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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