Originally Posted by
burraboy
The seats on these spindle backs were usually 'pressed cane' like in Springwaters example. A groove is routed into the seat and the pre-woven cane is pressed in when it is wet and is glued and held with a rattan 'plug' as you can see in the pic. All these seats are notoriously shortlived, especially the hand woven ones. The thickness of the seat is another factor which will lead to its early demise. Hand woven bentwood chairs have at least 1" of seat thickness and a round shape which gives extra strength. I suspect you only have about a 3/4" seat thickness to work with and straight lines which will be very fragile, even with offset holes.
The best solution I have found for these seats is to use a leather insert in a shallow rebate along the inside edge of the seat. The leather can be hand tooled into some interesting designs. Either that or use solid seats, they can be shaped nicely too.