Jason’s Dante Chair

Viewer Project -
Added on November 2, 2010

Location: Halifax, NS

Amateur or Pro: Amateur

Finish Used: Sanding to 150 grit. Wipe on poly with paste wax applied with 0000 steel wool and buffed.

Wood Species: Black Walnut / White Ash

Project Description:
This project was inspired by an interesting chair I saw while visiting the Halifax Citadel fort. After doing extensive research on it, I came up with a couple of names including Savonarola chair or Dante chair. I modified the design to suit some different species of wood and modern hardware to go for a more contemporary look.

Discussion

Russ November 2, 2010 2:37 pm

Awesome chair. Very cool looking and looks like it fun project.

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dyami plotke November 2, 2010 2:59 pm

I’ll second Russ. It’s a very cool chair. Nicely done Jason.

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Michael B November 2, 2010 3:13 pm

Nice! Simple and elegant at the same time. Folds up nice and thin and still look very stable and able to hold up under my large frame

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Triple B November 2, 2010 3:19 pm

Very unusual chair, I bet half the fun was researching it. Nice build.

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Russel November 2, 2010 3:44 pm

I like this a lot and I like the combination of walnut and ash.

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Brian November 2, 2010 3:47 pm

Nice chair. How comfortable is it? I have been thinking of embarking on a few chair projects but haven’t gotten to it yet.

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Bryan Huot November 2, 2010 3:55 pm

Jason – Nice chair..I really enjoy the slat type look with the two contrasting woods. It reminded me of a Cantilevered End Table that i had made (posted here: http://www.thewoodwhisperer.co.....end-table/ )
Great work on this, and the ability to fold it up always helps with making it more functional. Well done!

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Ben November 2, 2010 7:39 pm

Looks cool, but also looks like it would be hard to get comfortable sitting–kind of like a papasan chair! :p

Maybe I’m not completely visualizing how this chair folds, but how does it stop from folding to a pancake on the floor?

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- Bryan Huot November 3, 2010 9:07 am
  
  Ben – each of the slats for the seat are connected to one side, but also all connected together, so as it unfolds each side will both be pulling on that center ‘hinge’ keeping it from going any further. The third picture shows this pretty well…and don’t worry I thought the same thing at first.
  
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Jason November 3, 2010 11:44 am

The chair is actually quite comfortable to sit in. The 1/4″ threaded rod has a bit of spring to it so it flexes a bit when you sit down. Like Bryan says, there is a rod that goes through the center of all the seat members that holds it together. That was the hardest part on this project to get the hole aligned such that all the horizontal slats rested on their opposite vertical slat and the seat pieces were all aligned properly. Using my drill press with a fence to align everything was a must to get this right.

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Norwegianwoodworker November 4, 2010 4:43 am

Very nice.
T.Robertsen

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Amy Nielsen November 5, 2010 5:35 pm

Beautiful, wish there were free plans for novice woodworkers like myelf.

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tony cordero November 5, 2010 8:58 pm

fantastic work, i have seen this chair under roman-greek designs. do you have plans to extend the design with a wider base. or steam bending the sides into an s chair for lovers to converse.

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Jason November 6, 2010 9:28 am

If there is interest, I can post up some of the drawings I used to design/build this chair.

I had thought of drilling some holes in the walnut horizontal members and building a back. In some of the old drawings and pictures I saw on the ‘net this was included but not in the model I used to build this chair.

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- thewoodwhisperer November 6, 2010 9:39 am
  
  If you want to email them to me, I’d be happy to post them here in the original post.
  
  Reply
- Jessica January 21, 2013 2:38 pm
  
  Hi, I’m in a high school woods class and one of my classmates and I were interested in doing this chair as a semester project. Is there anyway you could message me the layouts? My email is jgabriel@osceola.esu7.org. This is a very neat chair.
  
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mark williams November 7, 2010 7:51 pm

Crap that is a nice chair! Well done! Did you discover anyhthing of the history of this chair?

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Jason November 8, 2010 1:17 pm

The following is a link that I used to jump off to a bunch of different sites with lots of info on the history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-chair

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Shaun Wellington November 8, 2010 7:29 pm

Very nice! I have been looking for an inspiration for a chair like this for my son.! Great work!
thanks

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Graham May 27, 2011 4:06 pm

Excellent, just out of interest it was also known as the Glastonbury chair in England, a Luther chair in Germany, etc.

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Richard December 8, 2011 12:11 pm

Nice to see this chair online, even more comfortable in person!!

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Jason’s Dante Chair

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