Workbench

Description

Glue press. Commercial machine base of open iron works. Top of two 3/4" tongue-in-groove boards, and a 1 3/4" oak or ash board onto surmounted by furniture screw-clamp which opens to 26", and a narrow flat-spring clamp derived from a saw blade, which can hold a 1 1/2" post. Two shelves below.

Notes

Shaker chairs were usually assembled in a particular order: the front posts and their connecting rungs were assembled first, then the back posts and their rungs and slats, and, finally, the six side rungs fitted into position and the front and back of the chair pressed/glued together. This table was used to assemble chairs that the Shakers made for sale. The Shakers reused a cast iron base from an unidentified piece of machinery to support the table's wooden top. On top are two holding devices, a spring clamp and a vice. The spring clamp held chair posts firmly as the round tenons of chair rungs and the ends of back slats were glued and inserted into holes and mortises drilled in the posts. Once assembled, the rungs and back slats were pressed firmly together with the vice. The photograph (1957.9276.1), taken by N.E. Baldwin in the early 1930s, shows Lillian Barlow resting from her work in the Second Family chair shop. The assembly table is in the center of the photograph. The boxes of chair parts and the number of machines illustrate that, even in its final decade, the chair-making enterprise was a business based upon mechanization and mass production.