It has been two years since I finished caning the seats on our dining room chairs. All this time, the remaining chair, that doesn't match our set exactly, has been sitting in the workshop gathering dust. I have just about enough cane left over to finish it. You watch, I will come up a few pieces short. I finally found some ambition to get it done. This chair has had the seat replaced before I think. The sides are woven wrong and I doubt that a factory caner would have made those mistakes. The chair is at least a hundred years old and that is enough time for it to have been fixed at least once already. Whomever fixed the seat then oversprayed the entire chair with some sort of varnish. That made the seat very brittle.
And when I tried to pull the cane off it was all stuck down to the rim. What a mess. It was nearly impossible to get an awl in under the binding. It took me over an hour to break all of the old cane out and pick it out of the holes and then another hour to sand the fibers out of the varnish and get back to clean wood.
I taped off the section I didn't want to sand into and took it out to the garage.
I used a die grinder and some fine sand paper to not only remove the fibers, but round off the inner edge of the seat. There were some sharp edges and these can cut into the cane as the seat sags.
This chair is definitely black walnut and not cherry. A little Old English Scratch Cover and the chair look as good as new.
Caning is just like riding a bike. Once you get the hang of it you know how to do it for life. Today I spent two hours laying in the first three layers. The fourth layer is my least favorite so I always start fresh on that. The diagonals are the fun part.
My original plan, since this chair doesn't match the others perfectly, was to try weaving a Daisy Chain pattern. It is not as strong a seat but... it would take less cane.
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