Building a stick chair might seem daunting, but with the right guidance, it can be a very enjoyable and rewarding experience that results in a comfortable and beautiful piece of furniture. In this video, I’ll walk you through my process of creating my own stick chair, from preparing the wood to the final assembly.

The first step in building a stick chair is preparing your stock. This involves cutting the primary components, including the seat blank, arm blanks, doubler, leg blanks, crest rail, and spindle blanks. For the chair in the video, the seat blank was a 16″x20″x1.75″ inch” piece of wood. The leg blanks were from 8/4 stock, and the arms and doubler were from 5/4. The crest rail was from more 8/4.

The wood for the project came from Alexander Brothers, which offers kits specifically for stick chairs. It’s not the cheapest way to get the wood, but it offers the least waste, and they did pick out some pretty good material. Plus, they glue up the seat blank for you. This wasn’t sponsored, I paid for it, and they have no idea who I am or that I was making a video.

Once the blanks were cut, the next major task was shaping the legs. A key part of this is cutting some corners, to go from their square shape to an octagon, and then to a tapered octagonal by using the jointer. This is done using a bandsaw with a V-block sled to cut the corners off to make the octagons and a jointer with a stop block to taper the legs. The process of tapering on the jointer may seem sketchy, but I’m a rather cautious and safety focused woodworker, and I didn’t do anything that felt unsafe in the process.

Essentially you use the jointer to take of half of the taper (in this case 3/8″ taper per side, so 3/16″ is what the jointer was set for). Set a stop block so you cut half of your leg blank. Then hold the mid point (where you stopped cutting previously), and the thin end against the infeed table. This leaves the leading edge up in the air, hopefully at or just below the cutting height of the jointer. Run the leg over the jointer, and it’s now been tapered.

After the legs are shaped, a tenon is added to the end. The video demonstrates using a “spoke pointer” and a tenon cutter for this step, setting the depth stop to two and a half inches.

For assembly, drilling the holes for the legs and sticks in the seat is a critical step. I use a laser to make sure that I’ve got things all lined up (and even then I made some of them less than perfect, but don’t worry; it still works fine). I used liquid hide glue, and wedged in the leg tenons, and the tenons in the arm.

I finished my chair with Tried & True Varnish Oil, which is an oil + pine resin finish. I like that it’s natural and easy to repair, but also somewhat well wearing.

Building this stick chair was a great project, and I really enjoyed it. I hope to make a couple more low back stick chairs in the future, but that’s for another day!

Anyway, thanks for checking it out!