Wednesday, February 12, 2014
The Worlds Most Popular Chair

Eventually Thonet succeeded. When the No.14 was launched in 1859, it was the first piece of furniture to be both attractive and inexpensive enough to appeal to everyone from aristocrats to schoolteachers. By 1930, some 50 million No.14s had been sold, and millions more have been snapped up since then. Brahms sat on one to play his piano, as did Lenin while writing his political tracts, and millions of us have perched comfortably on them in cafés. Another admirer was the modernist pioneer Le Corbusier. "Never was a better and more elegant design and a more precisely crafted and practical item created," he enthused.
Peace,
Mitchell
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Rocking Chair Repair
Heres another old furniture repair post, and also a lesson on the importance of grain direction.
This old rocker had a broken runner:

A closer look revealed how the sawn runner split down the grain. If the runners had been bent, with continuous grain, this couldnt have happened.

I didnt need to disassemble the chair; it was easy enough to loosen the screws and rotate the broken parts to get at the surfaces needing glue. The brown fuzzy strip is adhesive backed felt to protect the bamboo floor.

Heres the clamp swarm holding things put after glueing:

The glue probably would have been enough, but just to be sure I removed some of the felt and drove two finish screws across the joint. To insure that the screws pulled everything tight, I bored two different size pilot holes. First I drilled a small pilot hole (the size of the screws shank) the full depth of the screw, and then bored a larger hole (the size of the threads) just as deep as the break. This way, the clamping effect was between the threads of the lower part and the head of the screw.

To replace the felt, I squished the new felt with clamps until it was the same thickness as the older felt. Although I am confident this repair will hold, I didnt want to tempt fate by putting a lump right under it. Confident is confident, but safer is better.
Oh, and although I already pointed out that bent runners would not have failed this way, I also concede the point that these sawn runners lasted almost 100 years. So there you go...
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Dining chair plans woodworking
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