I've been watching C.S.'s journey into making vernacular furniture with great interest for the last couple of years. I find the form interesting maybe because I've always been interested in folk, outsider, and vernacular art. Back in the day when I was spending time doing post baccalaureate studio art at the university much of my study was outsider art. I'm drawn to the form. It is the same with furniture.
For the past year or so I've been making stick furniture, both chairs and tables and while there have been a few useable pieces made there have been more failures than not, but even the failures can please my eye. Some of the failures even work in their own strange way. An example was a child's chair with one rear leg that went off in a different direction. At first I thought about making a new seat and redoing the seat mortises but the more I looked at the chair the more I liked the weird leg. Perfect whimsy for a young child and it has a life lesson built in: Even if you are imperfect you can be beautiful and useful.
A photo of the child's chair with a full sized chair before it was painted:
The child's chair is a prime example of a common failure if not using jigs. A small misalign can make a huge difference in rake and splay. Splitting of the seat/slab is also too easy and common. One hit pass the "that sounds about right" will usually result in a split. The other day I split a slab when driving a cross grain wedge into a leg tenon. It shouldn't have happened but it did. Sometimes the split can be repaired with a butterfly key.
I've been using a 12* reamer and tenon cutter for making the seat/slab mortise and tenon joints. I now have a set of 6* reamers and tenon cutters. My hope, and I expect I'm correct, is the 6* M/T joint will be more forgiving and not as likely to split the slab.
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