Kiln-Dried Wood for Windsor-Style Chairs

One thing frustrating about living in California is the lack of access to the types of woods used by chairmakers like Curtis Buchanan.  Curtis and others regularly buy whole logs and split them to get the straightest grain possible for chair components.  Last year I saw a Pete Galbert video where he shows how to get straight-grained parts from kiln-dried lumber.

I'll leave the details and finer points of the method to Pete - the video is great.  After splitting the wood and cutting judiciously to ensure straight grain, he soaks the parts in water for a few days to soften them so they'll be easier to shape with a drawknife.  Today I practiced with a small scrap piece of white oak.  All I got from it was a pile of drawknife shavings, but at least I got some practice at shaving a piece to get some straight grain.

Using a section of PVC pipe to soak the piece of wood

About 3" inner diameter

This 14-15" long stick soaked for about 2 days

If you zoom in on that picture, you'll see that the grain does not run straight.  Galbert would normally split that stick to see which way the grain runs, then the edge grain on the split area will tell whether the face grain dives or rises.

But today, I just wanted to practice shaving with a drawknife to get a feel for how to get a surface to follow the grain.

Pencil sitting on a face, pointing in the grain direction.
The bottom edge is unaltered: I've shaved the upper edge to follow the face grain

This is looking at the upper edge that I shaved.  Note how the grain runs toward the lower face.
I then shaved the upper face (near the pencil) to follow that grain.

Here's what I got from this experiment: a pile of drawknife shavings

It was interesting to get a feel for how a drawknife cuts when it gets into a "seam" - a line of straight grain.  I'm going to try more of this very soon - a couple months ago I bought a big chunk of 1 3/4" thick red oak that looked fairly straight-grained.  I'll know more when I split it and try to get some chair parts out of it.