Woodworking Basic Introduction To Windsor Furniture
Legoland
By James F Clay on 2017-08-24 16:07:21
A deceptively well-engineered furniture style whose parts are assembled mainly from wooden sticks, Windsor represents one of history’s most innovative and recognizable furniture designs. The Windsor family of furniture consists of stools, chairs, cradles, stands, and tables. Chairs are the largest category with eight different basic forms, such as comb-backs, step-downs, and the sack-back version. Chairs also spawned nine derivatives that include stools, rocking chairs, writing armchairs, and child-sized chairs.
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The origin of Wndsors is ancient history. Their antecedents can be attributed to the Egyptians, where tomb drawings of the 18th Dynasty depict workmen sitting on three-legged hand-hewn stools socketed to a plank seat. The reason for the name Wndsor is something of an enigma, but the most logical explanation is that they were named during the first decade of the 18th Century after the English town of Windsot whose beech trees provided a plentiful supply of raw material for legs and other turned parts.
Windsor chairs improved on the traditional joiner’s chairs of the period by eliminating the need to glue-up seat frames. In a Windsor chair, the seat is a solid plank serving as the foundation for the legs and stretchers and for the spindle back. That simplicity and strengh of design is no doubt one of the keys to the chair’s undying popularity and longevity.
Windsor chair making started as a cottage industry in England during the 1720s, but soon became an important factory-based operation, employing hundreds of workers, centered in the town of High Wycombe. Although the first Wndsors in America were chairs imported from England, Philadelphia chair makers almost immediately capitalized on this popular new form of easily made seating. Their one-man shops expanded into large factories.
English chair makers took advantage of the physical properties of different woods for different components of the chairs, using ash for bent parts, beech for turnings, and elm for seats. Their American counterparts used hickory,red oak or ash for bending, maple for turnings, and pine for seats. Windsors were traditionally painted green, but other colors such as blue, mustard and red were also used. The paint concealed the different wood colors and served to protect the wood outdoors, while conveying a unifying wholeness to the piece. Many English chairs were simply dip stained. Learn how to make windsor chair please going to woodworkingplans.tv ….
