Elia Bizzari - Hand Tool Woodworking

I honor of the USA’s big birthday, I’m offering all my online classes at a 50% discount. These are the classes that I made during the pandemic (one that I did with other people like Curtis Buchanan and Jane Mickelborough aren’t on sale this time). The classes are:

GREENWOOD CLASS with ELIA BIZZARRI
WOOD TURNING FOR CHAIRMAKERS with ELIA BIZZARRI
DRAWKNIFE CLASS with ELIA BIZZARRI
DRILL BITS: POSITIVE TOOLS FOR MAKING NEGATIVE SPACES with ELIA BIZZARRI
MAKE A REAMER with ELIA BIZZARRI
OCTAGONAL TABLE with ELIA BIZZARRI
MILK PAINT VIDEO with ELIA BIZZARRI

Happy Holiday!

Junior runs the log-yard where I buy my wood. He brokers logs, buying mixed loads from local loggers and tree services, then selling them by species and grade to mills and foreign shippers. It’s a family affair:  Junior’s brother runs one of the huge knuckle-boom trucks, his cousin runs the scales, and his son runs a small sawmill back home. Junior’s grandfather was a logger and sawyer, and his great-grandfather was logging trees at the time of the Civil War.

I went to the log yard last week to get a red oak log for a pair of Democratic Side Chairs.  Junior knows what I want, often better than I do: he looks at hundreds of logs a day. “We don’t have much red oak.  But there’s a red oak butt on the firewood pile the loggers slabbed…”  ‘Slabbed’, I discovered, means the loggers split the log in half when they felled it, turning a valuable log into firewood.

The log was a beauty:  30“ in diameter, perfectly straight, fast grown.  Junior sawed off a piece small enough that it wouldn’t crush my trailer and loaded it with the knuckle-boom.  

‘What do I owe you?’  I always ask, though I know the answer.  

‘I’ll catch you next time’  Junior never charges me for logs from the firewood pile.  In a world economy where many of his logs go overseas before even being sawn, I think he likes knowing this log will be turned into a chair within 10 miles of his home. And for my part, I like salvaging nice logs that would otherwise end up in someone’s woodstove.

I’ve just returned from a two-week trip to England with my wife Morgan.  Bath, London, the Lake District. Almost nothing had to do with my work….except a day in High Wycombe.

I’ve heard about High Wycombe since I started chairmaking.  When I was 16, working at Drew Langsner’s shop in Marshall, NC, I first saw the book The History of Chairmaking in High Wycombe, which includes one of the best descriptions of traditional chairmaking I’ve ever read.  Then, a year later, I watched Jennie Alexander’s old VHS tape of chair turners at work when I was working with her in Baltimore.

At the turn of the 20th century, chairs were still being made entirely by hand in and around High Wycombe. Pole lathes were still in (spare) use there in mid-century. High Wycombe, in short, is the closest link we have to traditional Windsor chairmaking.

Upon arrival in High Wycombe, we went straight from the train station to the Wycombe Museum:

Where they have an old bodger’s pole lathe:

I’ve been excited to see this lathe for awhile.  The two popits (headstocks) look ancient  –  I wonder if they predate the rest of the lathe.  A piece of leather fills the worn screw hole:

The two wedges are the fanciest parts of the lathe:

But the treadle was the most interesting part to me:

The treadle is hinged far behind the bed of the lathe – so far back, in fact, that the turner would have to stand in the gap between the treadle’s two lateral boards as he worked.  At 27″ long, the treadle is also far shorter than mine.  The tip of barely extends half a foot beyond the lathe bed when the treadle is flat on the floor. My experimenting suggests that this combination would limit the number of revolutions the work makes on each treadle stroke, slowing the work down. But, assuming the treadle was made by a professional (and I think it was, but I’d like to ask someone who knows for sure), it must work well.  High Wycombe was a center of chairmaking and anyone using an inefficient late would have gone broke in a hurry. Besides being laughed out of town.  I’m itching to try out this treadle arrangement sometime soon.

Next to the lathe was a bodger’s shaving horse: 

With the meanest bite I’ve ever seen:

In another room was a chair framer’s bench:

The bench had a post vice mounted on it, with one of what used to be a pair of wooden vice pads in place:

A notch in the pad rests on the vice screw and the pads just kind of sit there.  I’ll soon be making some to try them out. I’ve been using pads on my vice that are held in place with magnets, but this is a much simpler solution. Wonderful.

Bill Anderson is one of my longest-held woodworking friends.  And one of my closest friends, period.  We met dancing squares and contras, and became fast friends.  We taught together at the John C. Campbell Folk School for a number of years. We made travishers together.  Then, in 2010, Roy Underhill opened his school near us in Pittsboro and Bill became the most prolific teacher there, besides Roy himself. 

Now, 15 years later, Roy’s school is closed and Bill has begun teaching one-on-one classes at his shop in Chapel Hill. You’ll never find a teacher who packs more into a class than Bill.  Or puts more into helping you learn the material. Hand tool basics, table making, plane-making and restoring, bit-brace making, work-bench fixtures, the list goes on and on. You can find more info here.