Add New Life to an Previous Chair

Woven rattan, or cane, has been serving as a cushty seating floor for hundreds of years. Hand-weaving cane—which entails threading particular person strands of cane via the holes in a chair body—is time-consuming and costly. However within the 1870s, the arrival of loom-woven cane, also referred to as sheet cane or webbing cane, revolutionized chair-seat development. Putting in a cane seat all of a sudden grew to become a quick, easy, cheap course of by which a sheet of prewoven cane is pressed right into a groove round a chair’s seat and held in place with a reed spline.

The cane used for weaving chair seats is sliced from the laborious outer pores and skin of the rattan palm, a climbing vine from Southeast Asia. Strips of cane can be found in bulk for hand weaving, often in a hank that comprises roughly 1,000 lin. ft. Prewoven cane is available in quite a lot of patterns and sizes and is bought by the sq. foot.

I’ll give attention to prewoven cane for this text. The chair I’m caning is the final one remaining from a set my grandparents bought for his or her South Dakota eating room within the early twentieth century. It has endured a farm misplaced to the Nice Melancholy, weathered the uncertainties of World Struggle II, survived adjustments in design tastes for over a century, and nonetheless gives a cushty place to get pleasure from dinner.

Soaking answer. To situation the cane for set up, combine up an answer of 8 elements purified water to 1.5 elements alcohol to 0.5 elements glycerin.

Soften the cane earlier than set up. Dry cane is brittle and may crack throughout set up. Soaking softens it, permitting it to lie flat and resist fracturing. A size of PVC pipe makes a handy soaking station. Fill the pipe with the glycerine answer, trim the panel to measurement, and drop it in place, ensuring that it’s absolutely submerged. Permit it to soak for half an hour or till it stays flat when unrolled.

Soften the spline. Moist the spline with purified water and let it sit for just a bit bit to assist soften the glue. Take a razor knife and frivolously reduce between the seat and the spline all the way in which round. Earlier than shifting on, reduce out a lot of the previous cane panel to simplify eradicating the spline.

Weave-it-yourself vs. prewoven cane

I used to hand-weave cane chairs as a part of my early woodworking and restoration enterprise, and I’ll testify {that a} well-done hand-woven panel is a murals. It takes observe to get a passable consequence with hand-weaving. Whereas a specific amount of “sag” in the beginning is a necessity, an excessive amount of will lead to a free weave.

It’s a balancing act that requires expertise to grasp. And weaving a panel the scale of the common chair seat can take most of a day, with breaks to assuage sore arms and muscle groups. Prewoven cane has all of the drama eliminated. It comes able to be put in rapidly and with predetermined outcomes for sag and sample uniformity. These components make prewoven cane a really interesting various.

Prewoven cane is offered in a number of completely different patterns, with the octagonal-hole, eight-strand being essentially the most recognizable. You will get the octagonal weave in varied sizes. Bleached cane with a really uniform mild tan colour is widespread, however cane can be accessible unbleached for a extra rustic look. The prewoven cane sheet is held in place by a spline that’s pushed into the groove. Splines are bought in sizes starting from 6.5 to 12, every for a selected groove width; 9.5 is hottest, because it suits a 1/4-in.-wide groove.

Instruments and prep

Only a few instruments are wanted for putting in a prewoven cane seat: some picket wedges, a small dead-blow hammer, and a razor knife with a recent blade. In the event you’re changing cane, be certain the groove is nicely cleaned. I exploit a 1⁄8-in. mortise chisel (handed down from the identical grandfather who owned the chair) to wash the underside of the groove, eradicating any previous cane, glue, or different detritus.

Watch out to not enlarge the groove in the course of the course of, for the reason that spline wants to suit precisely to carry the cane securely. Lower the prewoven cane to the approximate measurement of the challenge. I like to depart a few inches throughout the perimeter. That makes it simpler to align the cane to the spline groove. Additionally, it’s simpler to trim an extended cane strand than a brief one.

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