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The Musical Chair
The Musical Chair
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Is probably one of my more useful inventions:
It was aimed at any musician who has ever struggled with a conventional wobbly music stand, the sort that always has loose clamps and one rivet missing. It rocks before you do, it rolls as soon as you take it out of its disintegrating cardboard box and it overbalances as soon as you put any really heavy rock on it. Polly Taylor, my partner in the chair making business, is a flautist, and she's always going on about them.
So we decided to create one, built in to a sturdy and stable Windsor Chair.
It's as comfortable as a standard Windsor, but, by just flicking one clip,(brass of course, no plastic or painted tinplate here), you can fold the music stand out of the back. And the stand is then adjustable for height and angle.
It was never designed on paper; we knew all the angles and lengths to make a normal double bow Windsor so, when we got the the top, we just played with bits of wood, duct tape and string until it did what we wanted it to. And then, after we'd made a nice looking one that worked, we took a patent out on it. You can see the patent by going to www.espace.net and searching under our names, MJ Dixon and PM Taylor.
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Another variation on the Windsor theme is to include a painting on the seats. This was borne out of frustration; Windsors traditionally have elm seats, which is hard to find, expensive, and even harder to work. When you buy a board, you can't really tell what you've got until you start scooping out the seat. Sometimes it's a great surprise as this rather uninspiring chunk of old wood, which has been kicking around in someone's woodyard for years, suddenly comes to life under the travisher (an old fashioned seat plane curved in both directions to allow it to scoop) and wonderful knots, grain and greeny bits suddenly appear.
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Other times it's not so good, and a promising looking seat suddenly goes all to pot as an unattractive black mark, usually caused by water damage storage, suddenly appears right in the middle. Or, worse still, the wood goes soft in one place and, the deeper you scoop, the bigger the soft area becomes. Hours of work down the drain.
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Or is it?
The seat on the left was painted after one such discovery. Wonderful swirly grain...and a big black mark right in the middle. So I took it back to my studio, set up a back light, poured some wine and got out the acrylics. I still liked it the next morning so we made it into a chair.
And I liked the effect so much, with the grain almost as part of the painting, that I did another one soon after, this time on an oak seat that was, otherwise, just plain uninspiring. I can't sell this one though; my daughter has earmarked it.
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Walnut makes good chair seats too. These two were made for a titled client abroad, with the ash parts stained to match the walnut. The challenge here was to make the inlaid robin as small and delicate as possible. He's just 35mm high and made from twelve pieces of wood.
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| The emblem on the other chair needed a lot more than twelve pieces. There's about thirty here, many of them set in the background and then machined away to form the parts of the flower. You can just see the circular line, inside the flower, where I inset a second complete ring. I use a conventional milling machine for this, with a rotating table and a toolmaker's lathe with metal-working toolbits rather than wood turning chisels. The woods are lime (the very light bits) cherry, (the red bits) and elm (the rest!)
The fact that it was a rocking chair made it even more complicated. We spent a lot of time with mock-ups, trying to get the angles right so that it felt nice to rock and didn't walk its way across the floor!
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The ram on the left needed even more pieces of wood. Again, he's only about 40 mm high, inlaid into the back of a chair (on the wide central piece called the splat), and he's there as the client's star sign. The semi-circular cut-outs at the end of each section of horn were machined individually, and the pieces shaped to fit. The eyes were cut out by hand, using a scalpel and a magnifying glass. He looks a bit grumpy to me.
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After all that the refectory table was a real feat of heavy engineering! It seats twelve, with a top of cherry edged with ash.
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And finally, because we couldn't resist the challenge, a backgammon set in lime, oak, cherry, ash and black bean, with the owner's initials inlaid in the centre of a star on the outside of the box.
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