My wife bought this chair at a garage sale for $15.  After I tightened the screws, all were very loose, it is really a nice rocker. Now the question;

How did they make all those curves so precise? Was it made of multiple laminations and bent around a jig?
 

I don't know, at least not at this point. Do you know how old the rocker is? If you look closely at edges does it look like a bunch of thin strip glued together? Does you camera have a macro setting? Ff so maybe you could take a close up of an edge using plenty of light and post it here on the forum.

Ron, you'll see this over on the other forum but I'll post it here anyway so others will know.

Matt posted this and I trust his knowledge.

The design is from the late Beidermeier period and extended well into the Art Nouveau period. Very popular in Austria and France, and variations have been called 'bistro furniture'.

It's factory made, most often steamed and then put into industrial jigs to cool. Laminations are seriously more labor intense and more of a time sucker. Steaming and a little hand work after the fact was the way to go. Chairs such as this were made by the tens of thousands this way. As with everything like this, all the action is in the bending jigs.

I used Matts reply because he included a little history with his.

steven newman said:

And the Bandit beat him to the answer!

I have a question about building a project using steam bent pieces. If you steam a piece of wood (green not kiln dried ) does this mean all the wood in your project has to be green lumber? I would think you couldn't mix steamed and kiln dried in the same project because as the green steamed wood dried out all the joint between the green wood and the dry wood would loosen way up.

Alaskans for Global Warming

"The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot.. it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better"

Richard, I posted this on both forums, knowing that the Wood forum has a greater following of people and would most likely have the correct answer. I also posted it here so that all could see this fascinating chair. When I got the correct answer, I was going to post it here, along with other comments. You did it for me, but you left out my other comments.