xi's moments
Home | Society

Creating furniture for a modern era

By Liu Hui | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2018-06-19 10:00

Liu introduces the wooden chair he designed for leaders at the 2014 APEC in Beijing. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

What interests Liu most are the creations of mortise-and-tenon joints for family furniture. "They are used for projects, like table and chairs, which have frame construction among the strongest joints in woodworking," said Liu.

They come in several types - blind, through, angled, wedged and many others – but they consist of the same basic parts of a mortise (a recess cut into a piece of wood that accepts a tenon) and a tenon (a tongue at the end of a board that fits into a mortise), said Liu.

Unlike other carpenters, Liu tried to make his work more applicable to modern life. Citing an example about the heavy wooden chairs he designed for the leaders that attended the 2014 APEC in Beijing, Liu managed to install wheels to make them movable. Instead of using omni-directional wheels for uncontrolled rolling, Liu adopted the fixed casters for each chair which could also be easily hidden.

A staff member of Long Shun Cheng factory draws line for measurement. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]

"Master Liu came to the factory everyday and helped train us shoulder to shoulder," Zhang Bingce, who served his apprenticeship as a toolmaker, told China Daily website.

These years, Liu focuses more on training the talented. He told the website that they just formed a system fostering the inheritor. "We pick up 30 trainees and train them for several month and choose some of the best for further learning," Liu said.

In addition, the factory tries to cultivate 50 technical carders to support the successor. More competition to hone their techniques will be held across China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, where there's an increasing demand for traditional Chinese wooden furniture, he added.

|<< Previous 1 2   
Global Edition
BACK TO THE TOP
Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

Registration Number: 130349