This commission was different from every other project in our portfolio. The client was not buying a piece of furniture — they were buying precision. The jigs we built would be used thousands of times, and every chair produced with them would carry the quality of our work.

We visited the Lafia workshop before designing anything. Three days observing their production process, measuring their most common chair frame, identifying the three operations that introduced the most variation: seat rail drilling angle, backleg compound angle cut, and stretcher centreline positioning.

The result: three dedicated jigs. Jig 1 — Seat Rail Drill Guide: steel body, two aluminium registration plates, four fixed drill bushings at 8mm and 10mm for the standard rail cross-section. Jig 2 — Backleg Angle Saw Guide: adjustable steel fence on a heavy base, set at 5° compound taper, referenced from the leg face. Jig 3 — Stretcher Positioning Frame: open steel rectangle at standard stretcher span, self-clamping to the leg pair.

All three jigs were built with replaceable wear components — the drill bushings, the fence face plates, and the clamp faces are all standard-dimension replaceable parts available from any engineering supplier.