Not to do what I have done. 

I know how you like to see me make mistakes. Made a doozy yesterday. I was having a great day making a JA chair, everything going swimmingly. Chopped the slat mortises, did all the boring and sub-assembly. Even brought Daniel out for the final assembly - it's nice to have an extra set of hands and he seems to like the weird noises the joints make as they go together. 

Then I blew up the front post. Sheared it almost in two, right in the middle.

bad ending to a good day

Exit Daniel while I figured out what to do. "I thought you were supposed to be good at this..." I keep hearing that high school kid from years ago. 

Oh well, a teaching moment. Of course it happened at the end of the day. So I didn't really get blow-by-blow photos. First thing - get the broken post off those rungs. Before the glue hardens. This was yellow glue and it was late in the afternoon, so not hot weather. Time on my side there. I sawed it off above and below each set of rungs. Then split off the bits. 

looks like René Magritte was here

Then spoke-shaved and bored a new post. Put some glue in the mortises, wriggled it onto the side rungs, then drove that home. Then wriggled it onto the front rungs.

there's hope yet

And split it to smithereens. 

The culprit? Besides me, I mean. Slow-growing oak. Maybe too-tight joints. Certainly the first, maybe both factors. I've written a number of times about slow-grown oak - how much I like it FOR JOINERY WORK. Planes easily, mortising - piece of cake. Carves beautifully. But that oak furniture I make is greatly over-built. Jennie Alexander's chair is designed to push the material as far as you can. So no weak wood there. I was testing my luck using these posts - and lost.

these shouldn't be chair parts

Those bits above are 1 3/8" in diameter, more or less. The pencil marks are at 5-year intervals. The two on the left have just over 15 growth rings in them. In red oak, that's a lot of open pores and weak fibers. the one on the right went in the chair successfully - and it's still pretty dicey. 11 rings maybe?

finally!

Today I got a new post on the chair & it's fine now. 

And started in on a white oak chair with posts that have about 7 or 8 growth rings. Strong, just like JA used to use. 

THAT'S chair wood

I was thinking about Alexander a lot - I had extra time on this chair. I remember her telling me years ago she wanted to call the book "The Fifth Post." And then, when reading her old notebooks, I see that during the original photo shoot for the first edition, she put the rear rungs in the front section! Got them back out somehow and carried on. Well, the consolation is that it's good to be ready for chair emergencies and to know what to do when things go horribly wrong. No one got hurt, that's a plus.