Some Details about the Materials & Construction of this Furniture, and How it's Assembled

Please keep in mind that this page deals only with construction details of our furniture. To go to our home page (if you haven't already been there) for pictures and features of our full product line, click here.

If you receive delivery via our vehicle (normally only in the Northern North Carolina-to-southern and eastern Pennsylvania-to-north suburban New York corridor in the eastern U.S.), the delivery person would bring it in and assemble it. If your furniture arrives via common carrier (we ship almost anywhere, at moderate cost), what you do is shown by the arrows below, which normally doesn't even require a tool (the bolts can be turned by hand). In just a few minutes, the furniture can be together well enough to withstand decades of heavy use, yet it can be easily disassembled and re-assembled for moving, at any time.

The construction shown below applies to all models except for the FineFit model.

Every frame has been pre-assembled and carefully checked, together with the cushions, before shipping or delivery.

Steel tee-nuts are already firmly embedded in solid oak parts. These parts have been securely screwed (with high-quality steel zinc-plated screws) and glued (with aliphatic resin glue) to solid oak side members. Solid hardwood end blocks and support ledges (normally solid oak, but sometimes cherry or walnut) are already screwed and glued to solid oak front rails and to solid oak back frames (or to 3/4" hardwood plywood, if you choose the all-wood back). The eye bolts and the front rail dowels are 1/4"-diameter steel.

You won't find frame components made of particleboard or assembled with staples, such as is typical in the mass-production of most furniture. Construction like that has become the norm in American furniture stores these days, even for higher-priced lines; for more on this, click on the first link at the bottom of this page. There are good reasons why we are happy to show the construction of our furniture, and why other manufacturers don't do so.

For more details and pictures showing what's below the cushions, scroll to the bottom of this page.

For more details on assembling a frame, click here.

The corner unit of one our sectional sofas

Each side section will be bolted to this corner unit, with the same eye bolts as shown above. When a sectional arrives, this corner unit is the bulkiest component (33" x 33" x 24 1/2"); everything else is flat pieces or cushions. However, if the entrance is too small for this to be carried in whole, even this unit can be easily disassembled into two smaller (L-shaped) sections, by unscrewing six philips-head screws, and then re-assembled once inside the destination room.

Extra-Strong, Super-Durable Cushion Support:
The standard surfaces that the seat cushions rest on are made of plywood, resting on heavy oak supports, with firm padding over most of the seat deck and then a covering of heavy upholstery fabric (see more specifics near the bottom of this page). Together with our standard (medium-firm, high-quality) cushioning, this provides non-saggy support that most of our customers find to be quite comfortable, without a feeling of hitting bottom; and it's a pleasant contrast with the too-soft support characteristic of most furniture in normal stores. Also, it will never sag and become too soft or cave in, as is typical with springs. For those who want medium-soft support, we also offer a heavy-duty webbing suspension. (For more information about the webbing suspension, scroll to the bottom of the page linked to here.)

Also, the fact that our standard (firm) seat support has almost no sag to it means that there isn't the up-and-down flexing that's typical with sofa seats; that kind of flexing is what causes normal seat cushions to inch forward a little with each sitting. Even our optional webbing suspension has less flexing to it than most suspensions. In both cases, there is coarse, slightly-rough fabric below the seat cushions to resist slipping. We have not heard of any problems of cushions' slipping with our (standard) wood seat decks or with the webbing suspensions that we have used since the late 1970's.

l000 pounds of weight on an individual seat, plus another test of indestructibility
25 forty-pound bags of topsoil, carefully stacked on top of a Virginia model sofa suspension as shown, caused only minor sag after 24 hours. The weights were then shifted onto a California model frame. The bags rested there for 26 days. There was still no damage to the frame and less than 1/2” of sag. Our other models, except the FineFit model, have this same identical support.

Our “Teenager landing on it” test (shown above right) was performed by a 190-pound male, giving a beating to both a California model sofa frame and a Virginia sofa frame. These tests each included 35 backward lunges onto the sofa seat while carrying a 40-pound bag, and 50 lunges without it. They had no detectable effect on either frame.

Subsequent prudent economizing based on the above tests: Since very few of our customers will be subjecting our furniture to such stress, we have reduced the amount of the valuable oak wood used in the bottom support slats by about 15% since the above tests. For those who anticipate extra-heavy loads on their furniture, additional support can be ordered.

As impressive as the above test results are, we've heard of one kind of exposure that can overly strain even these frames: A heavy, autistic person with the "rocking" syndrome can eventually fracture the connection at the top of the back. If your furniture could be subject to that kind of treatment, please request extra reinforcement for that location.

28 years later
Shown at right: A sofa we sold in 1980, in a picture kindly taken in 2008 and sent to us by a Massachusetts customer after she purchased replacement seat cushions. (Note: It's unusual to be able to find fabric many years later that matches your original covers.)

High-Quality Cushion Filling:
Our standard seat and back cushions are filled entirely with high-quality polyurethane foam, shaped to give it the gently rounded contours you see in our pictures.. We don't use cotton batting, which for some people is allergenic, anywhere.. We don't use typical polyester batting (which is very widely used in mass-market furniture) except on arm pillows or on the sides of our fully-upholstered model's frames, since it doesn't hold up under long-term weight of sitting nearly as well as high-quality polyurethane foam; the only polyester batting we use on any of our cushions is for our softer cushion option, and on those we use a very special, luxurious, unusually durable kind.

To understand about foam quality, one needs to know about its density. Density of foam relates directly to durability, since it refers to the amount of supporting, strength-giving material, as opposed to air pockets, that makes up the cushion filling. Our seat foam is at least 2.25 pounds per cubic foot in density, compared with the 1 to 1.5 lb. density used in typical mass-market furniture. However, this high density does not at all mean that the cushions are uncomfortably firm. Density is not the same as flexibility, which determines softness.

Comfort results from the way the foam compresses when sat on. This in turn is affected by flexibility of the foam (determined by its chemical makeup) and also by the density mentioned above. Inexpensive, low-density foam gets its support from a less flexible material composition. What keeps you from hitting bottom with cheaper foam is stiffness, which is not only less comfortable but also less durable than support provided by greater density.

Higher-density foam can be more flexible, since it gets its basic support much more from compaction of material rather than from stiffness of the foam. The additional solid material within the foam resists more and more the farther it is compressed, preventing you from hitting bottom. The greater flexibility permitted by greater density gives it a softer feel for the first few inches of sinking in, molding nicely to your contours. And this softer feel combined with progressively firmer support explains why the great majority of people find our cushioning very comfortable even when it rests on a padded wood base, avoiding the normal problem of springs' sagging. In simple terms, this foam combined with the underlying firm support just plain feels good to your bottom and back.

So why don't all manufacturers use cushion filling like this? It's more expensive, for buying it, for carefully shaping it (as opposed to the usual quick way of achieving rounding by wrapping soft batting around a block of foam), and for shipping the completed (heavier) product. The furniture industry is extremely price-competitive, and most retail customers don't look past the price and initial appearance and feel of a sofa, so most manufacturers aren't willing to pay for the higher costs of such high-quality filling.

More details on our standard seat supports:

Shown here: On the left side, exposed just for purposes of illustration, layers of firm padding on top of the plywood seat deck, 1/2" thick at the rear and middle (where more weight is borne) tapering down to nothing at the front edge. As the next step, surplus upholstery fabric is used to cover the whole deck (as shown on the right). The dotted lines show where oak supports are attached to the underside of the deck. These supports could number either two or three, but in every case they provide 4 1/2" or more of total width of 13/16"-thick oak, providing extremely strong support (see the test results higher on this page).

This deck merely rests on ledges at the front and back inside of the frame. It is therefore a very quick, easy process to lift it out (along with the backrest panel shown below) if you wish to clean below the cushions all the way to the floor. The same ease of insertion and lifting out applies to our heavy-duty webbing suspension (if you are interested in that as a softer alternative, and haven't read about it already, scroll to the bottom of the page linked to here.)

Shown here: A backrest panel (plywood covered with non-woven black fabric) near the rear of the seat deck, supporting the back cushions at the forward angle that most people find comfortable. Also shown: Glued to the covered seat deck is a rectangle of special, slightly rough fabric which (when the seat cushion is pressed down onto it) strongly resists movement of the seat cushion. If the main fabric covering the seat deck is sufficiently coarse, no separate fabric rectangle is needed (we use various close-out upholstery fabics to cover the seat decks).

If incontinence or spills of drinks could be a concern, we can cover the seat deck and backrest panel with a heavy vinyl fabric in place of porous fabrics. We can also waterproof the surrounding areas.

And, of course, all of that is completely hidden once the cushions are in place.

To return to the page that explains about the general practicality and durability of our furniture, click here.

To return to the page that deals with our various cushion options, click here.

To return to the page about our furniture in use by fraternities and other heavy users, click here.

To go to Comfy 1 home page, click here.