About the club

The craft

“Bodging” is the old trade of turning chair parts from freshly felled (“green”) wood on a pole lathe — a lathe powered by a springy pole and a foot treadle. Green wood cuts like cheese compared to seasoned lumber, so the whole craft is built around working fast and light with simple tools: a froe to split the log, an axe and drawknife to rough the shape, and a gouge at the lathe to finish it.

The bodgers of the Chiltern beech woods supplied legs and stretchers to the chair factories of High Wycombe until the trade died out in the 1950s. Today it’s kept alive by hobbyists and chair makers around the world — including, now, a few of us in Utah.

What we do

• Monthly meetings with demonstrations, show-and-tell, and shared tool time on the club’s two pole lathes and four shave horses.
• Spoon and bowl carving — the gateway drug of green woodworking. Bring a knife; we have blanks.
• Chair builds — a slow-running group project to take members from log to finished Windsor-style chair.
• Wood days — when a member gets a lead on felled birch, cherry, or box elder, we descend with froes and wedges and split it into billets to share.

Where we meet

Second Saturday of most months at the West Jordan fairgrounds pavilion, with occasional field days up the canyons. See the events page for what’s coming up.

The wood is free, the tools are simple, and the company is good. That’s the whole pitch.