Full view of the chair. |
Lashed construction holds the parts together |
Lashings hold uprights to the bottom ring. |
He writes in part,
I recently got back from a trip to Mexico visiting my wife's family. When down there we saw a style of furniture construction which reminded me of skin on frame, in that it involves multiple relatively poor quality pieces of lumber lashed together in a way that makes it both strong enough to do it's job and is also very resilient to impacts. It seems to me that this chair and SOF (bicycle wheels as well) are so strong is because loads and impacts are dissipated by transferred them to multiple small, relatively weak, parts instead of concentrating them on one part that must be thus very strong. The type of furniture is called Equipale and was very common in the state of Jalisco. (I do not know if it is a regional style or a national one).
And I'm adding some photos of two chairs of ours that were falling apart because the glue was coming undone. These were chairs where the parts were held together with glued dowels. The glue failed and the dowels pulled out of their mortises one evening at dinner while a friend of ours was sitting on one of these chairs. The dowels were still stuck on one end and drilling them out would have been tricky so I just reassembled the parts and lashed around the joints. The chairs now have some movement in them since the lashings don't make completely rigid joints, but overall, they are hanging together.
This isn't skin on frame technology, but it is lashed and doweled construction where lashings take the place of glue or screws to hold parts together.
Here I reenforced each doweled joint with a lashing. Even if the glue fails, the joints will not pull apart. The string lashings function like ligaments in animal joints. |
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