I was wishing for some thick sassafras or white pine, but poplar will have to do, since it’s all I’ve got. It was quite a bit more difficult to carve than the sassafras I tested it out in. There was no joy in adzing the poplar, I’m afraid. Apparently I need some more robust cord for tying the head – but more than likely the hose clamp will simply remain. I noticed that the artificial sinew was starting to fray a bit and I wanted to nip it in the bud. Notice that I added a hose clamp to the adze. I need a better way to hold my seat blanks, but it worked fine for a quick job. I just held it on the floor with my foot (clean shoes are a must, unless you want to dull your adze in a hurry). I sketched the profile I wanted on the edge of the slab and started hacking away with my adze. I started off by flattening it with a couple of hand planes, then cutting out the profile with a jigsaw (use a sharp, thick blade, unless you want it to wander all over in the thick poplar…I was wishing I had room for my bandsaw in my shop as my jigsaw groaned). Perfect size for a shavehorse seat, though. This seat came from a 2″ x 13″ poplar board – not quite as dear.

I had no desire to cut up my prized 24″-wide, 2″-thick poplar slabs for a Windsor chair seat without first getting a good feel for the process on a lesser subject. I wish someone had given me that advice a week ago… The “smarthead”. After you get comfortable with it, you can always retro-fit it with the ratcheting head if you want – and you’ll probably do a better job of it later on. For any would-be chairmakers out there, I would strongly recommend building a regular ol’ dumbhead to start off with. The ratcheting head works quite nicely, but I’m not yet convinced it was worth the hours that it consumed. I’ll have to put some hours on this horse before I go mucking with it any more, though. It’s 100% functional as it is, but as Galbert astutely predicted, I’ve already come up with a few changes that I’d like to make. This isn’t my first shavehorse, but I took him at his word and used a knotty cypress board for most of the horse. More likely than not, you will want to change or customize your horse, and an ugly one is much easier to alter or put out on the porch. One of Peter Galbert’s bits of advice from The Chairmaker’s Notebook is this:ĭon’t build your first shavehorse out of prized wood you’ve been saving. Well, it took all of a week, but I’ve finally completed the shavehorse.

Adze and other woodworking tools