Several times a week, especially during periods of stress or writer’s block, I open the door to my basement and enter the 18th century. Down there, I create Windsor furniture, by hand, in precisely the same manner that New England chairmakers did around the time of the American Revolution. I use tools that were nearly lost to time: a gutter adze, travisher, compass plane, block planes, spoon bits, hand braces, spoke shaves, sweep gouges, and veiners.

After completing nearly 60 Windsors, I can attest that these old tools really work—and that most modern ones don’t. While we tend to congratulate ourselves on the march of progress being led by technology, I’d like to suggest that change isn’t always improvement.

In my hands, thanks to a heap of training from a master chairmaker in New Hampshire, antique tools release wondrous features. Chair back crests have decorative "ears" carved into them. Armrests have "knuckles" at their ends. Seats have deep, comfortable saddles. Spindles grow sinuous bulbs in the middle.

By contrast, modern tools are overpowering. They are like using a sledgehammer to drive a wood screw. That’s true even of modern reproductions of the tools I use.

For instance, an old-fashioned drawknife is a large blade with two wooden handles that is pulled toward the user to rough out spindles or round seat edges. In skilled hands, it can quickly shape wood in small increments. The old ones have a little "belly" to them, like a scimitar, that slices wood as smoothly as a carving knife through a turkey breast that’s just out of the oven. A new (far more expensive) version from my Woodcraft Supply store looks great, but it’s really a giant, unwieldy chisel with a steep, straight front edge. It dives deeply into the wood grain, gouging out great hunks. The "ergonomically designed" handles look oh-so spiffy, but no one at Woodcraft Supply could possibly have tested them. They are so small that more than half your palm hangs off the end, making the tool jittery.

My teacher once told me of a student who for years had carved out the saddles of his seats with a chain saw and an orbital sander. The fellow was then introduced to a gutter adze, an ancient device that looks like a curved pick. It is swung between the legs, each chop removing a crisp handful of pine. The poor guy could hardly believe what an "improvement" the old tool was over the new ones. You might say he had seen the candlelight.

Going all the way, one chairmaker I know has banned all power tools. He can cut a seat out of two-inch pine faster, and more accurately, with a bow saw than I (and, no doubt, many others) can with an electric band saw.

The Windsor chairs themselves have much to recommend them over more contemporary designs. Windsor chairs, the everyman’s chair of their day, were easy to make and inexpensive. A Windsor is a Windsor because its legs and top structure are simply socketed into the thick seat. By contrast, a single piece of wood serves as a back leg and a support for the chair back on a contemporary Chippendale chair. The Chippendale approach requires lots of complicated mortising.

The fact that so many Windsors have survived two centuries of hard use is entirely because of how they were built. For example, the legs of old chairs aren’t held in place by glue. Even today’s 21st-century epoxies would have failed by now. Instead, like a suspension bridge, the undercarriage of an old Windsor is constructed with an understanding of "camber." Stretchers hold the legs out as far as they’ll go, and then the tops of the legs, which are conical, are pounded into tapered holes in the bottom of the seat. The legs are wedged and keyed so that they won’t wiggle and so that, the more the chair is sat upon, the tighter the legs get. (I own an old one that, at some point, sat outside, as evidenced by rot in the bottom of the legs. Nevertheless, it still solidly supports my 200-plus pounds.) It almost goes without saying that the clunky, modern, factory Windsors (the ones you’ll see broken on every trip to the landfill) are not built in the old style.

That the old Windsor chair methods are still practiced at all is largely because of one man, Mike Dunbar, who holds classes in his Hampton, N.H., shop. Dunbar was all set to teach college French when he bought a tiny fanback Windsor at a New England yard sale. Then he began looking at it. Really looking at it. That was nearly 30 years ago. Today, he teaches several dozen classes a year. His yellowing doctorate in French literature sits in a frame in the shop’s bathroom. Under the frame are the words: "In case of emergency, break glass."

Even with Dunbar leading a revival, there are only about 30 professional Windsor chairmakers, primarily in the Northeast. (Most can be contacted through www.windsorchairresources.com, where they also share tips. See, we chairmakers aren’t Luddites who think all modern tools are bad. No 18th-century chairmaker used a propane lobster cooker from Sam’s Club to generate steam to bend wood, but we all do.) Each chairmaker uses old methods to create products with such desirable characteristics as visible tool marks under the seats. (Some chair factories now fake the distinctive markings left by hand tools.)

What chairmakers go through may seem like a tremendous amount of effort to anyone accustomed to the high-pitched scream, and instant gratification, of modern routers and table saws. And I must admit that results from the old methods aren’t always predictable: Hidden pin knots may shatter delicate, hand-planed bendings; sap pockets may ruin half-carved seats; too much pressure with a skew may explode a maple leg-turning that’s spinning on a lathe. None of the chairmakers earn serious money—a good chairmaker produces two a week, and they sell at retail for around $500 each.

But Windsor chairs, and the tools used to make them, can still serve as examples of the virtues of simplicity and of the need to avoid becoming slaves to modern gizmos and gadgets.

During my last class in New Hampshire, I was struggling to draw a scribe line to use as a guide as I tapered off the sides of a large oval, to be used in a Windsor writing-arm chair. I had the absolute latest tool: a brass scribing tool, complete with a little roller on one side and a sharp cutting edge on the other. Watching this, a grizzled graduate of Boston’s prestigious North Bennett Street School of woodworking came over and shook his head. "Hey, kid," he said, "watch this." He pulled a pencil stub from his pocket and eyeballed the wood. Using a curled forefinger to keep the pencil a consistent distance in from the edge, he drew a beautifully curved, accurate line. "That," he said, "is how the old guys did it."