Bad Furniture Repair and How to Fix It - Woodworking

In our furniture repair shop I often get broken chairs. This chair has a broken leg and unfortunately someone has tried to fix it before. I thought I'd show this chair to you because of how poorly it was repaired. You're going to see how not to repair a chair and I'm going to take this apart, assess what the problem is, put it back together and make this a rock-solid chair. I'm going to show you how As a furniture repair business we're opening up the doors to our workshop to show you the tools and techniques to repair furniture. What I need to do is take that apart repair it and put it back together so I can get this chair in working order We give you tips to make your repair projects easier Let's get into the workshop and start fixing furniture I'll lay some padding down to protect the chair and then turn it upside down so I can take the seat off Once it take all the four screws out this should just lift off. It does on these three corners but here where it was repaired someone's glued the leg right to the seat so I have to take out a putty knife and separate these parts It's starting to come aprart There we go I stand in this chair back up Wow look at all that glue This is a construction adhesive, a polyurethane glue so it's going to take some work to get that off and look how big this split is I can get my whole pencil lead inside that that's a pretty bad repair I see a brad nail here but there's no glue inside that so this should come back together pretty well This glue isn't releasing yet and I see there's a screw coming through here I'm not sure how deep it goes so I'll take that out and see if that helps There are some Brad nails in the chair stretcher so I need to pull those out before the joint will come apart and if you haven't seen our video on how to remove brad nails and finishing nails I encourage you to look at it there are a few techniques that'll make this easier for you it's pretty challenging to remove nails when you can't get to the head I've got some good play in that leg now I should be able to cut that glue right on that joint and separate the leg If you're not familiar with spreader clamps they're quick grips that allow you to reverse They clip on like that and now they go from a clamp to a spreader I'll just put one in here another one over here Let's see how this comes apart There we go there's your bread nails through here and you can see brad nails sticking out here through this tenon So it's pretty messed up But I've got lots of glue surface here and here I'll put some glue on that tenon and it should come back together if I can clean this up properly That's a lot of construction adhesive To pull out brad nails like this you're best not to push them back through where they came from because you might end up splitting the surface there What's best to do is pull them through Sometimes they come through and sometimes they don't let's just see what happens here so that one doesn't want to come off what I'll do is just trim that close and then fill in the recess in the front As you can see a Dremel with a cut-off wheel really makes quick work of cutting off brad nails They're really good for screws as well I recommend getting one of these you can usually pick them up for under $50 and we've linked one in the Amazon store if you click on the description below you get into our power tools section. You'll find it there It's at this stage in the furniture repair project where I take a look at why did the piece break to see if I can overcome that challenge and make it stronger Now in this chair this is a modern style chair and you can see there's no stretcher here and what that means is there's very little holding these two chair legs from coming apart most chairs have a stretcher further up here I can't fix that because that's the style of the chair this is common in modern style chairs these are more popular in the 80s and 90s and you might find the odd one today being produced this way but they're typically chairs that have problems I've repaired a number of them Now with not being able to fix that when I look at a little bit closer there's also a screw that comes in the back here and the length of the screw only goes as far as the existing piece that's holding on there and not through here so I can take a screw that's longer and get it into the meat of the leg that will help The other problem with this chair is the grain The grain pattern is on an angle like this here and as we move up the leg it moves here and then moves here so the the grain isn't giving the optimum strength that should be all up and down so when the mortises were cut in here and with these angles it was really compromising the strength of that piece of wood so I'm going to glue this all back together and I can't fix that grain pattern but I think the addition of the screw right through the meat of that leg should help now normally I don't recommend putting screws into legs because the metal and the wood compete with each other and the metal will wear out the wood but the way this chair is constructed this really is the only solution to help add strength to the glue that I'm going to be putting in there Look at this. This is the construction adhesive no wonder this chair repair failed here we've got some nice clean surfaces that glue could be applied to we've got joinery that glue could be applied to but the person just put construction adhesive at the top here no wonder this chair broke What I'm going to be doing is putting wood glue on these surfaces here I'm putting epoxy in here where I've got voids and if you wonder why I'm using two different glues I actually use five or six different glues in my woodshop it's important to understand the strengths and benefits of each I've got a separate video on that I'll leave it in the description below so let me get this cleaned up and we'll put it together I'll clean out this glue with a very sharp utility knife just a fresh blade so I can slice of that glue and try and preserve as much wood as possible and then what I'll do is come back with a scraper and finish off cleaning it out I've now got the glue cleaned off all the parts and before I glue this together I want to make sure it's fitting properly and especially when you've got pieces broken off like this sometimes they don't fit well and I don't want to be doing that well I've got glue on because ideally you've only got about 15 minutes with some glues I'll put this in here okay so it's looking pretty good at the front here but at the top here it's not quite level and what's happening is the wood fibers where they're broken off of the side here should be doing this they should be integrating and some of them are doing this they're touching and in some cases that might be starting to bend so I have to clear out some of those in there get them straightened out so I get this perfectly level and it's in the exact position that it should be Here's an example of one of those the wood fibers you see how it's folded over here so that one just broke off but there's a number of these that I have to either unfold or cut off to get that joint to come together well I'll do this on both sides and then test it again I've got the leg clamped in place and I'm replacing this two and a quarter inch screw with a three inch screw and you can see here that that three inch screw will bite into that broken off portion of the leg the first step is to drill a pilot hole so it helps but would want to put this the second step is to drill a clearance hole through all the parts except for that broken off piece this makes sure that when I screw it together I'm not causing some friction between the parts then I get a joint as tight as possible then it's just a matter of putting in the screw and driving home With the clamps off I can feel this is nice and sturdy I can also see here I've got a nice tight seam at the front so I can use wood glue here but further back here it's not as tight I've got a nice good seam here so I'm going to have to use epoxy in this back half and in that core Here's a good example of glue squeeze-out I know I've loaded up the joint I've wiped this off once and it's still seeping it a little bit that's just telling me that joint settling in and the clamps got the right pressure The glue on this chair leg is now dry so I can take the clamps off I've got a question for you I've answered a few questions from Australia and Russia recently and I'm curious about where our viewers are from so if you can put a comment in the section below of what country you're from and if you're really tech savvy a little flag that'd be great to see I've also got a question for you about the YouTube channels that you watch from around the world I'm not that familiar with other YouTube channels that work on furniture repairs so if you can post a name or two of channels you enjoy watching I'd appreciate that Let's take a look at this leg now we've got a nice tight joint here it's got a bit of glue needs to be cleaned up and put a bit of stain on that and then in here there's a bit of a gap I turned this around you can see here so we need some filler there there's a Brad now who will here need some filler and it'll turn this around and you can see here I've got a nice tight joint here here and there's a bit of a gap underneath here as well that needs some filler and then this piece as well I've got a number of different filters that I use the particular one I'm going to use today is a putty stick if you're curious about different fillers let me know I can make a video on that and I still haven't got the knobs on my tool cabinet here a little bit more work to do so this one I think it's going to give me a good match I can touch it up after as well and it's just a matter of rubbing it onto the void back and forth and working it into that spot Then what I do is take a rag and just buff off what's there It seems like there's a bit of glue or something here maybe that was the tape from the previous repair yeah there's some glue dry glue there As I was filming this last scene the lens just popped out of my glasses now we're in the middle of a pandemic and all non-essential businesses are closed due to state of emergency so I can't get these fixed I'm gonna have to tape them up for now to finish off this video and see if there's a way I can fix them I can't complain though there are a lot of people that are having a hard time right now my family is safe and sound at home and they're all healthy and I hope yours are too so bear with me I'll tape this up and we'll get back to the repair Where I've got this larger void on the underside here just rubbing that crayon there won't get it in as well as it should be so I've got another technique I use with a candle What I do is I heat up the wax stick with a candle and what that does is it softens it so that's much easier to apply to the surface Here you can see it saves a lot of elbow grease let me do it again I'm heating up stick and then rubbing it in It hardens pretty quickly With the wax cooled I just come back and clean it up with a putty knife and then I can rub it down with a cloth and we're good to go This large filled area is underneath the chair and you're like you're not going to see it but I want to make it as invisible as possible so I'm going to pull up the touch-up markers and touch it up touch up the other areas and we'll take a look at the finished chair I can now put the seat on we'll take a look at what it looks like Yep, that's pretty good I've got the touch-up marker my hands still so I'm just gonna touch up these two spots here this is where the chairs come in contact with the table when they get pushed in sometimes you get bruising on furniture so that'll just make it less visible for the customer I hope you've enjoyed this video on how to make a bad furniture repair a good furniture repair and if you haven't subscribed yet click over here and click on the bell icon and you'll get notified every time we make a video thanks for watching Fixing Furniture

Channel: Fixing Furniture

Views: 495,931

Rating: 4.8611226 out of 5

Keywords: furniture repair, woodworking, bad repair, bad furniture repair, furniture restoration, broken furniture

Id: wRk27aEkmyE

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

As I turn 38 and watch more and more artisan videos, I start to understand my dad who would watch home repairs shown on tv back when I was a kid... It's so soothing.

(he was watching stuff like Bob Villa and this old house. Not the new kind of tv reality.)

[u/cerebud]

I like how he stopped to fix his glasses.

[u/Zugzub]

Nice, fixing furniture is a pain in the butt.

He is so right about how the grain is orientated. The last set of chairs we bought I went through about 20 chairs picking out the ones I wanted.

[u/apachexmd]

I saw no ramen or super glue. Kinda disappointed.

[u/rufiolegacy]

I enjoyed that, thanks.

[u/greenthumbwitch]

I like watching artisan videos because I haven't chosen a career yet. Seeing experts display the process, it's easier to tell what I might be good at/enjoy. This looks right up my alley, i'm an artist and I love fixing things, saving things, altering, and making-over items.

If anyone knows about this sort of career, hit me up. I'd love to learn more.

[u/RealFunction]

this guy reminds me of someone, i can't quite place it.

[u/Badagaboosh]

That riff is so infuriatingly familiar... what is it from?

[u/Soulmate69]

seems a little like Joe Pera