Labeling parts

 I'm in the middle of restoring 110 chairs for a chapel in Boston.  I need to disassemble each of the chairs while keeping track of all the parts.  So what is my method to the madness of parts laying around the shoppe?  Well its pretty simple actually, I use blue tape and a sharpie and label every part. It is very important that each of the markings can easily be seen and each chair has its unique labeling system. By unique labeling system I mean not every chair will start with the letter A or number 1. Some chairs depending on quantity of parts may start with the letter Z and work back to the letter A or start at number 99 and work back to number 1. Some chairs may even have a combination of numbers and letters. When things start to get crazy than I switch color tape from blue to green to purple.  

 In the end it doesn't matter what you label the parts just as long as they go back exactly where they came from.  One important thing to remember is don't use masking tape or duct tape. The adhesives on these two tapes are often to strong and will remove the finish or just leave terrible tape residue which now needs to be removed.

As you can see there is no way I can screw this up and that is the point of labeling.  I hope this helps.