Never Give Up

Let’s see those glamor shots one more time—

When I first started cutting wood, I was paralyzed that you can’t just undo changes when it comes to wood. There is no way to back up your progress. You have the wood you start with and you remove portions to get it to fit together.

But remember: Never Say Die. I cannot believe the amount of seemingly catastrophic mistakes I have made while cutting wood. The mistakes are usually with a new kind of joinery or something. Let’s talk about a few mistakes that felt like they’d end this chair, and how I addressed them.

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The first, and smallest, is that while chopping the mortises in the battens on the underside of the seat, I broke through and ended up wasting nearly half of the material in the batten around the mortise. When chopping a mortise you are best off chopping from both sides and meeting in the middle. This way the fibers are always supported, until the very end, when a little breakout is no big deal because it’s on the inside. I have an excuse for this mistake, but I really should know better by now. It was a lazy mistake. The fix was easy enough: screw a replacement chunk of wood in place. This doesn’t do anything to reduce the strength of the chair, but it really looks messy.

The second mistake was a design flaw. When I designed this chair I researched some plans but couldn’t find anything like what I wanted, so I had to come up with plans myself. Most of the joinery for this chair is straightforward, but in the one place where it was tricky, I got it backwards. My plan was for tusk tenons to hold the seat back in the battens (see the first picture above for an idea of how it would work.) Unfortunately I made the mortises for the wedges backwards. I realized this after making and fitting the hickory wedges. I fixed it by trimming the seat back and fixing the seat back with handmade hickory dowels.

The worst mistake was an assembly error. When you glue a chair with stretchers together, you need to sloppily assemble everything, and then gradually tighten everything up till it all fits. I thought “I can just glue and wedge two legs with a stretcher in, and then get the other two legs into those.” This was madness, but somehow it worked out. I didn’t panic or anything, I just kept at it. Axel was with me and was like, “Dad that’s not going together.” I showed him!

There was one casualty of this mistake though: because of how I ended up needing to force the legs into place, one of the battens is not properly seated in its tapered sliding dovetail mortise.

It’s still solid as a rock, with the tops of the legs wedging fully into the seat, with zero give or wobble.

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It’s tempting to give up or give in or let your hopes flag, give out. It’s worth it to salvage what you’ve done so far and finish what you started. This new chair has a significant number of mistakes, but I had no plan and no map, just what I came up with myself: I am at peace with the difficulties that I went through. The next one will be better.