Rescue Mission Part Four
I've been fixing a table and chair for a friend. The table was back together and standing on all four feet again, but I had the chair to work on yet.
Chairs are an intimidating thing to me. I've built one, just one in the past, and though it saw light use, the friend who took it off me in a trade a half dozen years ago has recently told me that some of my questionable joint making has failed.
In my defense, I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started that chair, and I made some very naive decisions. Things I know better now. I'm not surprised it failed.
So chairs and I kind of have this spotty history together and I've resolved that I need to take a good class in them to get over my avoidance issues when it comes to them. But here was a chair I needed to have a good go at fixing.
It was dowel city for the joinery. Many of them broke or wiggled free in the trauma.
Originally I had pulled it apart into three pieces by stressing the joints by hand. A little while later, as I was cleaning things up, one more joint loosened. I had four joints to dowel and glue.
I sawed things even where they stuck out and plugged what was pulled out. Then I redrilled new dowel holes and redid the joinery as it had been in the past.
I glued the front together first and then connected everything else together once the front had dried. In the excitement of it all I forgot to take any pictures until I took the clamps off.
I am less confident about these repairs than I am of the repairs to the table, the cross corner blocks help quell my anxiety.
In the end I would much rather build from scratch, but these occasional repair jobs are good because they push me out of my comfort zone and make me do some different kind of problem solving. The table and chairs have been delivered and the owner was tickled to see her Grandma's table come back to life, especially since she thought it was a goner.
If you missed the repairs, or want to review the whole process, all the posts about this project have been collected at this LINK.
Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf
Chairs are an intimidating thing to me. I've built one, just one in the past, and though it saw light use, the friend who took it off me in a trade a half dozen years ago has recently told me that some of my questionable joint making has failed.
In my defense, I really had no idea what I was getting into when I started that chair, and I made some very naive decisions. Things I know better now. I'm not surprised it failed.
So chairs and I kind of have this spotty history together and I've resolved that I need to take a good class in them to get over my avoidance issues when it comes to them. But here was a chair I needed to have a good go at fixing.
It was dowel city for the joinery. Many of them broke or wiggled free in the trauma.
Originally I had pulled it apart into three pieces by stressing the joints by hand. A little while later, as I was cleaning things up, one more joint loosened. I had four joints to dowel and glue.
I sawed things even where they stuck out and plugged what was pulled out. Then I redrilled new dowel holes and redid the joinery as it had been in the past.
I glued the front together first and then connected everything else together once the front had dried. In the excitement of it all I forgot to take any pictures until I took the clamps off.
I am less confident about these repairs than I am of the repairs to the table, the cross corner blocks help quell my anxiety.
In the end I would much rather build from scratch, but these occasional repair jobs are good because they push me out of my comfort zone and make me do some different kind of problem solving. The table and chairs have been delivered and the owner was tickled to see her Grandma's table come back to life, especially since she thought it was a goner.
If you missed the repairs, or want to review the whole process, all the posts about this project have been collected at this LINK.
Ratione et Passionis
Oldwolf
Grandma's smiling too!
ReplyDeleteVery nice.
Toby