Paul | Geoff Tonkin

Make a Double Bow Windsor Chair with Howard Archbold and Geoff Tonkin

2020 Chair Courses

There are two Windsor Chair Making Courses planned for Spring 2020 at our Molong workshop. The dates for these are: Sat 19-Mon 28 September and Sat 17-Mon 26 October. (This is the rescheduled April course). If you have your name down already for either of these courses we will soon be contacting you for confirmation. The cost of the 10 day chair course in 2020 will be $1500. Scroll down the page to read the course description.

2019 Chair Courses

A total of 16 chairs over two courses were completed in 2019. This brings to 82 the number of chairs to come out of the Brooklyn Workshop from 13 courses over the last 8 years.

Make a Windsor Stool with Geoff & Colina Tonkin

The rescheduled date for the May Stool Making Course is: Tues 6-Sat 10 October. We will be contacting you shortly if you have enrolled on this course.

The cost of this course is $600. More courses may be scheduled later in the year.

For a complete course description scroll down the page to “course description“.

Click on this link to watch a short video by Rowan which pretty much captures the essence of our courses.

vimeo.com/165100901

2016 04 Bob’s Chair

Woodworking brings calm and camaraderie to those escaping mobile phone range

ABC Central West

By Luke Wong Posted Fri at 7:06 am Fri 14 Jun 2019,

Photo: Former wool grower Geoff Tonkin teaches green woodworking skills from his farm shed at Molong NSW. (ABC Central West: Luke Wong)

Woodwork enthusiasts are chipping away at the fading art of turning green wood into custom-made items, while finding new skills, new friends and inner peace.

For Gabriel Shannon a career as a medical practitioner did not leave much time for craft work. But since retiring he has attended four woodworking courses where he has learned to create his own furniture from scratch. It is a hobby he finds highly rewarding — walking away with a unique hand-built item rather than buying a factory-made piece and assembling it.. It makes you appreciate the value of labour, of physical effort, and of taking the time and trouble to make something beautiful with skills that you learn,” he said. “These things are really made to last, and a lot of the furniture and other objects you see at the moment are not really made to last.”

Photo: Participants use manually driven woodworking tools and traditional construction methods during the 10-day course. (ABC Central West: Luke Wong)

Taking a break from the modern world was another attraction of the physically demanding course.”We don’t get telephone coverage here, which is just fantastic, so we just have 10 days in which we just concentrate on this,” Dr Shannon said. “Our hands toughen up here, so lots of splinters and lots of cuts, but that’s all part of the beauty of it.”

Photo: The locally-sourced wood is cut shortly in advance of the chair-making course so it is still green and workable. (Supplied: Geoff Tonkin)

Turning to woodwork, Woodwork instructor Geoff Tonkin hosts the courses in a rustic shed on his farm near Molong in Central-West New South Wales.

Students learn to replicate an 18th-century Windsor armchair design using traditional construction methods and handmade tools. It is a skill that requires a generous amount of time, patience, and persistence.”It’s fantastic that these skills that were on the point of complete extinction — I think probably 10 or 15 years ago — now these sort of courses become so popular,” Mr Tonkin said.”I think it’s great to keep all these skills alive.”A wool grower for four decades, Mr Tonkin sold the farm and re skilled through a fine woodworking course at the Sturt School for Wood in Mittagong. .He lived in Sydney for several years working on commissions for custom-made furniture and musical instruments before returning to the countryside to set up a permanent workshop. Inside his shed are several pedal-driven pole lathes and shave horses used for shaping the raw wood.Out the back, a blacksmith furnace forges new tools from disused metal.”There’s something really satisfying about taking something off the scrapheap, an old sawblade, and turning it into a lovely chisel,” Mr Tonkin said.

A man posing with traditional woodworking tools.

Photo: Toolmaker Ian Percival is pleased to see a continuing interest in traditional woodworking methods and carpentry tools. (ABC Central West: Luke Wong)

Fellow toolmaker Ian Percival dropped by to give participants an insight into the various handmade implements not easily found at the local hardware store.The 76-year-old learned toolmaking skills from his father and through an interest in industrial design.”I admire what’s been done in the past and I want to emulate it,” Mr Percival said. He said it was gratifying to see so much interest in traditional carpentry techniques and tools, many of which were becoming archaic.”You can read as much as you like in books, but it’s nowhere near as good as having your hands on and seeing how steel can be transformed into a keen cutting edge,” Mr Percival said.

Photo: After completing their first chair many woodworking students return for subsequent courses to build more. (ABC Central West: Luke Wong)

Mr Tonkin said chair-making could be addictive with many of his dedicated students signing up several times for the 10-day course.”They’re not making them because they want another chair in the house,” he said.”I think they just enjoy the comradeship and the atmosphere, and they can just come here and forget about their worries.”It’s not the chair at the end it’s the journey that people have in making their chair.”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-14/woodworking-brings-new-skills-new-friends-and-inner-peace/11205990

Course description

Making a Windsor Chair takes 10 consecutive days whilst making the stool is a five day course. Windsor stool making covers most of the techniques used in making a Windsor chair, except steam bending . Stool making course are now held separately from the chair making courses. Please inquire.

Windsor chair and stool making involves actually birthing your piece from a local green tree. It is a technique that was used in the 18^thC English forests and has remained pretty much unchanged ever since. In the Molong courses we use stringybark Eucalyptus macrorhyncha and robinia pseudoacacia. Sometimes called false acacia this is a tree of North American providence which because they are deciduous early settlers planted around sheds and yards to provide summer shade and winter sun. Seats are carved from slabs of camphor laurel and ash is used for the steam bent arm and back bow.

Because the wood is split or riven and not sawn, chairs and stools are light but strong. The green wood tennon of the chair and stool components are dried in warm sand before inserting into a mortise that is still composed of green wood. Over time this shrinks around the tennon locking the joint and thus replicating a centuries old woodworking technique.

Chairmaking students usually start with a Double Bow Windsor Chair but be warned – chairmaking can become addictive. Only hand tools are used in construction including a foot operated pole lathe, a shave horse, draw knife, adze, spoke shaves and hand planes. ( see image below) Components are turned on the pole lathe, bent in a steam box or worked on a shave horse using hand tools. The end result is a beautiful chair to take home, made using the same techniques that evolved in the UK 250 years ago. Using a pole lathe is a great introduction to wood turning and particularly appeals to beginners both male and female. One of the highlights of the course is the chair makers’ dinner to which participants are invited to bring their partners.

Windsor stools have either three or four legs, turned on the pole lathe or drawn on a shave horse, with or without stretchers between them. The seat is shaped and the height of your stool adjusted to your individual requirements.