easily in a few minutes. Once the backs are bent to shape, leave them clamped in the cauls overnight and when you remove them from the cauls they will spring back close to the 22-1/2″ radius (10). They will then be quite strong and stiff (11).

     You may well realize that the hooped back could be any radius you want it to be. I wouldn’t get locked into having to make a perfect match unless you want to make a close reproduction. You can make any curve to suit your particular need.

TENONING THE BENT BACK RAILS

     To establish the awkward tenon shoulders on the hooped stock, I first laid out the shoulder lines between the posts on a storyboard and marked a centerline on the storyboard to reference with a centerline on the hooped back. With the hoop on the storyboard as shown, I marked each side of the centerline 6-3/4″, a combined measurement equaling the distance between the legs of the chair back frame. I then added 7/8″ to each end of the hoop for the tenons. (You could of course change this measurement if you wanted a wider or narrower chair and 1/8″ will make very little difference. You would simply make the shoulder distance of the straight lower rails match your hooped rails.) To establish my overall length and the angled cut for the shoulders of the tenons, I placed my hooped back on the storyboard as shown and used a square to give the angled cut lines (12).

     To establish the face of the tenon, I scribed a parallel line to mark the front face of the tenons using a 5/16″ spacer as a gauge to guide my pencil (13). Do this on both ends of the rail and to the top and bottom of the rail. Now take a 5/8″ spacer and do the same (14). This will give you the 5/16″ thickness of the tenon. I further defined these lines with a knife and squared all the way around each end to create a knife wall for my tenon shoulder lines (15) and my overall length cut. The knife wall ensures that subsequent cuts with the chisel will give accurate saw cuts to establish the shoulders (16). After cutting the shoulders down to the depth lines you can cut the tenon faces down to the shoulder line (17), trim as needed with the chisel (18), and cut the top and bottom shoulders (19).

DRAW BORING

     Draw boring is a simple yet ingenious method used only in mortise and tenon joinery to draw up the tenon into the mortise hole. This unique aspect of traditional mortise and tenon joinery, a technique developed prior to the invention of the screw-threaded clamp, worked perfectly well for centuries prior to the industrial revolution. The method fell into disuse not because it didn’t work—and work extremely well—but because it didn’t keep pace with industrialism and mass-manufacturing.

     Most people see dowels used in the construction of furniture and naturally assume that they are simply occupying a hole bored through both the tenon and the mortised piece at the same time. That’s not (or should not be) the case. The hole is bored through the mortised piece first with a suitably-sized bit, and then the tenon is inserted into the mortise and pushed firmly up against the shoulders of the tenon. Now, with the tenon inserted fully, the center point of the bit is inserted to mark the exact center of the hole as a reference point. The tenon is then removed from the mortise and a new centerpoint is marked—offset towards the shoulder of the tenon by 1/16″—and bored without being inserted into the mortise hole. The peg is made to the diameter of the hole and one of the ends is pointed slightly so that the leading edges don’t catch on the face of the tenon when passing into the mortise hole and through the tenon.

     As the peg is driven home, the shoulders of the tenon are pulled tightly up against the counterpart, be it a chair or table leg, door stile, window sash or whatever. Also, as the peg is driven through the hole it bends to accommodate the offsetting of the two components. If you cut through a jointed section and through the peg, you will see that the peg curves in the hole and actually becomes a sprung peg binding on the walls of the hole. You will also see that many of the fibers are actually compressed around the peg (see drawing detail). It’s the natural resilient springiness of the wooden peg that holds it permanently in its place.

     You could choose not to glue the tenon as the peg will hold it in place, but I prefer to glue mine. The draw bore pin holes are all centered 7/16″ from the tenon shoulders.

Paul Sellers has been a woodworker for more than 40 years. He teaches at the Center for Essential Education School of Woodworking in Waco, Texas.

Tags: chairs, project, Stickley

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 11:20 am and is filed under December 08 Issue, Woodwork Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.