Maloof Inspired School of Woodworking: A Tour

The Maloof Inspired School of Woodworking is opening in the new studio and school facility October 25th with a Seven Day Build A Maloof Inspired Rocker Class. The studio will provide room for the woodworking publication business ("Build A Maloof Inspired Rocker/ Low Back Dining Chair with Charles Brock") to film more videos for instructional bundles without having to move to another location for filming. The school will have a home for classes without having to move up to Highland Woodworking in Atlanta for a seven day class. My shop, studio and school are now in one location which is a dream come true.

Let me take you on a tour of the facilities. The building is 1,500 square feet located on the edge of town in a new commercial park with plenty of trees and fresh air all around. There are plenty of hotels and and eateries within two miles of the school for student accommodations.

The entire facility has lots of light, high ceilings, air filtering and has split heating and air conditioning systems to provide comfort for every woodworker. The front room of the school is the bench room with five wonderful German Hofmann & Hammer student woodworking benches. Several work stages are also present for showing and working on rockers and chairs without having to get in uncomfortable positions. There is also a hospitality area for cold drinks and coffee. Soon I will have a big screen TV for viewing instructional materials and an occasional ball game while I'm at work. HA!

My workbench, hand tool wall and power tool cabinet dominates the entrance into the machine room. The new Professional SawStop is waiting to safely cut all the various chair joints students will make for their Maloof Inspired rockers, low backs and other "bucket list" projects. A heavy-duty Kreg Router Table with lift is close-by as is a drill press and a lathe. A cutt-off saw is further down the wall and all of these items are supported by dust collection.

The other machine room wall has a 14 inch bandsaw, 8 inch jointer, 20 inch Agazzani band saw and a dust collector cyclone with a muffler providing a safe and clean work environment.

One of my favorites is actually having lumber, project and chair parts storage. This replaces two storage buildings and every corner of my old 24x24 garage shop. We were supposed to have a garage for the first time in the 14 years since we moved to our current house. Immediately my wife moved her stuff into the garage from a storage building. I still can't park my truck in the garage, but neither can she park her car!

I had a Five Day Build A Maloof Inspired Low Back Dining Chair mini-class last week to test things out. A woodworker from Canada and from North Carolina came down and we just had a great and productive time shaking down the new school space.

Yesterday, I journeyed up to Highland Woodworking to pick up a few odds and ends. Some of the odds meaning since we moved I can't find my turner's double stick tape. Some of the ends being some new drill bits, some more "You Can't Ever Have Enough Clamps" clamps and a few items to improve my dust collection systems. I also got a coffee pot to welcome all who have traveled from far and near to take a class, come by to visit or see what in the heck is going on in there! When I returned I was just thrilled to see my new school/ shop and studio.

Come on down and build your Maloof Inspired Rocker with me! Escape the cold of another winter and soak up some southern hospitality (the Taste of Columbus Lunch Tour is a must!) and Maloof Inspired Woodworking at its finest. I have one bench open for the October class and one for the January Class. Call me at 706 366-3152 or email rocknchairman@gmail.com.

To get more information go to the rocker class page at www.charlesbrockchairmaker.com.

Maloof Inspired School of Woodworking: Once A Dream Now A Reality

Once a teacher and school administrator always one. I retired from teaching and administering schools over a year ago to become a full time woodworker. Ha! This is even better than my wildest dreams could muster. The "maloof Inspired School of Woodworking will open by the end of September with its first full class by the end of October.

For the last couple of years I have been holding my classes 100 miles from home at Highland Woodworking in Atlanta. Chris and Sharon Bagby, Ed, Terry and the entire group of woodworking tool specialists have been the best hosts anywhere. I would not have this expanded woodworking career if not for their support. They cumulatively have many talents but one of them is growing woodworkers. They originally hired me into their teaching faculty to teach a class I called Build A Maloof Inspired Rocker with Charles Brock.

Eventually I had my own students and struck a deal to use their classroom for my "Seven-Day Build Your Maloof Inspired Rocker" hands-on class. Students have continued to come from all over North America to make their "bucket list" rocker and take it home to finish. Everything was good except the packing of tools and being away from home for 8 days and 7 nights at a B&B in Atlanta. I'll miss my extended family at Highland Woodworking. They are tops!

My wife and I spent a year trying to sell our house to move to the Nashville, Tennessee area to be more "involved" grandparents and to open my school there. Well this economy changed everything. There are no buyers for a house in our price range so after 9 months of cleaning and showing we took it off the market and I found a great place in Columbus, GA that would provide me with 1500 square feet of production space for my woodworking DVD business and room for the Maloof Inspired School of Woodworking.

I have been busy getting the "Maloof Inspired School of Woodworking" ready for the last month. We have installed massive amounts of dedicated electrical circuits, heat and AC lighting, painted everything in light colors to reflect the light without creating glare, epoxied the floor, installed dust collection, air filters, workbenches and some new woodworking machines.

The next post will take you on a tour.

And the Best Picture of the Year Goes to ......

A student from my January Seven Day Build Your Maloof Inspired Rocker with Charles Brock Class sent me a picture of the two Maloof Inspired rockers he has finished. You can write your own blog to go with this interesting picture. He is a Rock'NChairman and she is a Rock'NChairwoman! Eric (last name withheld to protect the dysfunctional) is a 72-year old dentist who loves building rocking chairs and life in general. His wife is undoubtedly very fond of his efforts. He kept all of us in stitches during the January class. There is no doubt he deserves the 2010 Rock'N Chairman Picture of the Year!

What a couple and what a couple of rockers!

Seven Days - Five Rockers - Five Dreams

August 3-9, I taught another group of five hopeful craftsman the art of building a Maloof Inspired Rocker. It is so exciting to see their initial enthusiasm and to see them start to believe that this project that they have wanted to do for so long is coming alive through the diligence of their hands, work and effort. As each student sees first that they can sculpt the 7 spindles and cooper a seat into an inviting "smile" they blossom into becoming the chairmaker that registering for the class promised. Each will take their rocker to their home shop and finish sculpting, sanding and finishing. Of course I am always on call to help. Click here to see their slide show.

Wood working is about wood, tools, design, methods and sometimes making a living, but it is really about people and their dreams. The picture of five guys and five rockers at the end of their seventh day doesn't tell the whole story. Everyone brought something different to the class. One man traveled 3000 miles to build a rocker for their daughter who is having their first grandchild in October. He was a shop teacher and retired educator who just drank up the opportunity. A very bright financial planner of 30 was preparing a rocker for their first child in December. Can you imagine gaining these skills at such a young age. I hate to quote the late sports announcer Curt Gowdy who would laughably say, "Well his future is ahead of him!" An electrical engineer listened intently and worked flawlessly without an awful lot of experience. A contractor from South Carolina always wanted to build a rocker like that and worked at each task in the hope they would somehow come together. Another engineer was just into all things woodworking and absorbed every detail. When the seats, joinery, legs, arms, spindles, headrest and laminated skids came together on the last day I could see and hear their pride of accomplishment.

In the process they experienced a lot of woodworking. Some learned rudimentary best practices like how to mark out and how to use a jointer. All searched for and found out how to sculpt a line as a transition between two adjacent surfaces, fit joints in curved parts and find square reference points with which to work. I knew that they would no longer approach their woodworking the same.

I love to work with each student and to help them see their dream coming together. Long after my name disappears from the conversation each of them will be a hero to their family, friends and community because they built this great rocker.

Helping them achieve their dream is what mine is all about! It doesn't get much better than this!

A Minimal Tool List

A delimma is a problem offering at least two solutions or possibilities, of which none is practically acceptable.

What tools are necessary to build a Maloof inspired rocker? It poses an interesting question and everyone that has built one has a different set of answers. This question reminds me of National Lampoons "Christmas Vacation." Sparky Grizwold and family hiked through a forrest to find the perfect huge Christmas Tree, only to realize that they didn't have a shovel, axe or anything else with which to remove it from the earth. So they dug it up with their bare hands.

You can't build my rocker with your bare hands but what would be the minimal tool list? The maximum? Why do I pose this delimma?

Some woodworker's want to know the exact tools I use for every step in the process. Some want to see what is involved in every step, then they modify everything in order to use what they have in their shop. In other words they recognize the work-arounds and modifications as they go.

I use a pretty well rounded shop for each of my chairs but then I add a few specialty tools that would not be found in a general woodworking shop. An example would be a small router plane for fitting the Maloof type leg to seat joints. Can anything else be used? Is it a necessity? I started out using a small shoulder plane which is rarely used now since I discovered the best way to clean and true the bottom of the dados was with the router plane. The shoulder plane worked but the router plane gives more consistent results. You could also use a flat rasp or file. So what do you put on the list - the best tool or the least that will work?

Size, so it's been said, matters! Some projects require a six inch jointer while others require an eight. Can you do it with a six? Yes, It's much harder. Of course the 7 inch board can be face jointed by hand.

Let me know what you think about the tool list. Should it be minimalist or the maximum? I want to give you the information you need.

rocknchairman@gmail.com

As Iron Sharpens Iron, So One Man Sharpens Another

The title of this post is from Proverbs 27:17. I was reminded of this verse by a wonderful friend. He is one of those people who makes everyone who is around him a better person. I reached the end of a journey this June that has blessed me many times over and seems to have been a mutual blessing to others.

This week we had pictures taken of five rockers in a group with their owners. It was the first time I had seen all five of the rockers together. They were crafted from slabs of a huge English walnut tree full of figure and curl purchased on a wood safari through Pennsylvania at Talarico Hardwoods. The first rocker was for his wife and then one for my fellow craftsman followed by one each for three grown daughters. Seeing the chairs together with three girls who love their father and exude a love and respect for what he had produced for them was just remarkable.

These rockers were born of a relationship between myself and a woodworker who had a dream of building rockers for his entire primary family. He asked me if I would help him with make the five rockers a reality. He is one those people whose association makes you a better person. Every Tuesday night for five years we got together in my shop and worked for an hour or two on the rockers one chair at a time. We usually began each session with a prayer of thanks. The woodworking sessions and prayer have reaped many blessings. The relationship helped us get through the passing of family, illnesses and struggles with life. We celebrated new grand children and other achievements.

The picture of the first finished rocker spawned the out of the blue request for me to begin teaching "Maloof Inspired" rocker classes at Highland Woodworking. We celebrated that event together as he assisted me in the weekend seminar. From the teaching at Highland grew my instructional bundle publishing business that has helped fine woodworkers all over the world build their Maloof inspired rocker.

Sculpting Chairs Part 2 Start with the Hard Lines and a Rasp

Part 1 - "Lines, Shadows and Curves, Oh My!" contained some exercises to help train and improve your sculptor's eye. Let's put the rasp to wood in Part 2 and see what flows from the event.

I see chair sculpting in four phases:

• Construction
• Hard Lines
• Soft Lines
• Transitions

During the construction phase you make the chair's parts and join them using the band saw, table saw, lathe and other tools. Many of the hard lines are formed by this construction phase which ends with parts joined to each other. But most of these hard lines need to be transformed or sculpted so they form a flow from one part to the other. That is the topic for this article.

Where do I begin. Pick up a tool and see what happens. We are back to the fear problem unless we just jump in

and take a chance. Is everybody going to be good at it? No! There isn't a to risk in comparison to many things we endeavor to do, but a lot to gain by trying.

First find a model for comparison. In my newest "Build A Maloof Inspired" Instructional bundle I do a video segment comparing and contrasting the Maloof Inspired Low Back Dining Chair roughed out, assembled and ready to sculpt and a finished chair. In the comparison I draw what I refer to as topographical lines on the chair to show the way surfaces transition in various radii

to join other surfaces forming hard and soft lines. I used a white pencil on walnut to show these contours. For your own project a mental compare and contrast with a picture of the object you are sculpting would be of great benefit.

When I am unsure of finding my chair's shape in the roughed out parts, I prefer to sculpt my prototypes with a rasp. I use Auriou rasps and the number system I will talk about relates to them. The lower the number the more coarse the higher the number the finer. The Auriou's are hand stitched meaning their teeth are set by hand making that are totally random void of a pattern. The result is that they leave a much smoother cut which will not be furrow or tear-out if the rasp is used correctly. They also have teeth right up to and along the edge,allowing the sculptor to get into corners and crevices. They are a much harder cut on your wallet in that they average $100+ for each rasp. A set of 3 rasps I recommend will take care of a great many of your needs and is available at Highland Woodworking. There are other choices. Sam Maloof used Nicholson's patternmaker's rasp. They are the best of those not hand stitched.

The first rasps I grab are the combi flat #5 on one side #9 on the other and a big #10 cabinetmakers rasp that is curved on one side and flat on the other and comes to a point. cabinetmakers rasp. Work with how they cut on some long scrap. Use big muscles and make long sweeps focusing on holding the rasp at 45 degrees to the length of the piece of wood while pushing the rasp along the length . Do not saw with the rasp. When the cut is cleanest you have found its best working angle. Look at the rasp's teeth and push the teeth in that direction.

While making long sweeps you will be establishing a flat. When I round over a surface with a rasp, I mentally divide the surface into a series of contiguous flats and then join them with flats until they appxoximate a radius that pleases me.

Start with an arm. How do you want the outside line of the arm to flow? Is it going to provide lift is it going to have a sweep and in what direction? A way to answer this question is by deciding whether the flow for the chair from any point of view is going to be generally up and back (uplifting) or down and back, etc.

Are there lines that will flow from the front leg through the arm. Is there a line which will continue into the back leg?

Start with the big rasps, using sweeping, big muscle strokes. Work on it until it smiles at you!

Remember the best tools in your kit are patience, persistence and attitude!

Part 3 will explore the use of a grinder to transform and establish the hard lines when you know where they are and you want to get there in a hurry!