Elia Bizzari - Hand Tool Woodworking

I’ve been having a field day.  Last weekend I started researching a long-promised post about pole-late treadles. In the process, I discovered that the internet can translate just about any book. That set me off translating Latin, German, and French books on pole-lathes from the 16th- to 18th-centuries.  It takes some effort, but it’s much easier than learning another language.  I’m sure an expert human would be better, but it’s pretty good: I compared a human-translated section to my internet version and the gist was mostly the same.  You’ll be hearing more about these translations – and pole-lathe treadles – soon.  

In the meantime, I’ve decided to book one more class this year from November 16th to 21st, on Curtis Buchanan’s loop back.  I’ll be booking more classes for early 2027, including some 18th Century Chairmaking classes.  But I’m also overseeing the construction of an addition on my mother’s house to help her age in place; I’m not sure how much time that’s going to take, so I’m posting just this one class for now (I may even need to leave this November class for an hour or two to meet contractors, but if so, I’ll have someone cover for me). More info and registration here.

I’ve been working on a series of chair orders for the last month or two.  It’s always a good time in the shop, especially when I have sets of chairs to work on as I do now.  I love getting into a rhythm, assembling a set of undercarriages, then the backs.  What is often a heady job becomes rote.  Fun!

Before I began working on the sets, I made a one off: a birdcage side chair.  It’s one of the most technically demanding chairs I build, and the paint job is no exception.  Luckily, this time I had a new tool that helped a lot:

Video Link

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.