Amish Furniture Construction Techniques

Most people are under the impression that the Amish use nothing but hand tools, like block planes, hand drills, buck saws and the like when they build furniture. This is not the case. While it’s true they don’t use the “plug and play” type tools you see all the time like circular saws. What they do use is belt or air driven tools. They’ve basically adapted the same technology our country used in the early part of this century.
Behind their shops you’ll find 2 things a diesel engine and a fuel tank. The diesel engine is hooked up to a drive shaft that runs under the floor of the shop. From there they have a belt that goes up into whatever piece of equipment they need to produce their furniture. Planers, drill presses, table saws and a few others are the most commonly use equipment.
No don’t get me wrong there are a few builders out there that make furniture this way but they take a really, really long time to get it done. The Amish that don’t use belt or air driven tools are what’s referred to as the Old Order Amish. These guys are hardcore when it come to limiting technology. They don’t even use covered wagons in the winter!! While they do produce great furniture with only hand tools you will have a really hard time finding their furniture in retail stores. The main reason is the long turnaround time and the fact that the only way you can communicate with them is by snail mail.
Both types of builders us the tried and true techniques of high quality furniture construction like english dovetailed drawer boxes, mortise and tenon joints, very tight tolerances etc. The difference is basically our ability as retailers to get a hold of them, fax or voice mail compared to snail mail only, and their turn around time.
One thing you’ll find with any Amish furniture retailer is that they love wood. Unfortunately most furniture produced today comes from china and is made of particle board or osb. If does happen to be wood it’s typically rubberwood or as it’s sometimes called chinese oak. The problem there is that while it looks somewhat similar to American oak it hasn’t been kiln dried as well. Speed over quality is the name of the game with chinese wood furniture.
On a slightly different topic one of the great American institutions of high quality solid wood furniture, Stickley to be exact, now produces 80% of their furniture in Vietnam. What the F$%&!?!?!?! This makes me sick. An institution of American made furniture has fallen to the lure of lower costs over quality and being American made. I’ve sold a lot of furniture to people that used to be stickley fanatics. Once they saw that they switched their factories to Vietnam they swore to never buy stickley again and that’s a real shame.
Stickley’s switch to overseas production shows that they are not as in touch with their customer base as they should be.