Hans Wegner designed literally hundreds and hundreds of chairs in his life time. His designs were so successful that they were used by JFK. This video demonstrates how one of these is made using 3d cnc routing.

Pierre sent me a link to the above youtube video which does an excellent job of showing the whole process of how one of Hans Wegner’s beautiful armchairs is produced. One part right in the middle of the video demonstrates the use of 5 axis 3d cnc routing, but the part I enjoyed most was of a machine I’ve never seen before, where a mechanism that is known as a kopierfräser here in germany is used in combination with a belt sander to form the legs.  It is an interesting solution for the production of an organic form that would be very very difficult with any other method.  Of course, a better  solution would be to use the 4th axis of a cnc router, that way it would be far easier to vary the form of the part, and to use Just In Time production, which is not something that is happening in the above video, but I assume the production of Hans Wegner’s armchair started without any cnc routering, the cnc router seen in the video was added later to eliminate the otherwise necessary and expensive work of craftsmen.