P ortland—The chairs made here at the Frederick Duckloe & Bros., Inc. factory are found in homes and businesses all over the country—even on the Broadway stage.

The family-run company n this small Northampton County borough did all the set furniture for the Broadway and road company productions of the musical "1776," which told how our founding fathers drew their Windsor chairs into a circle and create a nation.

In fact, the 230-year-old Windsor chair pattern is older than the Duckloe firm, which traces its roots to the first Frederick Duckloe's carriage shop in Jenkintown, a Philadelphia suburb, in 1859.

Today, the Duckloe showroom on Main Street in Portland sells a variety of home furnishing. But the nearby factory makes only chairs, rockers, settees, bar stools and occasionally high chairs.

The 15 workers in the factory—who work standing up—make an average of 70 to 80 chairs each week, mostly by hand, according to Frederick Duckloe Jr., who holds the title of company treasurer but said no one at Duckloe pays much attention to titles. Indeed, in the factory most of the workers do several jobs, and flexibility seems to be the reason may employees have been with he firm ten years or more.

Duckloe makes 60 varieties of chairs, many reproduced from antiques, including one done in 1981 for the Smithsonian Museum and sold through its mail-order catalog.

"They are so pleased, we're going to copy another one for them," Donald Shook, the unofficial shop foreman, said in between putting the lets on a combback Windsor chair.

Frederick Duckloe Sr., company president and the man who brought the firm to Portland in 1939, will be traveling to Washington, D.C. soon to pick a chair from the Smithsonian's private collection. Most of the patterns the firm uses are at least 75 years old, he said, though there are some new design. Sales and advertising have been nationwide since about 1979, and business has been increasing steadily, Duckloe said.

Nonetheless, the emphasis is on craftsmanship. The chairs are put together using glue and wedges—no nails—the tapered legs "double wedged" into their sockets in such a way that they will never pull out or split.

A Duckloe chair starts as a pile of parts in the firm's combined factory and warehouse. The factory is constantly making and stockpiling chair parts. Frederick Jr. explains, and assembling chairs from the parts on hand.

That allows for long runs, which means lower costs and less time wasted in setting up and changing the machine to make various chair models. But just how much has been saved—and even how long it takes to make a chair—is uncertain. As the younger Duckloe explains, the firm has never had a cost analysis. This is a very relaxed type of success.

The firm buys steam-bent ash for the chair backs and "blanks," or flat squares of wood, for the seats. The legs and spindles are make on the premises from dowels fed through a back knife machine that meticulously sears the wood into the proper shape and pattern for each style of chair.

The back-knife machine—at two years old the newest piece of equipment in the Duckloe factory—can cut 1,200 spindles per day and has doubled the daily output of spindles, Duckloe said. I also cuts the legs, stretchers for between the legs and the armposts for chairs and settees.

An 80 year-old machine scoops the distinctive seat pattern for each chair, giving the wooden Windsor the comfortable contours of an upholstered chair.

"We have a new one (seat scooper), but it doesn't work too well," Duckloe said, motioning to a cloth-draped, sawdust-covered machine in a nearby corner.

Another machine drills the tapered holes for the legs and back spindles—each hole is at a slightly different angle, to allow the legs to support the seat properly and the back spindles to fan gracefully.

Assembling a chair takes on to two hours, foreman Shook said. Then, it's on to the finishing room, where the white wood chair is sprayed with stain, rubbed down smooth with steel wool, lacquered twice and then waxed. The finishing operation takes three to four days per chair, finisher Andy Neiley explained, because the chair must dry between coats.

The finished products range in price from $155 for a Moravian side chair to $495 for a Thomas Jefferson writing arm chair with drawer.

Most of Duckloe's sales involve a few chairs at a time to customers locally or through catalogs. but this year, two contract have kept the firm occupies for several months: a bank in New York City ordered 500 chairs and a restaurant in Boston ordered 350. Duckloe also recently did chairs for an Allentown restaurant and has furnished the homes of numerous corporate executives, including some from Bethlehem Steel Corp. and Mack Trucks Inc., Frederick Sr. said.