Eames Fiberglass Armchair  

Hmmm. Good question. I...
Hmmm. Good question. I suppose it's possible as the later plastic and upholstery version of the DCM (the EC127) ridded of the mounts... or I think they were just built in under the plastic

Miller and Vitra did not use...
Miller and Vitra did not use shockmounts for upholstered shells in the 80s (starting 19??). Sometimes people remove upholstery and foam to get a naked shell. You can see the bolts on the upside on these.If You want to know if the chair is real, look for the embossed logo on the bottom.

the chair no doubt is...
the chair no doubt is authentic HM, it has the HM logo...what i want to know is if this was a molested chair, meaning the previous owner badly drilled through the seat just to get rid of dead shockmounts, it depresses me every time i see eames chairs molested this way.

Upholstered?
As stated, if it is/was originally upholstered, chances are this is how the shell was made. If not, then it was drilled after the fact.

This is correct
The chair had the bolts inserted through the shell, then the upholstery was applied. Earlier production upholstered shells had the upholstery hand applied. Later versions used a vacuum injected foam between the upholstery and the shells.
you can see in a photo below from the Eames office. The chairs pictured are from 1975.

We redo over a hundred ...
We redo over a hundred shell chairs a year, some have no shockmounts . The ones with miller fabric from the late 70s have no shockmounts, just drilled holes from the inside.

thanks for all your reply. i...
thanks for all your reply. i thought i already knew enough about the eames pieces until i came upon this chair. I was surprised and a bit disappointed though that eames would allow their chair to be produced this way, knowing they had a breakthrough design with their shockmounts and how they applied that system to all their chairs. this discovery raised one question, does the upholstered fiberglass chairs with shockmounts commands more value than the later produced shockmountless version? I personally dislikes the shockmountless version, because it looked cheaply produced.

Not necessarily...
Once the "formed in place" upholstery method was developed, the upholstered shells with shock mounts also had holes drilled in them (at the factory). Obviously, this is a detractor from the clean appearance as well as a presenting a problem if one wishes to strip such a shell and convert it to a non-upholstered version.

shock mounts
What value do the shock mounts offer on an upholstered chair? The padding hides the fasteners, and any additional flex they'd provide is imperceptible.
The additional holes were added to allow air to escape as the foam compresses. The early wire-on upholstery didn't require them, because the edges were not sealed. I'd agree that these holes were made in a pretty un-Herman Miller way: random in both placement and number.