Chair no 1 – Completion

After finishing the main woodworking and assembling the chair in the last post, the final details to complete were applying a coat of oil and weaving the seat with Danish cord.

For finish I used an oil called Kreidezeit. I had never heard of or used this finish back in the US, but here in Japan it’s pretty popular amongst furniture makers. Over the past several years a few different “natural” oil finishes have been gaining popularity like Osmo and Rubio Monocoat. Kreidezeit seems to be in a similar category. The variety I used is called Holzlauer, and Kreidzeit claims it’s contains all natural materials like linseed and tung oil, is biocide free, and solvent free. I’m not sure why they say solvent free when it also contains balsamic turpentine, which to my understanding is a solvent. But I have read statements that say that turpentine is less toxic than petroleum-distillates, so I guess Kreidezeit is trying to make a point that they don’t use petroleum based solvents.

The product I used was a clear oil that is labelled “gloss” in Japanese, but as far as I know “gloss” just implies that it doesn’t contain any waxes or other additives that may produce a matte sheen. Compared to Osmo and Monocoat which in my limited experience are kind of thick and gooey finishes that you really have to work into the surface, Kreidezeit is much more like a standard oil finish but dries relatively fast thanks to some added driers (calcium and manganese). Overall it’s been a pleasant oil to use. The smell of the balsamic turpentine is somewhat pleasant but it’s still nasty to breath, so it’s a finish that you want to apply with a respirator and/or outdoors if possible.

After wiping on the oil and giving the chair a couple of days to dry I moved on to the final phase of this project; weaving the seat. I wanted to weave a rush pattern seat for this chair but instead of natural rush or fiber (paper) rush I used Danish cord. Danish cord and fiber rush are both made of paper but fiber rush is composed of one sheet of twisted paper, while Danish cord has three sheets of paper twisted and wrapped, producing a better looking and stronger cord.

I didn’t take detail photos of the weaving process, aside from the beginning phase pictured below. In these first images I was essentially adding extra wraps to the wide front stretcher to bring it into an even width with the back stretcher. This chair, and really most chairs that I have seen, has a seat that gets narrower towards the back. For a rush seat pattern to work you need add simple wraps on the left and right sides of the front stretcher until the remaining length matches the back stretcher. The process really makes much more sense after seeing it, and there are a lot of great videos on Youtube showing this process ( I recommend Ed Hammond’s weaving demos).

After wrapping and evening out the spacing of the front and back stretchers I started in on the main weaving process. There’s something really pleasing about weaving a seat. On one hand it’s laborious, but it’s also one of those jobs that for whatever reason I really get into. I wouldn’t call it meditative but it’s a perfect task for putting on some good tunes and just diving into the process.

Jumping ahead to the finished seat and this is the result. As with any craft, weaving a chair seat has it’s own tricks and techniques and I’m far from an expert. This chair was also the first time in 4 years or so that I wove this style pattern. So there was a bit of relearning as I went along. All in all it took about 4 hours to weave the chair which seems likes a decent pace. I’d be curious how fast the guys who work for Carl Hansen can weave this style seat (check out Benny the Weaver).

This was also the first time I wove this pattern using Danish cord and one thing I would do differently next time is compress and pack in more strands. As you weave you can pack and compress the cord using a wood block. I thought I had this weave pretty tightly packed but after sitting in the chair for a few weeks now little by little the weave has started to open a bit. Not in a terrible way, but enough that I realize I could have easily fit in another pass or two. Live and learn.

So with that the chair was complete. Overall I’m pleased with how things came out. I particularly like the arm and leg joinery using the scribed shoulders on the legs, even though that was a tedious and time consuming process. My plan is to live with this chair for a bit, and see how it feels in use. Already I’m thinking about a few minor areas that I’d like to modify but overall I’m pretty pleased with how things turned out, and feel confident it will be a good chair to offer customers.

This was also one of the first projects that I designed in Blender and then produced in real life, and so far Blender has turned out to be an amazing tool for visualizing designs. It’s so much faster and easier to fully design a piece like this chair in Blender and work out the details before committing the time and effort to making the actual piece.

Thanks for following along on this build. Up next I’ve got some shoji screens and some really simple collapsable stools so stay tuned.

-Jon