For the past 30 years, Band International has manufactured elegant, stackable wooden wedding and banqueting chairs using the traditional bentwood method but in a modern facility, taking advantage of manufacturing techniques.
Named after race courses, Band’s chairs are made of beech from sustainably managed European forests. This hardwood lends itself to the bending process, in which this close grained wood is steamed and bent into shape, then allowed to dry out, at which point it maintains its new shape. Whilst the time-honoured manufacturing process is highly labour intensive, many of the parts are now made by machine using high frequency equipment, CNC routers etc. This ensures that the bending of each component is exactly the same each time. Not only does this give a consistent and attractive product but it is essential for the stackability of Band’s chairs, which requires consistency of the leg profile if stacks are to be stable.
The traditional method of constructing the chair seat from a single piece of beech wood means the seat surround will be continuous and will have only one join. This is much stronger than cheaper imitations in which the seat is constructed from four separate pieces of wood. Using multiple components is quicker and easier but the result lacks the resilience of the traditional method.
In the bentwood process the green wood is bent using steam. The best modern manufacturing practices now use high frequency energy combined with steam, which ensures that the bending of each component is exactly the same as that for every other component of the same type. The excellent stacking quality of Band International banqueting chairs results from a combination of design and high quality, consistent manufacturing.
The bentwood construction is most obvious around the seat support, but the legs are also curved. This not only gives them an elegance unique to this type of seating, it also is crucial to their ability to stack well. Again, quality of manufacture is vital in the chair leg as well as the seat support, if stacks of chairs are to be stable and fit tight in their stack during transport.
Any event promoter or venue manager will know how expensive frequent repair and re-lacquering is when chairs suffer slight scuffing and abrasion as is inevitable. As always, a good quality lacquer or varnish is worth it in the long run, not only do chairs look better but also last longer without any remedial work needed on them.
All Band International bentwood chairs are manufactured to ISO 9000.