Green Woodworking with Mike Abbott

Since starting my beginner’s cabinet-making course, I’ve been intrigued by the differences between modern woodworking techniques and the more traditional methods such as Green Woodworking (like chair bodging).

Why use green wood?

Well, Mike Abbott, who is, as you’ll read, the guy that ended up teaching me, explains in his article in the Summer 2009 edition of Permaculture Magazine that:

Green wood is wood that has not dried or seasoned. Green woodworkers usually start with a fresh log rather than a dry plank for a host of very good reasons. They can be categorised as follows:

• Enhanced strength and quality.
• Better workability.
• Simpler and faster seasoning.
• Much lower cost.
• Numerous advanteges to society.
• Many environmental advantages.

When we were investigating the purchase of 20 acres of woodland near our current home outside Malvern (which fell through as we were hugely gazumped) I found a local guy called Mike Abbott who was well respected in Green Woodworking circles – for example, his name is mentioned on numerous occasions in my Traditional Woodland Crafts book – offering courses on it I jumped at the chance.

The Course

That was a few months ago and I recently attended the course in Mike’s rented wood.

I spent The first three days making a shaving horse, which is used to grip the wood as it’s being shaved. I also learned how to use a pole lathe (want one!), started to crack the much more difficult than looks art of cleaving wood with a froe, and I was also shown how to use my axe to roughly shape the wood after cleaving and before shaving it down on the horse.

It was a pretty full-on three days but an excellent introduction. Of the two other guys doing it with me, another also made a shave horse, whilst the third guy made a stool and some smaller pieces on the lathe.

Chairmaking

With the intro out of the way, I was lucky enough to be able to stay on for a further 6 days to make a ladder-back armchair. This article succinctly gives some background to the (locally) traditional chairs that we made:

When they [Mike and his wife Tamsin] moved to Herefordshire together, they delved into the work of a Victorian chairmaker called Phillip Clissett, who made frame chairs such as the spindle-back and ladder-back. They were impressed by his simple yet efficient approach to chairmaking. Like the bodgers of the Chilterns, Clissett also used the shaving-horse and the pole-lathe to produce his chair parts. Unlike the bodgers, he made the whole chair, from buying the logs to selling the finished chairs in the local market.

One of the key features of the chairs is their lack of glue usage. The joints are very solid, using a pre-dried tenon jammed into a slightly undersized mortise (there are some subtleties to this). So much so that one can hook it onto a beam and hang from the piece, putting all body weight onto the joint, and it does not come apart.

The most nerve-racking bit was bending the legs, which I wasn’t particularly keen to snap after spending the best part of a day to make. A video of me performing the process can be seen on youtube.

I enjoyed the course and got a lot of practical, reusable experience out of it, and I’ve already made a workbench, lump hammer and a maul since getting home.

The course comes highly recommended. For more information see Mike’s green woodworking website, he also has a book Living Wood: From Buying a Woodland to Making a Chair which gives you all the information you need to have a go at home.

Here’s the finished chair: