Chair Recaning
2013
When my nesting partner and I moved in together, he brought his beautiful dining room set with him, but the cane was sagging or broken on most of the chairs. I brought them over to the Caning Shop in Berkeley to explore repair, and found that recaning them myself was more cost effective and pleasurable than having someone else do it. I recaned all six dining room chairs over the course of a handful of Saturdays, and they're still standing strong over a decade later.
I found Jim, the owner of the Caning Shop, to be a kind and generous instructor, and truly enjoyed my days at the shop working on chairs with him. I learned about the differences between machine- and hand-caned chairs, peppered him with every question I had about my project, and watched a master at work each time I was there.
This is the original cane on one of the chairs. The horizontal weave made the cane susceptible to wear at the front and back of the seat.
Much of the time recaning a chair is spent delicately removing the previous cane, which is set into a groove with a flexible piece of cane called a spline.
Using a specialty chisel and hammer, I tapped out the old cane and glue from the chair.
This process took me several hours for my first chair, but the subsequent chairs were faster.
The new cane was soaked in a hot bathtub to relax it, then I set it on the chair to begin to measure it.
I held the new cane in place with bits of spline to check on fit.
Once I established fit, I used another chisel to trim the excess cane away.
From there, carefully measured and cut spline and more glue than seems reasonable was added to the groove and hammered into place.