Emeco 1006 Navy Chair: Why It Takes 77 Steps

The Emeco 1006 Navy Chair is not stamped or moulded from a single piece — it is welded by hand from twelve separate pieces of aluminium, then ground, heat-treated and anodised through a 77-step process that Emeco has run largely unchanged since 1944. Built for the US Navy, the chair now sits in restaurants, museums and quiet Australian living rooms, and every one of them was made the same slow way.

A chair built for a warship, not a dining room

Wilton C. Dinges, an engineer running the Electrical Machine and Equipment Company in Hanover, Pennsylvania, took on a 1940s Navy brief that read like a dare: a chair light enough to move around a ship, fireproof, waterproof, non-corrosive in sea air, and strong enough to stay in one piece near a torpedo blast. Working with aluminium experts at Alcoa, Dinges answered with a process for hardening ordinary scrap aluminium far beyond what the raw metal could do on its own. To prove it to sceptical Navy officials, he is said to have thrown a prototype from a hotel window during evaluations in Chicago — accounts differ on which floor, but agree it bounced on the pavement without bending or breaking. The Navy placed its order, and Emeco went on to ship hundreds of thousands of the chair — then simply called the 1006 — to battleships, aircraft carriers and submarines.

The 77 steps, in order

Eighty years on, the build is still done by hand in the same Hanover factory. Sheets of recycled aluminium are cut and formed into the seat; the three vertical back slats are shaped and holes are routed through extruded tube for the frame; every joint is welded rather than cast, then ground back until the chair reads as one continuous form. The frame goes through a hot salt bath and an overnight bake that changes the aluminium's temper — the kind of treatment more often associated with aircraft parts — before the final steps: buffing, and an anodised finish that is not a coating sitting on top of the metal but a conversion of the surface itself into a harder oxide layer. Emeco counts 77 distinct steps end to end, and a single chair takes roughly two weeks to complete.

The detail Emeco leaves unfinished

One deliberate exception to all that finishing: three welds at the back of the chair are left visible and unground, rather than smoothed away like the rest. It reads less like an oversight than a signature — proof, visible to anyone who looks closely, that the chair was welded by a person and not cast in a mould. Gregg Buchbinder, who took the company over from his father Jay Buchbinder in the early 1990s and moved the 1006 out of institutional contracts and into design collections, has put the result plainly: the chair ends up stronger than steel.

Why the guarantee follows the process

The 77 steps are also the reason the 1006 carries a lifetime guarantee rather than the two- or five-year warranty typical of furniture — Emeco is underwriting a process it controls end to end, in one factory, using a temper treatment it has already tested against a wartime brief. That is a different kind of price justification to a designer's name on a swing tag: it is a manufacturing claim that can be checked, step by step, against eighty years of chairs still standing in the buildings that bought them first.

Objena carries the 1006 Navy Chair in hand-brushed aluminium (AUD 1,310), alongside the wider Emeco chapter — the house's other reissues, the 111 Navy Chair made from recycled bottles, and the collaborations with Starck, Morrison and Foster the 77-step process eventually made possible.

Three questions

Why does the Emeco 1006 Navy Chair take 77 steps to make? Because it is hand-welded from twelve separate pieces of aluminium rather than cast or stamped, then ground smooth, heat-treated in a salt bath and anodised — a sequence Emeco has run largely unchanged since 1944, taking around two weeks per chair.

What is the 1006 Navy Chair made from? Recycled aluminium, hand-formed and welded at Emeco's factory in Hanover, Pennsylvania, then anodised so the surface itself becomes a hard oxide layer rather than a painted or powder-coated finish.

How was the chair's durability first proven? Founder Wilton C. Dinges is reported to have thrown a prototype from a hotel window during a Chicago Navy evaluation in the 1940s; it reportedly bounced on the pavement without bending or breaking, and the Navy placed its order soon after.