I spent the day today in Grand Rapids Michigan reviewing furniture construction and specific orders placed with Kindel Furniture. I have used Kindel a number of other times on projects but have never traveled to see their production/manufacturing offices. This trip was necessitated by Kindel taking on production of some custom furniture for a project. All the designs for our furniture were taken from antiques –modified and flourished with details to work with our remodel project.

Below are some pictures of the day – Not all these are from our order but they are a good representation of a production process. There are also some cool videos  of the day on Instagram @designshadow.

CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine cutting multiple legs at once: (They had machines like this going all over the shop.)

  

Kindel has hundreds of standard prototypes like these to make arms and legs from:

 Parts and pieces being prepared:

                

This is the process of pressing the wood into a mold. For more information on this process read my previous post called China Millwork Inspection. I believe they called this a “hot press.”

Once they have all the parts, they do a “dry fit” for a chair. This means they make sure everything is going to fit together without any problems, before they are glued up.

Once the dry fit takes place…glue, lots and lots of glue happens.

    

 Then Sanding:

Then applying stain and finish:

    

Lastly, upholstery. Here are the sinuous springs applied before fabric:

This is the last shot I have to share. It shows the mock-up chair that was made as a trial compared to the finished chair getting ready for upholstery:

This was a wonderful trip. I have been apart of furniture designing and building before, but Kindel taught me some new things and that is why I love working as a designer; Always something new around every corner!