Hello from between the buses in Indianapolis my friends. Well it is another beautiful day in the bus barn to start chopping out the seat. This is the first time I have ever tried to do this by hand but I have watched many videos of guys making Windsor chairs so I am looking forward to the challenge. I think in this post I have combined days 4 through 7. I guess I was averaging about 3 hours a day in the shop. At this point when I finished smoothing out the seat I had about 21 hours in total for this project.


So here is the seat blank all glued up and ready for some chopping. I drew a new profile for the seat that had a few more curves in it.

Here is the adze I bought on ebay from a maker in Bulgaria. It is really for chopping out bowls but it was small and only $30. Only took about 2 weeks to get to Indy as well. Definitely  needed some extra care on sharpening but over all I liked it. So I slowly started to chop away and the material. This did take about 3 hours to get the seat fully hogged out with the adze. I don't know if a bigger adze would have sped up the process or not but I did like the feel of this tool in my hand.

I will fully admit this was a lot of work chopping this seat out but overall I did enjoy the experience.

 So here is the seat after 3 hours of chopping with the adze. It doesn't look like much and I wondered how in the world am I ever going to get this smoothed out.

Well here were my other helps. Two scorps or inshaves. Many say the circular tool is a scorp and the other is an inshave. But if you do a search to buy a scorp you will see both of these tools come up in your search. I got these on Amazon and they were both about $25. They are not the best out there and definitely need sharpening (a lot of sharpening) but they worked and did help the process.

 Here you can see the progress of the seat as it starts to take shape.

Once you get done with the scorps then you move onto a travisher which is a curved spokeshave. I got this one from Highland woodworking for $110 (ouch!) but that is the lowest price you will fine out there aside from making your own. It came sharp and ready to use. Beautiful tool for getting the seat to a finish ready for scraping and sanding.

Here I am cutting our two reliefs in the seat so there will be less pressure on your sciatic nerve on the back of your leg.

 Then it was onto scraping and sanding. I got this set of curved scrapers from Woodcraft for about $21. The guy at the store said they were sharp and ready to use. I always have problems sharpening scrapers. I don't know why but I just can't get the technique. But the guy was right these were sharp out of the box and produced beautiful shavings instead of dust. After scraping I was able to start with 80 grit sandpaper. I used Abrenet sandpaper which is a bit more expensive but very good sand paper. It is actually not paper but a mesh system and cuts the wood really well. It also holds up well and so you use less. I followed the course of sand paper going from 80 grit all the way to 400 which left a really smooth surface.

So here is the smoothed out chair. I can't believe I was able to get the seat to this state after chopping it out with the adze. But with persistence and the tools anyone can do this.

Well, my friends I hope you enjoyed the post. Up next the front legs, but until than as always, God bless.

Mark Hynek