FDR Chair: Finishing and finished

I have written that I unexpectedly got substantial color variation on the back of my FDR chair, something I hoped would be corrected by stain.   Salespeople at specialty stores assured me that gel stain was the way to go and, although I was skeptical, I decided to try it.  For the most part, it worked out:

I almost didn't use this color because General Finishes calls it brown mahogany, I have no idea why.  They had a sample on oak in the store and it looked like what I was after, so I went with it and I'm glad I did, as this is the shade I was looking for.  I applied three coats of Arm-R-Seal over the top of the stain.

Once again Margeson's law held:  "No matter how hard you try, there will always be a stray scratch, dent, spot of glue and/or tool mark that becomes visible when you apply finish."  Grrrrrrrr.  I know you're supposed to wipe down your project with mineral spirits to avoid this, but that's not happening in my shop.  I may try alcohol next time.  I had one blemish that really bothered me, so I carefully sanded and reapplied stain and, to my surprise, it blended in fine.

As for advice about using gel stain, it dried to the right consistency to rub off quite quickly, so just do a small section at a time.  Because gel stain doesn't wick like regular stain, pay special attention to make sure you get it wiped off thoroughly around nooks and crannies.  Finally, they say coat in 12-24 hours, but I found 24 hours is best or you risk rubbing off the stain in spots. Gel stain sits on the surface rather than soaking in.

So, now for the acid test.  Here is the photo of the original chair from 1937:

The finish is different, obviously, but, other than that, how'd I do?

FDR chair ready for finish

Installing the arms was the last major thing remaining on this chair.  They are held in place by half inch dowels, two through the back into the arms and two through the arms into the front legs.  I clamped them securely into place and drilled the holes:

I would have liked to use a brace and bit for this, but, if there is a bit that will make a hole in white oak end grain, I don't own it.  My only alternative is a cordless drill and brad point bit.

I cleaned out the holes carefully by running the bit in and out several times.  Because I know dowels are a tight fit, I put them through the dowel former multiple times and even drove them dry through the hole in the back for good measure.  Nevertheless, when I applied glue to the dowels, it was a real struggle to get them in.  I wish my Lee Valley dowel former was a bit more undersized (I checked the drill bit and it is dead on.).

All's well that ends well, and the chair is finally ready for finish.  Notice how the arms make a second Timberline arch:

FDR chair: finally

Except for finishing and the arms, the chair is done.  It's glued-up and every joint is pegged:  

I am not going to tell you it is perfect.  All of the joints on the outside are tight but on the inside there are a few gaps in the .00X" range.  The chair rocked about 1/8", likely a result of my trimming the compound angle joints on the seat rails, which I solved by trimming the legs on the longer diagonal about 1/16" each.  There is the grain mismatch on the right rear leg/arm.  I give myself an A-.  My standards keep going up as my skills improve, so I can never achieve them.  That's good and bad.  For the most part, I don't think about this after the piece is complete and it keeps me striving to get better.

I went back to the lumberyard and they still didn't have any 5/4 or 6/4 QSWO; the whiskey distillers continue to buy it all.  I had to buy an 8/4 piece:

$54!!  I also bought Pendleton wool upholstery fabric for the seat.  It is usually $84 per yard but they are having a 30% off sale on remnants:

It's more than I need but I can use it for other things and I really like the pattern.  All told, materials for this chair will cost almost $300!  Yikes.  Maybe that's the reason the chair isn't reproduced commercially, that and the fact that it takes so much hand work to build it.

I have reluctantly given up on the idea of making an exact copy of the original from photographs and an inaccurate construction drawing, so I contented myself with making a template for the arms that looks right and seems to match the photos:

Basically, I made the curves by placing nails at strategic points and bending a thin stick around them.  The width changes very subtly from the front, at 3", to the back at 2 1/2", so that it will mate up with the back, just as I think the original does.  I tried to do this in a way that isn't noticeable by having the outside curve in a little bit more than the inside.  The paper template is mounted to thin baltic birch plywood.  It is surprising to me how much the eye and the fingers can detect a smooth curve.  I just kept making very fine cuts with a spokeshave until I got the shape I wanted.  It also seems to fit my arm quite well.  I continually think that the design of this chair is just right, a testament to the skill of Ray Neufer and Margery Hoffman Smith.  This is an example.  I now realize that the front of the chair is just enough wider than the back so that the outside of the rear legs line up with the inside of the front legs.  So much goes into the design of a great chair.  Few people will really notice, I know I didn't, but the details matter.

Ray Neufer made several copies of the chair later in his life, this one for example.  It clearly doesn't exactly match the original, especially the shape of the back, but I don't think he cared.  You'll notice he has a grain mismatch too.  I feel better.

FDR chair: almost ready for glue-up

Except for some more fine-tuning, the chair is ready for glue-up and pegging:

I don't yet have the material for the arms, but they are pegged in place so I will install them after the rest of the chair is together.

Frankly, the last week has been frustrating.  There are ten angled joints in this chair, four of which (the side seat rails) are angled in two directions.  I made them as carefully as I could and each joint closed tightly on its own, but when I dry-fit the chair there were small gaps in some of the joints, less than 1/64" in all cases, but noticeable.  Grrrrrrrr.  Incidentally, I accidentally discovered that this is almost exactly the thickness of my fingernails.  I have spent forever trying to close these gaps and am gradually getting there.  The problem is that it isn't obvious which joint you should work on and what is holding the joint apart, so there is trial and error involved.  In addition, each time I made an adjustment I had to reassemble the chair.  Compounding the problem is that I made the joints very tight, maybe too tight, which slows down the process.  These thick pieces of white oak don't flex at all, so the joints have to be very precise.  Calling this chair sturdy is an understatement.  It's a beast.

There is a Pendleton Wool outlet near me and I went there last weekend because I thought that it would be nice to upholster the seat with their cloth, which in Oregon is iconic.  The heavy fabrics suitable for upholstery cost $84 per yard!  I'm thinking about it but, at that price, the pattern will have to really grab me.

Despite the frustration associated with closing these angled joints, this has been a great project.  I have come to realize that this is a chair that can only be made with hand tools, unless you scan it, make a CAD file and make a plastic one with a 3-D printer I guess.  Trying to make all these curves and angles with machines would take forever, if it even could be done.  The guys in the WPA shop were hand tool woodworkers, some of them very talented carvers, and they made a chair that showcases hand tool skills.  Rectilinearity didn't interest them at all.

Starting to look like a chair

After a whole lot of final fitting, rounding-over and scraping, I assembled the back of the chair.  As I wrote earlier, I wanted to do this because I want to fit the remaining pieces rather than measure them, especially because of the compound angles of the side seat rails.  All of the joints on the chair are pegged but I chose not to drawbore them because this oak is so dense and the pegs are so stout that I didn't think they would deform as intended.  I had visions of the pieces splitting instead.  A middle ground would have been to drawbore the pieces very slightly.  At some point, I may try some experiments with pieces of my scrap white oak.  In any case, the joints are tight and the back looks good to me, except for the one grain mismatch I mentioned earlier.

The next step was to make the front legs and fit them to the side rails.  Here is what I have:

It was a relief to see the front legs vertical and things looking roughly as they should.  You can see in the front picture how the side seat rails slope up and out.  The chair is a full 4 inches wider in the front, which seems like quite a lot to me but it does give the chair the appearance of receiving you with "open arms."

So now it's on to making and fitting the stretchers and arms.  The arms have a substantial curve to form a second Timberline Arch and I'll have to make a template for them.  I'll also have to take a trip back to the lumber yard to see if the whiskey distillers have left any quartersawn white oak because I don't have material suitable for the arms.

Story sticks and tempates

I have decided to assemble the back of the FDR chair before proceeding because the time for measuring is over and the time for fitting the remaining pieces has come.  Before I do that, I need to do a lot of rounding over and scraping, which I won't bore you with.  I have really come to appreciate scrapers and their many advantages over sandpaper during this project.  I'll mention just one here.  It you are trying to refine a curved edge a scraper works way better than sandpaper, which just rides over the area needing refinement, leaving it smooth but uneven.

I want to write about something else this project has really driven home to me:  the fact that modern plans, drawings, even Sketchup files aren't anywhere near as good as what was done historically.  As some point in my past reading, I saw a picture of a back room in a nineteenth century furniture shop.  I have looked and looked for it but cannot find it.  There were hundred of templates and story sticks for the pieces made in the shop hanging from the rafters.  When an order came in, the woodworker used them to make the piece.  If you ever used them, you know they are a fantastic way of capturing all of the essential information about a piece of furniture.  Just imagine if I had had templates for the back and arms and a story stick with all the key dimensions on it for the FDR chair.  They would have saved me many hours of research, drawing, and guesstimating.  The construction drawing wasn't accurate but, even if it had been, it wouldn't have been any where near as useful.  When I am done with this project, I will make a story stick and put it and the templates away so that, if I ever want to make another one of these chairs again, I'll have everything I need.

We have gone backwards.  A set of construction drawings doesn't come close to templates for key parts of a chair and a story stick with all the measurements on it.  With the templates, you can just lay out the piece directly and the story stick gives you all of the required dimensions without measuring.  Who wants a Sketchup plan if you have templates and a story stick?  In fact, I'd argue that the main use for a Sketchup plan should me to make templates and a story stick.

This makes me wonder why woodworking writers don't provide a better way of creating them.  Why don't they just have a file you can access that will print out full size templates and a story stick?  You could use spray adhesive to stick them on thin plywood and have all you need in most cases.

The first serious hand tool project I ever undertook was a Porringer tea table.  Bob Rozaieski published a fantastic video series that took you through the construction step by step.  That's where I was first exposed to story sticks and templates.  He went the additional step of publishing his dimensions in fractions.  They are meant to be used with dividers so you essentially don't have to measure at all and you can scale the project up or down at will.  I was amazed at how well this works.  I have saved my story stick and template so that I can make another tea table like this whenever I want.

I am not one of those who believes the old way of doing things is always the best way.  Progress does happen.  In the case of capturing everything you need to know to build a piece of furniture, though, the old way really is the best way.

FDR chair: dangled tenons

The side seat rails are angled up one inch and out two inches, the reason I am saying they have "dangled" tenons (double-angled).  A little trigonometry told me that the rails have to be angled up 3.25 degrees and out 6.5 degrees, interesting but not all that practical.  The right way to go is to set two sliding bevels to the correct angles by using a stick cut to the length of the rail placed on a surface with an accurate ninety degree corner.  You measure up the correct amount from the corner to form a right triangle and then use it to set the bevel.  I did that and could mark out the shoulders and tenons accurately, after a silly mistake I will tell you about below.

By the time the FDR chair was being constructed, I am sure there were workmen in the Portland WPA woodworking shop who could easily saw these out accurately and have them fit off the saw, but I'm not there yet, so I needed a different approach.   In a way, cutting the shoulder of a dangled tenon is like cutting a pin and a tail simultaneously on a very thick board, because the cut angles both horizontally and vertically.  I could see two approaches.  The first way would be to saw them out roughly and refine them with a chisel.  On a whim, I tried the only Japanese pull saw that I own to see if I could saw more accurately to the line.  Somehow, pulling the saw along the knife line was easier for me, though perhaps it was because of the very fine teeth.  To do a fair comparison between western and eastern saws, you would need to use a western saw with the same ppi, which I don't own.  Dunno, but I used the Japanese saw from then on, with reasonably positive results.  I sawed out the cheeks and fine tuned them with a chisel on a practice piece.

While I was congratulating myself on a good test piece, I decided to check to make sure that I had gotten the angles right and, to my intense annoyance, I found that the rail angled out correctly but it angled up far more than one inch!  After spending time checking my sliding bevels and scratching my head, I realized what had happened.  3.25 degrees and 6.5 degrees (actually 93.25 and 96.5 degrees) are hard to tell apart by eye and one rosewood bevel looks pretty much like another rosewood bevel!

As I said, the results were pretty good and, with patience, I could refine them to get a pretty good result I thought.  Then it occurred to me that I could make a guide to cut the shoulders very accurately and cleanly.  Worth a try I thought.  It worked well and I ended up with shoulders off the saw.

       

Here are the rails in place:

As you can see, my dog is not impressed.

FDR chair: back together

It made sense to complete the back up to the point of rounding everything over and final scraping before moving on to the rest of the chair.  I spent an inordinate amount of time getting these joints to close simultaneously, but they finally did.  

I look at these pictures and at pictures of the original to see how well they match and just can't tell without completing the chair.  I can say that when you lay the back/legs against the full size photo, they seem to match up well.  Just have to wait and see I guess.

Incidentally, here is a photo I intended to share earlier:

When I was agonizing over whether I had gotten the templates right, I happened to notice my father-in-law's rocker, his favorite chair for decades.  It is extremely comfortable and I now enjoy sitting in it too.  On a hunch, I went and got my template; sure enough, they are a close match.  Wow!  This project has already taught me a great deal and one of the things it has taught me is that this side profile is a classic.  I'm thinking that Ray Neufer took the sketch he got from Margery Hoffman Smith, used a classic arts and crafts side profile and then shaped the front view to create the Timberline Arch.  If so, it was very clever and shows his mastery of the craft.  There is so much to great design that goes unnoticed, at least by me. 

FDR chair: mortises

At long last, the rear legs/back pieces are finished saved for final scraping and rounding over the edges.  I mentioned earlier that I left the outsides of them uncut until I had cut the mortises so I would have a stable base to work from.  There are a total of five mortises on each side.  With those cut, I  sawed out the outside edges and finished the shaping.  Here is what they look like:

I am generally quite pleased with how they turned out and, surprisingly, when laid against the photos, they seem to match quite well.  Save for the joinery faces, everywhere else is curved, which makes things quite challenging.  My one disappointment is that I didn't get the grain matched on one of them very well (the front one in the picture).  There were defects to work around and it was difficult to for me to anticipate what the grain would look like four inches into the blanks.  There would definitely be an advantage to cutting these out from a solid blank, but I simply didn't have access to any.  My hope is that, after they are stained, this won't be too noticeable.  I guess that's an advantage of a faux finish like the original.

The next step is to make the pieces to complete the backs.  These three tenons are by far the easiest of the chair.  Most of the others are very difficult because they are angled in two directions.  The seat slopes up an inch from back to front and out four inches.  To make things even more challenging, the shoulders on the stretcher tenons are slanted, as you can see from the picture.  Yikes.

FDR chair: shaping

The construction sequence for this chair may seem a bit unorthodox, but I think the reasons will become clear as I go along.  After I glued up the blanks and cut out the side profile, I reattached the offcuts with double stick tape and sawed out only the inside of the front profile.  At that point, I shaped and refined the fronts and insides, but not the backs.  I did this in two steps.  First I shaped them by eye, then I placed the pieces side by side to get them symmetrical and the joinery surfaces parallel so they will line up perfectly.  This is somewhat complicated because the workpiece is mostly curved, frequently in two directions at once.

The process went fairly smoothly, although, obviously, white oak is a lot harder than the alder I used for the prototype (Janka hardness of 1360 vs. 590).  The douglas-fir like Ray Neufer used is a lot softer (660).  Even keeping my tools sharp, it was very slow, difficult going and I was glad that I had sawed quite close to the line.  I didn't do as well with the spokeshaves as I had hoped, especially on the wider sections at the top of the back where they were difficult to grasp.  They had a tendency to skip and chatter.  I ended up using the plane, rasp and file for most of the work and had to bear down to get them to cut.  The biggest surprise was that card scrapers worked great.  I must have done a good job the last time I prepared them, judging by the nice shavings they were taking.  What a relief and pleasure that was. 

After the initial shaping, I lined the two pieces up the way they will face each other, hoping that I wouldn't have a lot more to do and breathed a sigh of relief that there were only minor differences, less than 1/16".  Here they are:

You can see how tight the pieces are at the top and that the faces where the mortises for the side and rear seat rails will be are parallel.  Whew!

So, it may seem strange that I went this far with the fronts and insides when the backs are still rough and the outside isn't even cut yet.  The reason I did this was for joinery.  I wanted to have two reference faces before I laid out and cut the mortises and, of course, two of the mortise faces on each leg weren't even exposed until I made these cuts.  By not cutting out the outside curve I can lay the legs on their sides and have a flat stable base for making the two mortises at the top of the back and the one for the rear seat rail.  By reattaching the cut-off on the back, I can have the same stable base for cutting out the mortises for the stretchers and side rails.  That was my reasoning, anyway; we'll see how it turns out.

FDR chair: good news and bad news about quarter sawn white oak

I decided to make the chair from quarter sawn white oak, for the reasons I discussed previously, and, uncharacteristically, I even went to the trouble of carefully figuring out exactly what I would need, right down to the board lengths and thicknesses that would be best.  The exact size of the blanks needed for the back/rear legs is 3'x4 1/4"x6".  There is no way to avoid 2 glue lines with the material available to me, so I decided that 6/4 stock would be best for everything but the front legs.

I usually buy my stock from a very large local, commercial hardwood supplier because, with many millions of board feet in their warehouse, they have a fantastic selection and good prices.  They tolerate me because I always make sure to restack the piles carefully and don't waste their time.  When I told the warehouseman what I wanted, he just laughed and shook his head.  It seems that the distilleries have bought up all the 6/4 quarter sawn white oak to make whiskey barrels out of.  They did have some 8/4, although the price has skyrocketed to over $9 a board foot since the last time I bought it!  I reluctantly decided to buy enough to make the rear legs/back, and I think they took pity on me because they pointed to a pallet of 5/4 scraps, all quarter sawn white oak, and asked if I wanted the whole thing for $40.  I jumped at it.

These two boards cost $154 and contain enough material for the rear legs/back pieces, the front legs and the stretchers:

This pallet of scraps, most about 3" wide and 20-30" long, cost $40:

The 8/4 boards were about $9 a board foot and I estimate there are about 120 board feet of scraps at about $.33 a board foot.  My current plan is to get the rest of what I need for the chair from these scraps, even though it is 5/4 rather than 6/4 but, whether I do or not, I am absolutely delighted to have all this beautiful oak for future projects.

The approach I took to making the back/rear leg blanks, was to glue two 8/4 pieces together, saw out the side profile on the bandsaw, then glue on a piece of scrap at the top where the arch will be.  Then I can use double stick tape to put the offcuts back on in order to saw out the front profile.  Here's what they look like just prior to this last step:

FDR chair prototype

My wife is a very accomplished teacher who subscribes to a theory that there are seven intelligences, not one.  I was dubious, but I have gradually come to accept it because of my own mental limitations.  On conventional intelligence I do pretty well, but on what she calls "visual-spatial" intelligence, I am basically a moron.  This was proven to me once again last week when I saw the roughed-out blank for the rear leg/back of the FDR chair for the first time.  There were all sorts of things I couldn't understand looking at the full-size front and side photographs that suddenly made sense and a couple of surprises as well.  Fortunately, I was lucky and things turned out well.

Refining the leg as it came off the bandsaw turned out to be quick and pretty easy.  I used flat and concave spokeshaves, a rasp, a file, a chisel and a smooth plane.  I don't have one, but the Veritas large spokeshave would be perfect for this.  You might be surprised by the smooth plane, but a plane works extremely well for shaping convex surfaces.  I was expecting the shaping to be more difficult than it turned out to be, in part because alder is so soft and easy to work.  Here's the result: 

This piece is pretty stout on the original, but not this stout.  I hadn't shaped something like this in quite a while and wasn't sure how much extra material to leave on the blank, so I used a thick marker and sawed to the outside of the line.  At it turned out, I only needed about 1/16", so what you see here is 1/4" too big in both dimensions.  It also looks heavier because the original has a substantial roundover on all the edges that I didn't bother with on  the prototype.  I learned what I needed to from it and saw no reason to remove all the extra material; now that I know this, I'll cut to a thin line when I make the chair.

The surprises.  I knew I needed 9" on the straight edge above the inside arch on the back for the crosspieces; that's what the photograph measured and that's what I made the template.  When I actually cut it out, it was 10" for the now obvious to me reason that it is curving quite a bit.  See what I mean about visual-spatial intelligence?  In two dimensions it's 9" and in three it's 10".  Turns out that is just fine, so I was lucky.

The second surprise was that the inside arch wasn't perpendicular to its curved side for the same reason. The arch is curving backwards at the same time that it is curving in and that is the cause.  It really showed at the upper corner of the arch where it meets the straight section of the back.  Again I got lucky because, with the extra length I had resulting from the first surprise, a little extra shaping with a chisel made it come out just right.

Now I have to decide what wood to make the chair out of.  According to the curator at Timberline, the original is made out of douglas-fir.  You can't tell because of the finish.  It looks like some kind of multi-layer faux finish, but maybe it has just become opaque with time.  You can't see the actual wood grain at all.

According to the curator, they scratched the douglas-fir with a metal comb, then applied an unknown finish.  It certainly feels that way when you touch it.  I don't know how to do this and wouldn't if I did because I hate faux finishes.  That's an advantage of giving up on the idea of making an exact copy!

There is an interesting story about this.  In his oral history interview, Ray Neufer is emphatic in expressing his dislike of varnish and preference for a linseed oil and wax finish, way different from what is on the chair.  I talked with Sarah Munro about this and she said she ran across a letter from the Forest Service late in the project directing that henceforth the furniture should be sent to them unfinished so they could apply the finish of their choice.  Maybe this is what happened with the FDR chair.  It is also possible the chair was refinished, as it was in active use in a guest room for decades after the President used it at the dedication.  

My chair will either be CVG douglas-fir or it will be quarter sawn white oak. I may apply a stain and I will use a satin varnish. I actually think that QSWO might look more like the original, although I have made chairs out of douglas-fir before and I really like it. It is our State tree after all. I do have some concern about it splitting and I suspect that is one reason why the back on the FDR chair is so stout. Both options will be expensive and I have to see what is available.

Making an exact copy of the FDR chair, or not

I started out, without really thinking about it, wanting to make an exact copy of the FDR chair, but my efforts to come up with precise templates failed.  I obviously can't have the original in my shop to measure and trace.  I found out that I could hire a professional to produce a 3D scan which would be precise right down to the dings in the chair.   The resulting file could be used to control a CNC router or to produce paper templates.  I suppose another option would be to print out a 3D copy of the chair.  Not a real good fit with hand tool woodworking, to put it mildly, and extremely costly to boot.

Ray Neufer himself made several copies of the chair later in his life and they don't appear to be exact from the pictures I have seen.  Given how he made the original, he probably didn't feel that was important.  Linny Adamson, the Curator at Timberline, also encouraged me to not get too hung up on exactness.  The Forest Service has made an explicit policy not to produce exact copies of the furniture when replacements are needed, if I understood her correctly.  I don't really understand this but, mostly by necessity, I've come to the same place.

Back to the drawing board.  The first thing I decided was to pay less attention to the WPA construction drawing.  Of the three sets of information I have--the drawing, my photos and the measurements I took--it is the least reliable.  My measurements are the most reliable, but I only had an hour with the chair and they are incomplete.  The photos are extremely valuable but are distorted by perspective, so you have to be careful how you interpret them.  This time around, judgment played a much greater role.  Here are the templates I came up with, mounted on thin baltic birch plywood:

I generally don't make prototypes, as I am too impatient, but this time I thought it was essential because of the cost of quartersawn or riftsawn 4x6s and the uncertainty about how this would look.  I laminated some of the alder I have and was finally ready to do some woodworking:

Those of you with bowsaws could probably do this much faster, but I don't have one and use my bandsaw.  That means that, after you saw from one side, you have to put the pieces back together with double stick tape so you can saw from the perpendicular face:

When you are all done and you are peeling off the remaining pieces, it's like opening a birthday present:

Now it's on to shaping to see what I have.

Making the FDR chair

After deciding I wanted to make the FDR chair, the first thing I did was go to my local library and check out all the books I could find about Timberline Lodge.  I learned that the WPA required that construction drawings be made of the furniture and collected into books.  Three copies were made, by hand as far as I can tell, and are preserved in three places, one of them in the rare book room at the Multinomah County Library.  I went through the approval process and found myself in a beautiful, environmentally controlled room with walls covered in locked bookshelves.  The archivist placed the book on a special stand to protect the binding and I was able to look through it and scan the construction drawing of the FDR chair with an app on my phone.  Here it is:

I left thinking I was all set, but, when I got home and started looking at the scan carefully, I noticed several things.  First, the drawing doesn't include a number of key dimensions.  Notice the depth is blank and the width at the back isn't given, which is needed because the chair narrows front to back.  More importantly, there is no side view, critical because there are complicated curves in the back of the chair.  Construction drawings of other chairs in the book include side views.  This drawing was made after the chair was constructed in order to meet a WPA requirement and oral history interviews suggest it wasn't a high priority.  I went back to the rare book room a second time to make sure I hadn't missed something and the archivist speculated that the drawing may have been traced from the picture that was included in the book on the facing page, the one I shared in my last post.  Bummer.

Clearly, I needed to get access to the original chair.  The Oregon Historical Society put me in touch with Sarah Munro, the author of the book that I linked to previously and the editor of several others.  We exchanged emails and eventually met over coffee.  She is a very interesting woman with a Bachelor's degree in anthropology and a Master's in folklore who has accumulated a wealth of information about all things Timberline.  She very kindly gave me an introduction to the Curator at Timberline Lodge, Linny Adamson, and Linny graciously agreed to let me come up to the Lodge to photograph and measure the chair.  Several of the photos were in the last post and here is a link to an online gallery.  Now that I have done this once I could do a much better job, but the pictures are useful.  I also took as many measurements as I could in an hour and from them I learned that the measurements in the WPA drawing don't match the chair very well.  Hmmmm.

The rear legs and back are the key to this chair; otherwise it is a pretty standard Arts and Crafts armchair.  With my measurements and photographs, I used dial calipers and ratios to create full size front and side views.  I bent thin, straight-grained sticks around nails at key places to draw the curves. When I was done, I thought the templates looked quite graceful and were fairly accurate.

As a check, I blew up photographs to actual size and compared them to the templates I had made.  They did not match.  *!&%#  At first I thought the photographs must be right but then I started noticing that the arms, seat rails and stretchers didn't connect at the right places in the photographs, which I knew from the measurements I had taken of the chair.  After a lot of thought, I realized that this happened because there were considerable differences in the relative distances between the camera lens and the chair.  Since the camera was about midway up the side of the chair, the top and bottom get stretched.  Who says cameras don't lie?

This is turning out to be complicated but it has been a real learning experience.  I have been pondering this issue for some time and have come to some conclusions which I will share next time.

FDR chair

Important Note:  In a general sense, the history of the building of the FDR chair is reliably known, but many of the details of interest to woodworkers are not, as least as far as I have been able to discover so far.  There is also information that appears to conflict.  Some of what follows is what seems to me most likely true based on my research to this point and my knowledge of woodworking.  I will refine it as I learn more.  Readers interested in Timberline Lodge and its furnishings should consult Sarah Munro's excellent and authoritative book (and its references): Timberline Lodge: The History, Art, and Craft of an American Icon

Put these shoes on.  Your name is Ray Neufer and the year is 1937.  You are in charge of the Works Progress Administration woodworking shop in Portland, Oregon.  Some of the workers you supervise are highly skilled and some are less so.  Many show signs of the toll taken by the Great Depression and are desperate for the wages they get in this "relief" program, but they are gradually becoming a great team.  For nearly a year, you and your guys have been making furniture for the Timberline Lodge, which is under construction up on Mt. Hood.  Even though the Lodge is not finished, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is coming to Oregon to dedicate the Bonneville Dam and will be driving up to the Timberline Lodge for the same purpose next Tuesday, September 28th.  As the prior work week is winding down, you are suddenly told that, because he had polio, the President can only stand up unaided if the chair he is sitting in has arms.  Not a single chair you have built for the Lodge has arms, not even one!  Because of the symbolism, the chair must be made by the workshop and it must reflect the spirit of Timberline.  The very talented woman, Margery Hoffman Smith, who is in charge of all of the interior decorating and with whom you have a great working relationship, gives you a rough sketch, but the rest is up to you.  You must take everything you know about the many details that go into the design of a fine chair and create one for the President of the United States on the fly.

There is no time.  Finish will have to be applied to the chair on Sunday at the latest.  You can delegate some things to workers in the shop, like stock preparation for example, but there are unique aspects of the design that require your personal attention.  You have been a "detail man" in the past, taking sketches from architects for built-in woodworking and turning them into detailed construction drawings for the craftsmen, but there is no time for that.  The chair is defined by the graceful rear legs and back, which curve in toward the center to form the "Timberline Arch" while simultaneously arching backward and then forward again to make the chair comfortable and flowing.  Steam bending or lamination aren't feasible in the time you have, so you pick out two thick timbers, lay them on your bench and sketch the outline on the front and one side of one of them.  You don't have a lot of power tools in the shop, so you work mostly with hand tools.  You rough out what you have drawn and then refine it.  With the first done, you can use it as the pattern for the other side.  Except for the arms, which form a second Timberline Arch along with the back when the chair is viewed from above, the rest of the chair is quite similar to a standard Arts and Crafts armchair and it goes more quickly.  The mortises are chopped, the angled tenons sawed, the joints that will be stressed the most drawbored and you breathe a sigh of relief because the deadline is going to be met.  Exhausted, you go home to rest, too tired even to travel up to the mountain for the dedication ceremony.

Quite a story, don't you think?  Here is a photograph of the chair taken at the time:

   

Here are pictures of it I took last week up at Timberline Lodge which better capture its beauty:

I love this chair for its truly outstanding design, for what it captures about the best of Oregon, for the engaging story about how it was made and for its historical symbolism.  This was a desperate time in our national history; the building of this lodge and its furnishings meant so much to the people involved, as they would never tire of telling for the rest of their lives.  It gave them hope when they had none, pride when they had none, a means of sustenance when they had none.  What they gave us in return was Timberline Lodge and all its furnishings, as Sarah Munro says, an icon.  

I had seen this chair before but this past Christmas I really saw it, heard a little snippet of a video near the display about its construction and just had to try somehow to build one like it.  But how?  At the time, I had one poor quality photo from one angle through a glass window into a secure display.  I can try to put his shoes on, but I'm no Ray Neufer, for whom this would have been enough.  Searching for an answer to this question has taken much of my time for the past six weeks.