Staked Armchair Templates Available in the Store –
You can now purchase laser-cut templates for the Staked Armchair from “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition” and they are available for immediate shipment. A set of templates is $43 and can be ordered here from our store.
The templates are a supplement to the instructions in “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition.” If you own the book, there is an entire chapter devoted to making your own templates with trammels and a ruler. In other words, you don’t have to own these templates to make the chair.
Why offer them? To remove one more barrier to you making a chair. The templates are laser cut from MDF (they are nicer than my personal set of templates) and contain all the important information you need to lay out your parts: the mortise locations, the sightlines, resultants and even the shape of the seat’s pommel. They are a shortcut. Plus they are a jumping-off point for developing your own designs for arms, crests and seats. When I develop a new chair, I usually begin with existing templates.
The templates are made by FirstLightWorks in Derbyshire in the U.K. Ed Sutton at FirstLightWorks took a chair class with me last year and developed these templates using my personal set. If you like in the U.K. or Europe, you can order the templates here through Classic Hand Tools.
Note that the templates are a supplement to the instructions in “The Anarchist’s Design Book: Expanded Edition.” If you are a beginning chairmaker, you will need the book to guide you through the construction process.
— Christopher Schwarz
