A set of 15 dining side chairs in Sapele and ebony. These chairs are based on a Greene & Greene design for the Gamble House in Pasadena, CA, as adapted by Darrell Peart and Bob Lang. The leather slip seats were covered by a local upholsterer, Jet Upholstery, In Bedminster, PA, who did an excellent job capturing the original Greene & Greene look. This set of chairs took me a little over a year to build and were made to go with my interpretation of the Greene & Greene Thorsen House Table.

The chair was first designed in CAD, then CNC pattern routing templates were created from the CAD drawings for each curved part or detail (which was pretty much every part). Most parts were pattern routed to final shape. A few were too tall to pattern route and were roughed out with the bandsaw and either pattern sanded using a spindle sander or cleaned up by hand using spoke shaves. Most of the corner rounding was done by hand with a combination of floats, rasps and files before final sanding. All joinery is loose tenon construction, with the mortises cut mostly using the excellent Leigh FMT.

The crest rail and back splats were the most challenging parts of this chair. These parts have curved faces on all sides except the flat mortised ends. Each part required a significant amount of hand shaping using spoke shaves, floats, rasps, files and scrapers.

The ebony details are classic Greene & Greene. There are square plugs at most of the joints and ebony bars with nickel-silver pins inset into the center back splats.

The finish is General Finishes water borne dye stain topped with Target Coatings EM-6000 water borne lacquer.

Here are some project totals:​

Board feet of Sapele used: 315
4’ x 8’ sheets of 3/4” baltic birch plywood: 2
Number of chair parts fabricated: 285
Number of mortises: 720
Number of floating tenons: 360
Number of square ebony plugs: 405
Number of ebony splines: 120
Quarts of finish used: 10
Hours to complete: 596

thanks for looking!


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