How Dining Chairs Are Built: Inside a Foshan Chair Line

The seven operations a dining chair passes through in our Longjiang factory - equipment, cycle time and the inspection checkpoint at each stage.

One site, seven operations

Every dining chair we ship passes through the same building in Longjiang. Nothing is outsourced except the plating of metal components, which is why a question about a joint can be answered in an hour rather than a week.

The line runs: cutting, machining, sanding, assembly, finishing, upholstery, packing. The table below is the actual sequence with the checkpoint at each stage, not a marketing diagram.

Cutting and machining

Timber arrives kiln-dried and is cut to blank, then machined on the tenoner and the spindle moulder. This is where the joint geometry is set, and it is the only stage where a mistake is unrecoverable — a tenon cut 1 mm small is a loose joint for the life of the chair.

Fixtures are set per model and verified against a retained sample before a run starts. That is the reason the MOQ on a new model exists: the setup is real work.

Production sequence

Sanding, and why it takes three passes

Three grits, progressively finer, with a inspection between the second and the third. Sanding is the operation most likely to be compressed when a line is behind schedule, and it is the one the customer notices first — a finish applied over a poorly sanded frame shows every scratch under a dining room light.

Assembly

Frames are glued and clamped, with corner blocks screwed as well as glued. Clamp time is fixed; releasing early is the classic shortcut and it shows up months later as a joint that creaks. Frames for our solid wood dining chairs go through the same fixture set whether the order is 6 pieces or 600.

Finishing

Spray booth, flash-off, then a second or third coat depending on the system. The booth is filtered and the flash-off time is specified by the coating supplier, not by convenience. Colour is checked against a sealed reference panel from the approved sample before a frame leaves the booth.

Upholstery and packing

Covers are cut from nested markers to control waste, sewn, then fitted over foam on a seat deck built the same way every time. Final packing is five-ply carton, EPE between components, corner board on frame ends, and a drop test on the first carton of a new model.

Then the container: cartons are stacked to a loading plan, photographed at three points, and sealed. Those photographs are what settle a damage claim.

Capacity, and how a run is scheduled

A line is scheduled by model, not by order. Changing models means changing fixtures, which is dead time on the machining line, so runs are batched: everything that shares a fixture set goes through together. That batching is why a larger quantity usually costs less per piece and why a small order on an unusual model does not.

Two shifts are normal, three in the autumn peak. Capacity is quoted per month, not per day, because the bottleneck moves: machining when the models are complex, finishing when the specification calls for three coats.

What we outsource, and why

Metal plating, and nothing else. Plating requires an environmental permit we do not hold and a plant we do not want next to a woodworking line. Everything from the kiln to the carton is on site.

The practical value is answerability. When a buyer asks why a joint is loose, the person who set the fixture is in the building, and the answer takes an hour rather than a week of emails through an intermediary.

Where defects are caught

Roughly two thirds at machining and sanding, where they are cheap; most of the rest at final inspection, where they are not. The aim is to move that ratio further upstream every quarter, and the mechanism is simple: every defect found at final is traced back to the operation that produced it.

The two defects worth naming because they are the expensive ones: a joint cut undersized, which is invisible until the frame is loaded, and a colour mismatch, which is invisible until the chairs are placed together in a room.

What a visit actually tells you

Come and watch the machining line on a Tuesday. A factory that runs its own line will show you any part of it; a trading company will show you a showroom. The model range we currently build is on the main site.