Pressed Back Rocking Chair (ca 1890)

One of the pieces I have recently completed is a pressed back rocking chair made around 1890. The reason I give for this date is that that is when the method of pressing designs (into wood using metal wheels with the design etched in) was first used in a commercial setting. The wheel was forced down on to the wood surface (probably powered by steam) and rolled across the surface of the wood creating the patterns and giving the overall impression of a carved back. The overall design of this chair also seems to be fitting with the turn of the last century.

The chair was very loose and had a severe break in the seat of the chair. One of the lower back posts had pierced through the seat and was lodged with the tenon poking through. This break happened quite sometime ago, because at one point someone tried to address it with nails and then covered over the seat with naugahyde. The seat subsequently cracked in half and was only held together by braces underneath. In addition, the chair was held together with nails in all of the joinery. In short, this rocking chair needed some help!

Below are photos of the chair from start to finish. You can see all of the repairs made and the final product. I will start with a photo of the chair as it arrived in my shop.

 Here is a close up of the seat with the upholstery.

Once the naugahyde was removed, I could see the extent of the damage. In this photo you can see how the wood was raised by the tenon poking through.

The photo below shows the crack that developed in the entire seat.

Once the seat was removed from the rest of the chair I removed the braces that were bracing the seat. I believe that the smaller brace was original to the chair while the bluish green slat was added as a repair.

Another view of the damaged seat.

After the braces were removed, I removed the finish from the seat. The crack in the seat was completely separated as seen in the photo below.

This was a section of the seat that was completely loose. It had been repaired before and had lost some material. Rather than putting it back in, I made a patch that would span the area. This way there was a tighter surface for gluing up.

This photo shows the new patch before it was glued in place. It was later carved flush with the contour of the seat.

Here is a photo of the seat being glued up.The patch is also being glued and can be seen in the lower right corner of the photo.

After the seat was glued, I noticed significant wood loos in the underside of the crack that ran the length of the seat. Glue alone would not hold the seat together! I made three butterfly patches that spanned the crack in three spots. Below is a photo of the patches before they were inserted into the seat. The following photo shows the patches in place and trimmed flush.

While the glue on the patches was drying, I disassembled the rest of the chair and scraped the joints clean. The chair had many nails in it which took a little time to remove, but I eventually got all of the loose joints apart. The following two photos show the chair knocked apart.

I glued the rocker up with the arms held in place by clamps alone so I knew that everything aligned properly. After the glue dried I removed the arms and spindles to make the staining of the seat a little easier. Here is a photo of the chair glued up followed by a photo of the chair with the arms removed and the seat stained.

 After the seat was stained, the last thing to do was to build up the finish on the seat and clean and add finish to the rest of the chair. The results can be seen in the three photos of the completed rocking chair.

Mid-Atlantic Ladderback Arm Chair (ca. 1780) Part 2

Well, I finished the restoration and repair of the ladderback arm chair I have been working on. It is always an enjoyable experience working on and spending time with a piece of furniture this old. I find my mind imagining the hands that created this piece as well as the many hands that it passed through. After all, isn't this why we are drawn to these things? Each piece is a direct link to another time and place, giving us a small glimpse of what life was like and how our ancestors thought about things. From the intention of the piece, to it's manufacture detail, to its subsequent use, all shed light on a piece of our collective history. Personally, Taking a chair apart like this and studying it to see what I can find out gives me a sense of communion with it's maker that gives the whole project a new purpose. We are fortunate to have these crafted pieces of art to admire in this day and age.

Once the joinery was reassembled on this chair, the next step was to clean the existing finish and build it back up. A previous owner had used linseed oil to "feed" the finish, resulting in a build up on the finish. This is usually a hard thing to remove, but it came off a little easier on this chair. After the surface was brought down to a consistent level, I applied new finish to the old in a process known as amalgamation. With a few coats of new finish, the chair developed a nice sheen, while still displaying the many signs of use. Below are a few photos of the chair, starting with the chair after my work was completed. The chair was then sent to the caner Chris Frear for a new rush seat. As always, Chris did a perfect job on the seat. The last few photos show the chair after it the seat was put on and ready for delivery.

 

Two small notes about the chair:


1) I do think that the chair was originally painted blue. My hunch is that the maker probably made the chair to be either finished clear or painted and that in this case it was painted. Not knowing the final finish on the chair during the manufacturing process, the maker probably decided to put the decorative scribe marks on the finials, in case it was finished clear. Because of the variation of the woods used and their different visual characteristics, chairs like these were often painted in the eighteenth century.  Evidence of white paint was also found showing that this chair went through several different looks. The places where the blue paint were found indicate that it was probably the original finish.


2) One thing I never discussed was the gap between the top slat and the second one down. Usually the slats are evenly spaced. This one has a greater gap between these two than the other slats. I have not seen another example like this and do not see an obvious reason for doing this, but I am positive it was done intentionally. Perhaps future research will shed some light on this.

Mid-Atlantic Ladderback Arm Chair (ca.1780) Part 1

 Recently I have started to repair and restore a Ladderback or Post and Rung Arm chair which I have dated to being manufactured around 1780.In fact , this chair could have been made anywhere between 1750 and 1800. Dating a chair correctly is tricky business because this style of chair was made from the early 18th century through the beginning of the 20th century and continues to be made today. At first glance I had a feeling that it was probably made in the 18th century, mainly by looking at the finial design, but it is extremely difficult to be sure of such a thing. My suspicions were latter strengthened through close examination of the joinery, which I will discuss later. The really amazing thing for me about the restoration of this chair is how much I was able to discover about it with close examination.

A similar chair appears in the book Southern Furniture 1680-1830:The Colonial Williamsburg Collection  by Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown. There are several stylistic differences between the two chairs, but over all the construction methods used are very similar. One striking similarity is how low the stretchers are on the bottom of the chair. This was a feature I immediately saw in the chair I am working on. two notable differences are the arm design and also the fact that the Williamsburg chair has a square seat while the chair I am working on has a trapezoidal seat. These, I believe are all stylistic differences, perhaps particular to a region and or a particular maker. below is a like to this book:
















The chair is made up of two woods, Maple and Hickory. Maple was used for the posts of the chair, while every other component was made from Hickory. The chair came with a worn rush seat which was not original. Here is a photo of the chair as it came to me.

 

Above is a photo of the side profile of the chair. If you notice, the chair back is set at a slightly skewed angle from the rest of the chair. This allowed the back to be a bit reclined for more comfortable seating. Other ways of achieving this were to steam bend the rear posts so that they were bent a little in the middle or to use a method of multi-axis turning to achieve a bent rear post. Early American chairmakers seemed to prefer a straight leg set at an angle (which involves some interesting joinery angles) to the other two methods. In the 19th century, chairmakers commonly used the steam bending technique to achieve the raked back. This alone is not a good way to date a chair, because there examples of all of these methods throughout the 18th and 19th century.

The photo above is taken from the top of one of the rear posts. It is hard to see, but the leg is slightly oval in shape. Originally the posts would have been turned round on a lathe. as with all woods, the posts have shrunk along the grain so that the circle has turned into an oval. As I will later show, this natural function of the wood is used to the chairmaker's advantage.

When a chairmaker was plotting the layout for where the stretchers would meet the posts, he needed to have a way of marking where to drill the mortises for the tenons on the stretchers. Pencils were not as readily available as they are today, so alternative  methods were used. Traditionally, when a post was on the lathe, the final step in the turning process would be to incise lines at the points where the post and stretcher would meet. this would either be done with the pointed end of a skew chisel on end, or by use of a stick with several sharpened metal points fixed to it being placed next to the spinning blank. the points would incise the lines exactly where the chairmaker wanted them. The benefit of this later technique was that the measurements were predetermined on the stick with the points and the scribe lines could be repeated exactly from post to post.  Neither of these methods were used by this chairmaker. The scribe marks on this chair were made on the lathe while  the blank was spinning using wire to burn the wood by friction. This permanently darkens the wood and serves the exact same function as the incised lines. I have heard of this technique in turning before in turning, but this is the first time I have ever come across it being used for this particular application. Above is a close up shot of two of the scribe marks on the chair. They mark the top and bottom points of the mortise for one of the slats in the back of the chair.

This photo is a closeup of the finial. With more research, it might be possible to find out the region and possibly the maker of this chair by close examination of the finial. The lines on the finial were once again made by use of the wire burning technique.

As stated above the rush seat on the chair was not original and was in need of replacement. When I started to remove the old seat I noticed that old newspaper had been used for stuffing between the layers of rush. The paper was balled up and very brittle from age, but I was able to open enough to find out that the seat had been put on in 1934 in Xenia, Ohio, a town near Dayton. The paper was various copies of the Xenia gazette. One copy had a date of Friday October 20th, 1934. above are two photos of the paper I found.  

This photo shows the chair after the seat was removed.

What followed next was very interesting and told me great deal about the manufacture of this chair and the amount of attention to detail that the maker put into his work. The techniques used below also confimed in my mind that this chair was made during the 18th century, since that is the time period in which they were most used.

The chair was loose in spots and so I set about knocking the chair apart so I could clean the joinery and re-glue the chair. When I started to dismantle the chair, I found that the tenons for the chair had a specialized design. after a little research this is what I have learned.

Chair makers of the 18th century used two techniques to make a locking tenon that would keep the chair tight, even when the glue dried. One utilized a split tenon that was wedged from the interior. The other process is as follows. The chair maker would make the tenon of the stretcher slightly bulbous, sometimes carving a shoulder onto the inside of the bulb. The stretchers were made of Hickory in this case. The sides of the tenon would sometimes be carved down flat so that the tenon was slightly wider in one direction that the other. The tenons were then heated by putting them next to a wood stove on just outside of a fire in an effort to remove the moisture from the tenon causing it to shrink. Meanwhile, the posts for the chair would be made from green wood and the mortice for the stretcher would be made using a Spoon bit. Below is a photo of a spoon bit:

Spoon Bit

The spoon bit used with a brace would drill out a hole for the mortise. With a little movement, the chairmaker would cause the bit to cut a hole slightly wider in the center. After the mortise was drilled and the tenon was dried, the tenon would be hammered into the mortice with a little hot hide glue. The moisture from the hide glue would cause the tenon to expand into the mortise causing it to lock in place. As the posts cured, the wood would contract around the tenon making the fit tighter. The flattened sides of the tenon prevented the post from cracking at it shrank do to pressure. The end result was a tight fitting joint for the ages that relied largely on the forces of mother nature.

Any person who has ever glued a chair will tell you that the sections that loosens up the most are the stretchers that connect the front of the chair to the back. This is due to the motion of people sitting in the chairs  and leaning back, etc. To accommodate for this, the chairmaker oriented the posts so that the maximum amount of shrinkage would happen around these stretchers, minimizing the amount that the chair loosened. The result was that although the stretchers from side to side were loose, the stretchers from front to back were very tight and needed no re-gluing, just a little wedging in spots.

It is very impressive that this amount of consideration went into the manufacture of this chair. It clearly shows that it was the intent of the chairmaker of old to build a chair that would last for generations to come.

Below are some photos of the tenons.

This photo shows the tenon with its carved shoulder. The end of the tenon was rounded like the end of the spoon bit.

The flat side of the tenon can be seen in this photo.

It is worth mentioning that while I had the chair apart, I noticed that the tenons for the slats had a barb on the top edge of the tenon, similar to the tenons on the stretchers. These serve no function that I can see, because they are visible when the chair is together and do not lock the slats in place. One other thing I discovered while the seat was off and the chair disassembled was that there appeared to be remnants of blue paint. Many of these chairs were originally painted and refinished some time later on. It is my opinion that the chair was not painted originally due to the fact that the finial has a decorative scribe mark around its diameter. I do think that it was later painted and then striped and refinished at some point. It is possible that the paint is original and that would certainly be in keeping with the trends of the time.

The tenon of a slat with its barbed side and remnants of the blue paint. This photo shows the condition of the existing finish in detail. The crazing in the finish is largely due to use of linseed oil on the finish.

these last two photos show the chair disassembled and also being re-glued. The next post will focus on the restoration of  the finish and  the application of a new seat.