Making this staked chair has been on my project list for over two years. I took some time this winter to finally tackle it. This chair design is a lot easier to make than a Windsor… but it’s rewarding all the same.
And with all the charred wood on my brain this past year, I decided to take the torch to this chair for a shou-sugi-ban finish. Here are the results of the shou-sugi-ban staked chair.
Staked Chair with Shou-Sugi-Ban Finish
This staked chair design comes from Christopher Schwarz’s The Anarchist’s Design Book, probably my favorite woodworking book for the past couple of years. This is a straight-up excellent book, and it’s given me a lot of direction in my woodworking forays.
The chair construction itself is extremely simple, and since doing the shou-sugi-ban finish on the oak timber frame last year, I wanted to try out something similar on a piece of furniture. The chair seemed like the perfect candidate.
Finishing wood is an artform in and of itself, so I try to learn as I go with each new project. For better or worse, there’s not a ton of detail out there in the world about doing a shou-sugi-ban / yakisugi finish on furniture.
Soot-Free Sitting
The trick (for me, at least) seems to be how to char the wood and prevent the soot from rubbing off on clothing. In this case, I used a torch to char the wood, then buffed out the char with a scotch-brite pad. Finally, I doused the chair with three coats of Original Finish from Heritage Natural Finishes and a topcoat of Liquid Wax.
I like penetrating oil finishes for ease of use. Because they’re not film-forming finishes, it seemed like I might not have the desired outcome for soot-free sitting. A topcoat of wax and oil seemed better, but… I couldn’t get it to work for myself. I still had some soot residue when taking a cotton rag to the chair.
So I ultimately decided to put two coats of shellac over the linseed/tung oil finish. Shellac has more gloss than I typically like, but now there’s no rubbing off of soot whatsoever. It seems to have done the trick.
This chair has definitely been an experiment, and a happy one at that. Time will tell how things hold up. Next time I think I should probably burn individual pieces of the chair before assembly. However, the glue seems to be strong despite getting torched. Hmm…
If there’s a “standardized” or proven way to do this, I’d be happy to know. But whatever I did seems to have worked… I think. I sure do like how it looks.