I made a chair

The chair in the blog is not robust. It is simple, but not robust. It contains a hinge with an extreem amount of force placed on a small area of wood. It will deform very quickly, changing the angle of the recline. Similarly, the sharp points in contact with the ground will wear/weather quickly, putting it out of level. Rustic and utilitarian, but not meant to last. Imho.

I think you should check your own knowledge before double-guessing Enzo Mari - a designer who did the work and had extensive knowledge of form and materials spanning decades.

This is not an ""argument from authority" but "Chesterton's Fence".

Having built a couple of smaller structures, I don't see why these can't be done today. Ignoring the current trend of building for curb appeal instead of practicality, you can build a house using standard size materials (8/10/12/16 foot). Even studs come in 92 5/8" to accomodate for top/bottom plates in 8 foot walls.

I'm always intrigued by the Segal method, but it's so closely tied to the sizes of construction materials available at the time and I can't help wondering if anything has changed since.

Ironically, companies like Ikea have started selling products aimed at people making their own furniture; the "outdoor bench made from pallets" is pretty popular, and ikea & co sell cushions just for those.

I never understood those tbh, used pallets are splintery. I wouldn't be surprised if you can buy pallets specifically made for use in upcycle projects.

fake edit after a quick search: yup, you can buy readymade pallet benches or benches "inspired by" pallet projects.

https://www.online-pallets.nl/products/pallet-bank-2-hoog-me...

https://www.karwei.nl/assortiment/wakefield-palletbank-lina-...

Can it be brutalist when you have the richness of wood in full diplay, veins, shimmer and knots all apparent?

And nothing stops you to paint them or engrave them.

Is a wooden box "brutalist" too? It is a box. It is square. Is the the same as a square windowless concrete building?

And if you love the look but don’t want to build it and have a spare $18k laying around, just buy one: https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/tables/dining-room-tables/...

I'd hazard a guess the other activities involve more than one person...

Yes, you’re being too dense ;)

They’re talking about the chair being useful during sex.

The problem with using modern pressure treated wood for outdoor furniture is less any cancer risks like with the old CCA treatments, and more that it's just a bad choice for a bunch of different reasons.

Modern copper-based treatments--e.g. ACQ or CA--still cause skin and eye irritation. If you try to sand it so that people sitting in your new chair don't get a nasty splinter somewhere best avoided, you can compromise the effectiveness of the treatment (even when the treatment gets full penetration, it's still most effective on the outer layers you're now sanding away). Plus, while the dust you create when working with it might not include arsenic, it's still nasty to breathe in and can cause respiratory problems. Staining P/T wood can be a whole ordeal in itself, and because interact much more closely with furniture than say a deck, any imperfections will be more noticeable.

Even then, it's not like P/T furniture isn't going to require ongoing maintenance in the future. At which point, you're better off with something like cedar or white oak. Hell, with a decent outdoor grade finish and proper care, even untreated pine is going to last for years without rotting away underneath you.

Keep in mind Yakisugi ("shou sugi ban" is a Western misinterpretation circa ~1995) is traditionally performed on wood which is already weather resistant, particularly Japanese Cedar ("sugi" is cryptomeria japonica, a type of cypress endemic to Japan). Even then they still treat it with oil regularly to improve its longevity. So I wouldn't char some white pine and stick it outside and expect it to last.

We still treat wood with oil. Your local home improvement store should stock a bunch and you’ll find more at a woodworking store.

You can also add a sealant on top like polyutherane if you want it to last even longer at the cost of imparting a different texture.

I'd rather have my kids play on pressure treated timber than rotting timber...

Back in the olden days, pressure-treated wood contained compounds of arsenic and chromium. This made it pretty terrible to cut, sand, burn, etc.

The warnings persist in part because older wood still has that problem, so "reclaimed wood" projects can be risky. That said, since mid-2000s, wood in the US and the EU is treated primarily with much safer copper compounds. Copper isn't hugely toxic to humans at the levels you're likely to be exposed to from wood.

To be fair, the treatment often also includes an organic fungicide (the "azole" part in "copper azole"), which is probably not understood as well as copper.

> I'm not familiar with this. What are the dangers?

Wood is typically treated with nasty chemicals. For example, formaldehyde is extensively used in these applications, and it's linked with cancer.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/chemicals/form...

The traditional methods of "carving" I know about are using an adze [1] and controlled burning [2].

[1] https://engineeringlearn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Adze...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dwAu6RIQURo

In my chairs I just sculpt the back out of eight quarter with an angle grinder. More production focused wood workers are using multi-axis routers/cncs.

The english term for what you are referring to in bent lamination which is done by taking a piece of wood, slicing it to sections with a thin kerf blade, soaking in water, and then clamping to a form and gluing back together. This is how Russ Filbeck creates his classic presidential rocker.

Bending solid wood is something you do while it grows. See for example https://fullgrown.co.uk/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier or https://www.core77.com/posts/27263/Polands-Forgotten-Crooked...

I've seen people doing it with steam

> The ultralight community never ceases to amaze me.

The ultralight community doesn't typically touch this stuff. This is sold to traditional backpackers that are drawn to the allure of ultralight.

No sane hiker brings a chair along on a 4+ hiking trip.

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I find it weird that low weight is one of the main selling points of this product, but they don't say how much it is.

I just watched the whole thing, and I didn’t mind.

I feel like people have just gotten so used to 10-second videos, and anything longer now feels like an eternity.

I really hope people don’t stop making longer form videos in favor of TikTok-sized videos.

I agree, but would be even worse as a TikTok video.

Shorts are absolutely terrible as product reviews. The point of a product review is to explore different aspects and use cases, otherwise it is an ad. It doesn't mean that long videos can't be ads, but short videos can't be anything but ads (if positive).

Shorts have a place, TikTok is great for silly dance moves, magic tricks, or people working really fast. You can even have short form educative content, though it usually doesn't go further than random trivia. But product reviews just don't work, unless they are ads. And in fact, ads don't even work that well as people tend to forget about them quickly.

Not sure about TikTok, but in this video and YouTube in general, you can just directly go to where most people go, and this way (I'm always a bit amazed that this actually works) you can generally see the actually important points of the video.

There is a “ten minute rule” for youtube video to maximize reach / clout / whatever the kids are looking for.

It's a new book (and free!). There's also a YouTube series where they build it, so I'm very tempted to make my first chair now.