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  The Chairmaker’s Mortise & Tenon Joint Chairmakers live and die by their Mortise & Tenon joints. The average panel door does not get stood on, climbed by hyper toddlers or get rocked back and forth with the weight of a full grown adult perched only on the rear legs. A chair with poor Mortise and tenon joints is firewood in waiting. I make handmade chairs (Take a look at some at https://www.tchair.org or https://www.instagram.com/rtchernis/ ). In order for them to survive in this harsh cruel world I have learned the crucial elements that facilitate a strong mortise and tenon joint. A well made six pound chair can support a 250 pound person and will stay strong well after the glue has failed.  A recipe for a long lasting strong mortise and tenon joint:     1. The fit of the joint. A tightly fitting joint is very important. Any movement in the joint will be exacerbated during the life of the chair.  Given the variety of stresses the joint will be put under, gaps will let the te
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January Class.

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I will be teaching this chair in the shop of Greg Pennington in Nashville, TN, January 2-7, 2023. This is a side chair designed by Brian Boggs, in oak with a shaker tape seat. The class is limited to 4 students. Send me a message if you are interested at rt02906@gmail.com.
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Recycled chair

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  This chair was built from extra parts of other chairs. The back legs came from an extra set I bent when working on an arm chair. The rungs and slats came from a friend who was moving and did not want to through away his extra parts. I decided to mix oak and cherry and make a side chair I can use. I am taking an online seat weaving class and this gave me a deadline to finish the frame so that I can practice weaving the seat during the class. Because I mixed two types of lumber I decided to just use one color of Shaker tape for the seat - checkerboard top and herring bone bottom. I think it works well together.  If you are interested in learning to build this chair please send me an email at rt02906@gmail.com.
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Tchair.org blog

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Finding time to write. I decided to try to do a reflection exercise in order to try to break the cycle of rushing through the project to get to more projects. I am noticing more and more that I do this with anything I do. Work and hobby, which very quickly becomes more work so that sometimes I hide at work from the stress of hobby. So the idea is to schedule time, every day, to write down a few lines of reflection about what I was doing and how it felt. Since I have not done anything in the shop this morning, I will just do this as a practice and reflect on a few thoughts that have gone through my mind in the last few days. I counted how many chairs I am working on at the same time. I don’t mean that I am physically working on all of them at the same time, but they have been started and are in the shop right now. There are two Jennie Alexander chairs (rear posts are bent and rungs shaped to octagons for one of them), Boggs side chair (back posts are steam bent a few years ago and
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