The Easy Chair

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How to build a chair to be proud of.

The author (above) with his homemade birch chair before weaving its seat (below left) out of deer hide.

Making a chair is not difficult. With a little time and effort you can construct a cheap, sturdy and good-looking piece of furniture. First, locate a stand of young birch trees - birch is a sound wood as well as being aromatic and comfortable to work with. Any of the hardwoods though, like oak, ash, maple or beech, will produce a fine chair. Using a hand saw, cut off a fairly straight 12-foot-high sapling, 1" to 2" in diameter (sawing is cleaner than chopping and prevents splintering) as close to the ground as possible. Take care to keep any large limbs that measure an inch or so thick. These will be used as the stretcher pieces, or rungs, that secure the legs of the chair and set its width and depth. Next, saw the sapling into various lengths: two pieces 40" long, cut from the base end of the wood, for the back legs, and two pieces 18" long, cut from the remaining wood, for the front legs.

Afterward, use a drawknife or pocketknife to peel the bark from the wood to reveal the wet and shiny "meat" beneath. A vise can work well to secure the wood while you're pulling the drawknife, but if you don't have access to one you can always whittle away the bark using your hands and a trusted pocketknife. Just be sure to cut away from your hands. When you're finished peeling the four legs, lay them alongside one another with their bottoms lined up evenly.

Now it's time to cut and peel the stretchers. First, cut lengths from the 1" limbs you held on to earlier. These will determine the width and depth of the chair and are commonly 17" long for the width and 16" long for the depth. You'll need six of each.

When you've got the stretchers ready to go, return to the legs and, measuring from the bottom, mark the centers of the legs with a pencil so that the front and rear stretchers match up with one another. These marks represent holes to be drilled - there should he a total of 24 - and they should be approximately 5", 10" and 17" from the bottom of each chair leg. With the legs secured, drill 1/2"-diameter holes as straight as possible to a depth half the thickness of each leg (approximately 3/4" deep).

At this stage you'll notice that the holes for the 17" stretchers (width of chair) are at right angles to the 16" stretchers (depth of chair). Be sure to drill the holes higher or lower from each other so they don't run together, weakening the fitting. The only exception to this rule comes when you're drilling holes for the four seat stretchers (set approximately 17" above the floor), which you'll want level. At this point you can also cut two 17" stretchers for a backrest. Drill holes 2" above the seat stretcher and 3" down from the top of the back legs.