Late one night I was reading the wikipedia page of Hans Wegner and realized that we both attended the same school in Copenhagen. I like that.

I went to West Edge Design Fair in LA for work and signed up to win a wishbone chair at the Carl Hansen booth. I didn't have any hope of actually winning the chair, but I did get a nice poster to take home.

Along went my life, still not winning any giveaways, but occasionally searching "wegner" on craigslist. And then one day a wishbone chair came up for sale that wasn't crazy expensive. It was about an hour north of me, in wine country. The pictures in the ad were shit, and the chair was damaged.

This is one of the most copied chairs ever. So I was skeptical about the authenticity, but I realllyyy wanted a danish paper cord project, and with the seat of the chair being stained, it was probably timeto replace it.

The chair wasn't marked, but the seller confirmed that it was old and that it was stamped with the number 4 where the label would be. The shape looked about right but it was hard to tell much else from the picture in the ad:

This chair has been in continuous production by Carl Hansen since 1950. The earliest examples are stamped "Carl Hansen & Søn, Design Hans J Wegner" etc.  At some point they came with a paper decal, then a foil sticker. This chair was only marked "4", but it also had a random pencil mark barely visible on the left hand side. This seems to be common on a lot of these chairs. Some say the stamped number is from Inspector 4 or Inspector 6 etc.

How to avoid fake CH24s

Before driving up there, I read through the link above among others.

I showed up at the shop, checked out the chair, and it looked old for sure, but a few things bothered me.

• It's Oak, but it has a Teak colored stain.
• The wood has knots in it, and I've read that Carl Hansen only uses 'clear' wood to make their chairs.
• The cord pattern on the seat isn't original.
• The dimensions were all wrong according to the link above. This chair was smaller by a lot.
• The number 4 stamp was in the center, not to the right side as I'd seen on other chairs online.
• If it was authentic, why would it break in the first place?

So obviously I bought it.

The first time I sat in it, I thought it must be original. It just felt right. The arms wrap around and hit in just the right place, and it's comfortable...

It's possible to make a new chair look old, but at the price he was selling it for, it just wouldn't be worth the time. The curved backrest is bent from a single piece of wood on the originals. Most of the copies are made from 3 pieces of wood. The legs are turned and then steam bent in a very specific shape. All of the joints were precise and the chair is well made. There are a lot of copies today, but this chair is probably 20-30+ years old, and I haven't seen any vintage copies. The chair was too hard to produce back then and wouldn't be worth the effort.

Apparently the chair grew in size sometime in the 90s. The photo of Hans Wegner sitting in this chair makes it look quite small. It also seems like the angle of the backrest has gotten steeper over the years.

If it's original, then why did it break? The wishbone support on the old chairs is cut from a solid piece of wood. The newer CH24s from Carl Hansen actually use a laminated piece of wood now, to give that piece more strength. So I would guess that it's not uncommon for the chairs to break at that point.

My own guess about the knots in the wood is that there wasn't enough wood back when this chair was made to be so particular about the grain. Knots in the wood add figure and it's really beautiful, but structurally it's weaker, so today Carl Hansen only uses clear wood on the chairs.

Knowing it was worth putting work into, I started on the repairs.

You can see the damage to the wishbone. It cracked in half and was poorly repaired. The arm in the right of the photo below is sitting up way too high because it wasn't glued back together very well.

To remove the back rest and wishbone I heated the joints with a heat gun. This loosens up the glue and the parts can gradually be removed.

The wishbone was split almost in half, but not quite. I heated up the crack, pulled it apart, cleaned out the old glue, and then glued it back together.

Using a lot of clamps I was able to get the crack more or less flush on both sides, better than it was before.

The break in the wishbone was addressed the same way. It's amazing how little glue there was holding this piece back together.

Then I straightened out the edges of the gap with a chisel and carved a small piece of oak to glue in place. I did this on the back side of the chair too where it was missing a piece.

The new piece was stained with "Antique Cherry" which was pretty close to the original.

It's not perfect, but it's a lot less noticeable now.

All the old glue is cleaned out of the joints and the whole thing is glued and clamped together again. One of the arms was developing a crack, right at the joint, so I fixed that too. And one of the dowels between the legs was loose so I glued it together again too. I didn't want to re-glue the whole chair because it's so much work and not really necessary, but if it loosens up in the future I'll have to do it.

This is what I was looking forward to. Reweaving the seat. Unfortunately or fortunately it cleaned up with soap. I heated a cup or two of water in a pot, added 1 tablespoon of grated bar soap, then wiped the cord with a microfiber and the soap mixture. Nothing much happened and I left for work and the soap mixture turned into a gel. Rather than get the whole seat wet, I just wiped the soap gel on and off and to my surprise it removed most of the stain.

Along the way I rubbed the wood lightly with teak oil and #0000 steel wool. This cleans the chair without removing the patina.

That's how I got my first Wegner chair.

Thanks to Carl Hansen & Søn for the poster.