Dugout Chair Part 5, Ready for Sculpting

After sculpting the backrest of this dugout chair with a chainsaw, I noticed two things. One, the chair is about half the weight when I started. I can move this thing around by myself with some grunting. Two: It’s now a rocking stump.

Yup, after removing a lot of waste from the front of the chair, the stump began to tip backward on its own, rocking nicely on the meat under its arms. This was not my intent. So I will have to buzz-cut the bottom of the stump to level things out again. Thank goodness I can wrestle this stump now.

With the dugout chair now in rough shape, I’ll begin sculpting the inside and outside with an angle grinder mounted with an Arbortech Turbo Plane. This circular blade is a fairly safe way to remove a lot of material on concave and convex surfaces.

I’m going to grind away a lot of the punky rot on the inside of the trunk and see how the tool likes grinding away the bark, too. If the bark bites back (its bark is worse than my bark?) I’ll resort to a bark spud and sweat.

Then it’s onto scooping out the seat, fitting it inside the trunk and doing the final shaping with a drawknife, spokeshaves and a scorp.

At least it looks like a chair now (when you squint your eyes). My neighbors were beginning to wonder if I was just making noise and mulch.

— Christopher Schwarz