Recreating the classic Pleasant Hill Shaker rocking chair.
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By Kerry Pierce
Recreate this striking Shaker form as a modern heirloom.
Almost 15 years ago when I was writing Pleasant Hill Shaker Furniture I fell in love with several pieces of furniture originating in that 19th century Shaker community, each of which represented what I saw as a near perfect expression of the Pleasant Hill aesthetic. Among those, in fact standing at the top of that group, is the original of this chair. In the text, I enthused about the coordinated detail evident in this piece, how the cutaway on the bottom of the arms mirrored a similar but more pronounced cutaway on the tops of the rockers below those arms, about the perfection of the curves on the finials and the vases on the front posts.
Unfortunately no one had ever asked me to build this chair— that is until very recently when a friend offered me the commission you see here, detailed in the photos and captions.
Building by Eye
In 1994 I visited Cleveland-area chairmaker Joe Graham so that I could write a story for Woodwork magazine about the Windsor classes Joe offered in his rural shop. Early on in my visit, Joe mentioned to his students the concept of building by eye. He showed them how to use spotters to align drills, how to rely on their eyes (and their bottoms) to determine when a seat had been fully excavated, how to use only the naked eye to determine the location of a crest rail mortise for a back spindle.
I appreciated Joe’s instruction, but building by eye wasn’t a new concept for me. I had been building by eye since my earliest incursions into the woodshop, driven to it at first because my initial incompetence in the shop meant that I was constantly checking what I did with my eye, looking for the mistakes I was sure I was making.
I didn’t then know how to perform accurate measurements, and I didn’t know then how to transform accurate measurements into effective
machine set-ups. What I learned during those years was how to look at a curve to see if there were flat spots, how to decide whether a thing was centered without the use of a rule, how to use my eye when creating the coves and beads and vases of a turned part. Then much later I learned that most of these things could be jigged and fixtured and measured, but by then the damage was done. I had become accustomed to a free-wheeling style of woodworking which did rely on measurements and occasional jigs but which was ultimately dependent on the ability of my eye to see what was right and what was wrong about a part or an assembled piece of furniture.
Early on, this approach sometimes led to disasters, but later it became the most important tool in my evaluation of my work. I learned to sight the front seat rung against a back seat rung to determine the trueness of a chair frame. I learned to establish accurate verticals by eye in laying out a rocker notch in the bottom of a post, to determine if two mushroom caps were close enough in size to appear on the same chair, to evaluate the curve of a slat or a rocker or a chair arm.
Today every bit of work that leaves my shop has been evaluated hundreds of times by a pair of eyes which have become pretty reliable instruments of measure. That doesn’t mean I don’t verify what my eye tells me through the use of a straightedge or a rule. I use these tools whenever I think it necessary, but the overwhelming majority of my checks on the rightness of a part or a finished work are performed with nothing more than the naked eye.
The Plan for this Particular Chair
I went into this project knowing that I was going to change the original design in three ways. First because the customer had chosen walnut, rather the hard maple of the original, I decided to beef up the rungs. I increased the diameter of the mid-point of the rungs from 7/8" to 1 1/4" and made a less dramatic increase in post diameter. Second because contemporary Americans are a good-bit wider than their 19th century predecessors, I added 11/4" to the width of the chair. And third, I decided to change the way the front posts and the arms intersected. On the original chair the front end of the arm didn’t encircle the tenon atop the front post. Instead, there was a screw driven through the front post and into the end grain of the arm. In my judgment, it’s always a mistake to reinforce post-and-rung chairs with metal fasteners because cracks always appear when the flexing wood of a chair in use is side by side with inflexible steel. So I made up several roughed-in arms to see which would eliminate the necessity of a steel fastener without compromising the look of the arms.
I tried to fit these potential arms, and that’s when I saw it: The arm mortises on the back posts were a full 3/4" higher than they were supposed to be. My shoulders slumped. I felt a wave of panic. I knew immediately how the mistake had occurred. (See “Managing Catastrophe,” page 44.) This was my first reproduction of this form, so the story sticks were fresh-hatched and untested and—at least in the placement of the arm mortises—totally wrong.
Then, after the panic, I settled in and became a woodworker.