Chair Repair

I think just about everyone who's been calling themselves a woodworker long enough has been asked to do a chair repair.  And this article proves I'm no exception.  I have seen numerous articles by woodworkers online on this topic.  Usually they concern typical spindle construction chairs which are principally joined with integrated mortise and tenon joints.  With that type of chair, the options are generally to remake any parts that are damaged beyond repair and re-glue the existing joints.

This set of chairs, however, is completely different. 

 

My sister picked these bar stool type chairs up at an antique store, and wanted to sand and paint them.  She originally presented the job to me as a modification: the chairs were too tall and she wanted the legs cut down so the chairs were shorter.  After she dropped them off at my house, though, it became obvious that one of the two was structurally unsound (it's the one in front in the above picture).  

My first clue was the plethora of fasteners in the chair.

 

Most of the fasteners looked to have been attempts to repair loose joints.

 

 You can also see a bad crack here in the rearmost seat board, as well as more fasteners.

Here I've removed the damaged seat board.  You can see fasteners that I failed to remove first because they were driven in below the wood surface and filled over.

And here is the back frame of the chair after detaching it from the rest of the chair.  You can see some definite damage from fastener removal.  At this point, I had to think a bit about what kind of repair strategy I was going to use here.  Obviously fasteners wouldn't hold up - the state of the chair as brought to me proved that much.  This joint was originally just a butt joint glued and screwed together, as near as I could tell.  Again - that didn't hold up the first time.  I considered just remaking many parts of the chair with integrated joinery.  It is mainly constructed of spruce two by material, so it would be easy enough to do.  But I really wanted to try to save the original material, so I decided to use loose tenons.

The first step in the process was to layout the area for the mortise.

Then I drilled it out at the drill press with a 3/8" bit and cleaned it up with a chisel.  Here's the finished mortises on the chair back frame.

Then I made the tenon.  It's just a piece of scrap spruce I had on hand, cut down to 3/8" wide and then hand planed round on the edges to match the round ends of the mortise left by the drill bit.

 A corresponding mortise is made on the horizontal stretcher, the other half of this joint, and then the loose tenon is fitted and glued into place.

Then once both are installed in the stretchers, the back of the chair is glued in place with the tenons running all the way through and clamped up to dry.

I made a replacement for the cracked rearmost seat board out of some spruce 2x6 I had on hand, and put a roundover on it at the router table to match the existing boards as best as I could.

I attached this seat board with dowel joints.  Here you can see the holes in the seat board.

...and the matching ones in the frame.

I assembled this joint with polyurethane construction adhesive.  I like this stuff for repairs - it sticks to almost anything.

For good measure, I also doweled into the rear of this seat board through the back frame of the chair - mainly because the old setup had a fastener tying the two together.  I'm not sure it really adds any strength, but I figured it couldn't hurt.

Next I removed the spindles.

These I reattached with more construction adhesive and pocket hole screws.

I turned my attention to the front of the chair.  Here the two legs are attached to stretchers which attach to the back frame, as well as an apron that ties the two front legs together.  I removed the front apron first.  The joints between the apron and the front legs was still surprisingly strong.

It had been repaired once, though, with an amazingly deep countersunk screw.

I originally thought I might not have to make a lot of repairs to the front of the chair, but after I removed the apron I discovered that the joints between the front legs and the side stretchers had utterly failed.  More loose tenons were in order!  First I made the mortises - this time with a hand drill because these parts were just too big to get under my drill press.

Then I cleaned up the mortises just like before with a chisel.  I used the same sized tenons, and I had made extra, so I got these assembled in no time.  You can see the glue running down - this is no time to be economical with your wood glue.

I put some plugs in the pocket holes on the spindles.

Since the joint between the front apron and the front legs had held up relatively well before, I decided it wasn't a high stress joint and repaired it with glue and pocket hole screws.

With all the joinery repaired, all that remained was to remove the bottom frame and cut the legs down to reach the desired chair height.

I reattached the bottom frame with dowels.  This isn't the strongest joint, but then this frame doesn't bear a lot of stress.

  

Here is the finished product.

Given the condition of the chair that I repaired so heavily, I did consider just rebuilding it from scratch.  It's easy to ask, "why repair a chair like this?"  After all, it was not made out of high value materials, and it didn't have any personal family history or anything.  So why repair it?  These days, everything is disposable and anyone who once made a living repairing consumer goods is long since out of a job.  For me, repairing an item like this is a way of valuing the work that went into building it in the first place.  It preserves the history of the item, even if I don't know what that history is.  Plus, it's fun and rewarding on a purely woodworking level.  Now get out there and repair something in your shop!

 

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Backyard Shed Complete!

The shed is finally complete!  All total, I worked on this on and off for about 3 months, and I am happy with the results:

This post is going to be more about showing what all I have done than about how I did it.  Some of this worright gone on for a long time and I have not documented it well along the way.

We'll start with the doors and latches, which were actually the last thing I did.  The doors are what's commonly referred to around here as "Dutch doors."  This means that each door is composed of a top and bottom piece that can open independently.  So for each opening, there are two Dutch doors, or 4 total door frame sections.  Here's the left set:

 

And the right:

The door pull and latch system is something I came up with and made at the forge.  The left door has a fixed pull, and the right side pull is attached to a rod that acts as a bolt latch between the two doors.

Here is a picture of the back.  You can see the rod coming through the slot in the door, and passing through a piece of square tubing mounted to the door.

Then there is a matching piece of square tubing on the other door that this rod slides into when you close the latch.  You can also see the fixed pull coming through the door in this picture.

The sheet metal exterior of the top doors overlaps the bottom doors, and the sheet metal of the right doors overlaps the left doors.  This causes the bolt to lock both left doors in place, as well as the bottom of the right door, which it is mounted to.  But this arrangement leaves the right top door unlatched.  So I made this little rod to lock the top right door to the bottom right door when they are all closed.

I made all the door frames from welded 1 inch square tubing.  I also made the hinges at the forge from 1/8" sheet steel.  Here are a couple of the hinges that have been made but not yet painted so you can see how they go together: 

 

This is the pattern I cut the steel into before rolling the eyes or barrels at the forge.

Here is a picture of some of the door frames in-progress.

And here is my forge set up inside the shed.

  

 

This was a long project, but the results are worth it.  I've really enjoyed having the new shed.  Unfortunately it's already full.  It seems that no matter how much storage space one has, one will need more.

 

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Backyard Shed: Part 3

Having completed the build of my shed in part 2, I was eager to start getting some stuff out of the garage and into the shed to free up some space.  I started with my yard tools, specifically, my shovels, hoes, rakes, and forks.

I began by selecting a group of tools and laying them out so that they would fit along one of the short walls.  I laid them across a 2x4, and marked where the handles of the tools intersected the board.

I cut a rabbet into this board, and it became the top of an L shaped assembly which I would hang the tools from.

I cut rough notches into the top board with the bandsaw to match where the tool handles would sit, and then glued and screwed it to the bottom board.

I hung this rack in the shed, and set my tools in place. 

I found that the rack had to be set low enough for the large shovel heads, which caused the hoes to sit too low and hang below the exterior sheeting of the building.

To remedy this, I threw together a quick little frame to raise the hoes up.  It's all constructed of scrap 2x4s and held together with pocket hole screws.

This first rack took care of hanging my shovels, hoes, and forks, but I needed a couple of other hangers for my rakes.  I left them off of the first rack because their large heads would have taken up a lot of the space.  I made these hangers by cutting another notch into a board, and then gluing and screwing it to a piece of 2x4.

 Here you can see I let the large rake heads overlap a bit to save space.

I also made a mount of the same design as the rakes to hold my pickaxe.

I forged a piece of 1/2" rebar into a hanger for my sledgehammer.

I made this little tool holder for this wooden tamper I use in the garden.

Sorry for the extremely long hiatus I took between this post and the last.  I hope any formerly regular readers I had are still hanging in there.  Look for the last installment in the shed series coming very soon!