# The Windsor Hewn Shop Notes · https://hewn.build/shop-notes/the-windsor AI-drafted, not yet checked: Drafted by Chip, the writing system Hewn runs on Claude, from Hewn's craft corpus. Jonathan Salomons has not read this note yet, and no outside reader has checked it. Read it as a shop note: check a number before you cut to it. Cite as: "The Windsor." Hewn Shop Notes, hewn.build/shop-notes/the-windsor. Drafted 2026-05-02; AI-drafted, not yet checked. --- If you want to know what you've actually learned, build a Windsor. Not a dovetailed box, not a floating-panel cabinet. A chair. Specifically, a sack-back Windsor. It will tell you where you are in a hurry. The Windsor asks for everything at once: hand tools, turning, steam bending, compound angles. No other piece of furniture does this. You can build thirty boxes and still not know whether you can hold a line with a spokeshave or whether your steam setup will keep a bow intact around a 10-inch radius. The Windsor finds out. --- **What you're actually building** There's no frame in a Windsor. No mortise-and-tenon carcase, no panels. The structure is four elements: seat, legs, spindles, bow. That's it. The seat is a thick slab — typically 2 inches or better — that everything else connects to. The legs mortise in from below at compound angles. The spindles mortise in from above. The bow, which is the bent arc that defines the back, mortises at both ends into the seat, and the spindles connect up to its underside. Get the seat right and the chair is possible. Get it wrong and nothing else matters. The seat is your reference surface. Every angle comes off it. --- **The forms, in order of difficulty** Five major Windsor styles. Build them in this order. The **comb-back** is where to start. No bent parts. Straight stiles run up from the seat; a shaped comb sits across the top. Accessible without steam infrastructure. It's still a real chair, and building it will teach you more about compound layout than you expect. The **sack-back** is next and worth targeting as your first steam-bending Windsor. One continuous bow anchors into the seat at two points. Spindles fan up from the seat and connect to the bow from below. Demanding but achievable. This is the one to aim at. The **continuous-arm Windsor** is what most people picture when they think Windsor — one unbroken arc from one side of the seat, up and over the back, down the other. It requires a longer blank, a bigger form, and more precise springback calibration. Build it after the sack-back is behind you. The low-back and high-back are variations once you have the bent bow sorted. --- **The bow blank** Here's where the prior posts in this arc matter. Straight grain isn't a preference. It's the condition under which the bow survives the bend. Ring-porous species work best: ash is the benchmark, white oak quartersawn is excellent, cherry is acceptable at moderate radius. For a sack-back with an 18-inch finished arch width, the flat developed length of the blank runs 36–40 inches. Add 4–6 inches for overage. You're buying and milling a 42–46 inch blank that has to satisfy the grain requirements at every point across its full length. That's harder to source than it sounds, especially in the BC Interior. BC species priorities, in order: ash (not local, but importable from Kelowna suppliers or the Lower Mainland — worth the trip for a first Windsor; the forgiveness is real), cherry (local, available, use for sack-back bows at moderate radius, plan for 15–20% springback), white oak quartersawn (specialty dealers in Kelowna, more demanding than ash but excellent if the grain is right, plan 20–25% springback). Standard inner radius for a sack-back bow is 9–10 inches. Overbend to 7.5–8.5 depending on species. Run a test blank before you touch project stock. This applies every time. --- **Why the Windsor is the test** The chair doesn't let you skip anything. Sharp chisels to chop the angled seat mortises. A well-tuned spokeshave to fair the bow after bending. A lathe for legs and spindles — the Workshop Arc and Shop Arc aren't optional prerequisites, they're the prerequisites. And the correct finish for a Windsor is penetrating oil, full stop. Hardwax oil, Danish oil, or BLO on a more traditional chair. The Windsor gets handled, sat in, dragged across floors. It needs a finish that can be repaired with another coat, not one that chips and peels. Don't build-up a film finish on this piece. One thing worth flagging before you start: the leg geometry is its own skill. Windsor legs aren't standard mortise-and-tenon. They drill into the seat at compound angles — raked from the front view, splayed from the side, and different at each of the four mortise positions. Experienced Windsor makers lay this out by direct sightlines and bevel gauges, not trigonometry. It's learnable. It just doesn't fit in this post. Build the bow first. Leg geometry is a parallel acquisition. --- The sack-back Windsor is the piece that puts everything to work at once. Get the bow built. Get the form made, the springback calibrated on a test blank, the blank prepared correctly. Then let the curve come off the form and build the chair around it.