Popular Woodworking 2004-11 № 144, страница 46

When class starts again the next morning, my seat is on the bench in one piece and as good as new. (Even to this day I cannot find the repair.) I'm amazed, but Fleming merely shrugs, smiles and resumes whistling a song as he keeps time on his foot-powered pole lathe, turning another spindle for a Windsor chair he's building for a client.

Most of the world has never heard of Fleming, a high-school English teacher who began making ladderback, Windsor and Welsh stick chairs in 1986. But he has started teaching some small classes (usually four students at most), and his reputation is beginning to spread. Several employees of Lee Valley Tools - including one of the company's tool designers -have made chairs under Fleming's tutelage. And Leonard Lee, the

company's founder, owns some of his chairs.

Orders are coming from far-off places, and students are beginning to make the long journey to Gould Street in Cobden, Ontario, to spend five days making a chair, listening to Fleming spin stories and forgetting that the 20th century ever happened.

A Chairmaker's Shop

Located an hour and a half outside Ottawa, the village of Cobden and the nearby town of Pembroke are the last stops on Highway 17 before you penetrate the Canadian wilderness. Civilization falls quickly away on this highway until there's little left but river, sky and the occasional Tim Hortons doughnut shop. By the time you reach Fleming's shop, a tidy red building at the end of his home's

driveway, its rustic contents seem perfectly natural.

Though it's only 25 -feet square, the shop is roomy enough for three or four people to work comfortably because of the absence of woodworking machinery. The shop's entryway is reserved for a few of Fleming's finished chairs and a well-thumbed library of books on chairbuilding and traditional crafts. (Fleming read aloud several romantic passages about particular species of trees during my week there.)

Two shaving horses and a low workbench occupy the center of the room. The right wall is framed by shelves stocked with spindles and the timber for upcoming orders (Fleming is usually booked to the point where it takes him six months to fill an order).

A pole lathe squats in the back of the shop. Powered by Fleming's foot and a long springy tree branch secured to the ceiling, he churns out a spindle every three minutes or so when he is busy. The left side of the shop has a cabinetmaker's bench, a storage cabinet and one of the few 20th-century intrusions into the environment — a small benchtop band saw.

All four walls sport large windows (only a few electric bulbs are needed to light the shop) and dozens, probably hundreds, of well-cared-for traditional tools. Handsaws and frame saws hang on the back wall. They're not for show; at any moment Fleming will fetch one off the wall and blaze through a board. The large win-dowsill on the left wall is populated by a forest of chisels, carving tools and clamps. And the front part of the room houses his planes, bit braces and all the specialty tools of the chairmaker's trade.

It Starts With a Log

On the first day of class, we pull up in the driveway outside Fleming's

shop, and he is sitting outside in the unusually warm March sun dressed in a starched shirt and vest with two ash logs propped against some sawhorses.

"This," he explains, "is some of the nicest ash I've ever had." He runs his hands over the perfectly straight, clear and white wood. The wood is still green and wet, and because ash dries quickly, we need to jump right in to make the spindles for our chairs. Once the wood starts to dry it will be more difficult to work. So we fetch a wooden club, called a maul, and a froe and start splitting the wood on a stump inside the shop.

At first glance the froe seems a primitive instrument, but it's a surprisingly effective way to split the 1" x 1" sections we need for the chair spindles. A froe has the basic shape of a framing square. One leg is a handle; the other is a slightly wedge-shaped length of steel. You balance the steel edge of the froe on the end grain of the log where you want your split to begin. Then, with all your might, you strike the back of the steel wedge to drive it into the wood. The ash splits true. Once the cut begins, it's simple work to push and pull the handle to drive the split to the bottom of the log.

We take the blanks to the shaving horse and learn to make the slightly irregular shapes into more regular square sections, which will be dried in Fleming's wood-burning stove in his kitchen. With a sharp drawknife the wood comes off in long wet ribbons that have an earthy, primitive and intoxicating aroma. Fleming shows us how to taper the spindle blanks so they'll be easier to shape round after drying.

Halfway through the morning, Sandy, Fleming's wife, brings a fresh pot of tea to the shop, a ritual they observe during every class, and one I became quickly fond of.

Hoffman and Fleming inspect the parts of the seat before gluing it up. After dressing each long edge with a try plane, students inspect the joint for a perfect fit by looking for gaps of light.

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Popular Woodworking November 2004