NAVIGATION
Basic Questions | Quality Questions | Ordering & Shipping Questions | Miscellaneous Questions
BASIC QUESTIONS
| Can I order two chairs for my home?
Since we are a manufacturing company, our furniture is custom-made from the ground up – assembled, stained, and upholstered. Therefore in most cases we would normally require a minimum of 20 of any seating to be ordered, excluding booths.
| Can you modify or customize any of our chairs?
We can in most cases; it all depends on your specific request. As a matter of fact, we do it quite often. Many of our designs are the result of customer input.
If you provide us with a sketch or a drawing what you have in mind, we will gladly work out the best way to achieve it.
Please note that we have various options to further customize your furniture, whether it’s adding nails or welts; choosing legs or a base for booths; scuff plate color for barstools, etc.
| Can you do custom finishes?
Beside the standard finishes, Eagle Chair provides an entire range of optional “semi standard” finishes.
If none of these choices fulfill your needs, we do “to match” finishes as well. There may a custom finish we cannot do, but we have not seen it yet.
| What is the wood species that you use for the frames?
For all of wood chair frames (with one exception, where we use oak) our chair frames are made from European Alpine Beech.
That windswept, mountain grown, FSF responsible forestry, LEED class, hard lumber is closely grained, flexible and resilient; probably the best wood species for chairs designed for extremely hard working conditions as well for its inherent beauty of the woodgrain.
Note: American beech is much less dense than its European cousin that we use and the marketing gimmick seen in some knockoffs; Asian Beech is not beech at all, but totally unsuitable Rubberwood.
We are also a unique booth manufacturer that builds both booth and banquette frames from locally grown American oak.
| Would you reupholster my furniture?
We only reupholster our own furniture, for a small fee.
| What is your standard warranty?
We warranty to the original purchaser any product manufactured by us for one year from date of purchase under normal use. Some metal frames, as shown in the price list, are warranted for seven years. No warranty is issued on upholstery materials; they are covered by warranties, if any, by the upholstery mills. This warranty shall be null and void if our product has been repaired or altered by anyone other than the manufacturer. For complete information, go to our Info & Warranty page
QUALITY QUESTIONS
| The issue my customer has with the OXXXXs chairs is when they get knocked over, they’re breaking. And the footrests on the barstools are breaking. They are not even 9 months old. What makes your chair hold up better than theirs? To me they look the same.
Please take a closer look; you will see the difference and you might see why Eagle Chair – made chairs will often last for ten years or more.
We cannot say we have not seen a broken chair in the field, but in our case it happens so infrequently, so rarely, we could name every single instance it has, in the last three years, with the cause of its failure and the way we remedied it.
There are quite a few differences between the way we make our chairs and those made by others, starting from the sources of the wood itself:
- Our wood comes mountain grown, dense grain, FSC certified; theirs is bought as cheap as possible from unknown sources.
- Although both of our sources have the raw lumber kiln dried, ours is also carefully aged and conditioned; their sources have no idea about this process.
- All of our vendors have been making wood chair parts for over a hundred years; theirs have been making wood pizza blades as recently as a couple decades ago.All of our vendors have been making wood chair parts for over a hundred years; theirs have been making wood pizza blades as recently as a couple decades ago.
- All of our critical joints are mortise and tenon locked and reinforced with pocket screws; theirs are usually doweled with added metal brackets that will eventually break.
- We use custom-made screws made to our exact specification; theirs was Chinese made out of some junk steel.
- We know how to make a quality chair – we have been doing it for over forty years; they know how to make a chair, cheap.
- We have an extensive research program, analyzing any field failures for the past forty years – understanding each failure, its causes and the ways to build a better chair; they copy the cheapest way they can.
Combining all of these small, but significant details adds up to a better chair.
| Why choose aluminum?
Perfect for outdoor, even in extreme climatic conditions, such as salty air, high humidity, very high temperatures, light, durable, modern and attractive, aluminum combines it all into a perfect package for outdoor seating.
For practical reasons, aluminum does not corrode, allowing years of return on your initial investment. Being very light, a stack of 4 to 8 aluminum chairs can easily be moved, in or out, by any employee. In the bright sun, aluminum, unlike iron or steel, dissipates heat extremely fast and therefore is never hotter than ambient air, so your customer will not be in danger of getting hurt by touching an overheated arm or seat.
| Why choose Eagle Chair aluminum over competition?
First, we do not have any competition; the quality of our aluminum products are unequaled in the market. Many companies are peddling 1mm wall thickness or 1.2mm aluminum tubing as commercial use product. Some may go as high as 1.5mm.
Actually, 1.8mm should be the minimum thickness of aluminum tubing of any tubular construction furniture considered for commercial/contract use. After all, any failure of seating product can have quite dire consequences in many, many ways.
On most of our aluminum outdoor seating, we offer 2mm: aircraft grade tubing with all welded construction. The welds use aircraft grade, very specialized, and quite expensive welding wire. The thicker tubing requires very high skill and a slower anodizing process that, although adds some expense to the finished product, ultimately end up as a chair that has no equal on the market today.
ORDERING & SHIPPING QUESTIONS
| Where do you ship from?
We ship from our factory in Houston, Texas.
| What is the standard lead time?
Ask your sales representative for an accurate lead time, for every order is different. Lead time starts at the time of deposit. Most standard orders are done within 1-6 weeks. Some items such as outdoor seating and table bases could ship within 2 business days. We also offer special order items that may take 12 weeks.
| Are the frames in inventory?
In order to serve our loyal customers, we keep one of the largest part inventories in the business. It is our way to make sure we can support their needs.
One way to do it is to track the usage and plan on a six month level of supply. Sometimes the demand for specific items changes rapidly, creating an inventory imbalance, but it is quite rare.
| Do you accept credit cards?
We do.
As a manufacturer, we must attribute the 3% surcharge to any credit card payment, and currently allow a maximum of $10,000 credit card payment towards any order. Anything more must be approved by our CFO.
Additionally, if paying via PayPal, we must also add the 3% charge they add post-payment.
We also accept wire transfers and ACH payments, and our most popular option, checks.
MISCELLENOUS QUESTIONS
| Why do I see different sizes cited as standard for booth spacing by different people?
The old standard for booths used to be 5.5′ center to center, 42″ wide, with a 24″ x 42″ table top. Sometime in the 60’s, it expanded to 6′ center to center, 45″ wide, with a 30″ x 45″ table. In the early 80’s the 45″ dimension expanded to 48″ and today we see a lot of 54″ wide booths for two people sitting side by side.
For the last fifteen years as the ergonomics has changed, the size of our usual customers has increased; to maintain the 30″ width of the table and still accommodate ability of the larger customer to fit into available space, a 75″ center to center is advised.
Barring that, if there are only 72″ given, a 28″ wide table top makes the booth space still workable.
| What does ‘Pirelli Type Suspended Seat’ mean?
This is a unique seat suspension system Eagle Chair uses when requested by the client to provide a high level of comfort. It is lifetime warrantied and never wears down like springs do.
| Can you please advise on what table base that can be bolted down, provide 27″ H clearance, and have a clear 30″ wide x 17″ deep minimum clearance under the table for ADA and would support a 48″ W x 30″ D granite table top? We need this for Texas ADA requirements in the restaurant portion of this hotel.
Two floor mounted bases, TP-08, with 8″ spiders instead of standard 14″, mounted 30″ inches, floor flange edge to flange edge, apart, would be a recommended solution and still provide 28″ clearance.
| We purchased some Eagle chairs a couple years ago and the plastic chair tips are wearing out. Should they not last longer than that?
The plastic glides we attach as the standard to all our wood chairs serve two purposes.
One reason is to protect the floor; the constant movement of chairs over the floor surface will wear one or the other, we prefer that to be the easily replaceable and inexpensive chair glide.
The other purpose for the chair glides is no less important, that is to prevent contact between the wood of the chair leg and any possible moisture moisture, or outright water found occasionally on the floor, typically during cleaning cycles. Moisture wicking into the wood will expand the wood’s volume and then when dried again, the wood will contract, the finish coat would separate from the wood substrate.
Do replace glides as needed.
| We had purchased some cheap chairs on our last project and the frames loosened right away, so we are happy about the quality of Eagle Chair. That being said, we have a concrete floor that is stained and has a texture to it to prevent it from being slippery when people walk on it. That texture has worn our standard glides completely off on a lot of chairs and is wearing the nail down. He needs to get his floor redone but he doesn’t want to do that until he gets new glides to prevent floor damage. What kind of glides would you recommend for a concrete floor that has a rough texture? Do we have stainless steel options? A tougher plastic option?
There are several options, besides the standard glides.
One is a metal clad, cushioned glide, WCG-4, which will last significantly longer, but when the metal cladding gets worn through it needs to be exchanged immediately or its metal edges will wear your floor extensively.
The other choice is a floating, Delrin glide, WCG-12, which has an added advantage of being somewhat self adjusting.
Eagle Chair offers an extra wide range of glide choices; some have higher costs than others, but the ultimate decision which one to use is yours.