Repairing a Broken Chair Leg

hi guys it's turning here at john's furniture repair uh today i've got a chair in the shop that's got a broken leg it's a chair from africa and it's made of ebony and mahogany and it's a really interesting chair i'll show it to you guys it's different than anything that you really find in the stores here and it's somebody who brought it over from africa so it's kind of a cute little chair but uh the seat is made of just strapped leather that is just nailed onto the bottom there so it's pretty simple but it's really cool uh the main problem is the leg has broken right off as you see here and the back rung has snapped as well so i'm going to show you guys how we deal with that repair all right let's get to it okay so i've got the leg in the vise here so unfortunately someone has uh smushed my favorite gorilla glue everywhere so i know this is not going to be a great joint but the first thing regardless of what i'm going to be doing for a joint is i need to get this off so what i'm going to do is take a heat gun and just soften up the glue so i can pick it out and get as much of this wood cleaned up around the side it doesn't really matter in the middle because i'm going to be drilling a dowel into the center of this but we do need to get it off the sides here so i'm just going to get my heat gun going and just really carefully work and what you're trying to do when you're using heat instead of force is you're trying to remove the glue with as little damage to the actual original wood as you can so you can kind of see it's just peeling off instead of you know chipping off and i don't have to take any wood with it it actually got it slathered all over the chair here so i'll just kind of rub it off as the heat works [Music] a little drilled for this side so what i'm going to actually end up doing just so i can get my forstner bit started properly is sawing these high middle pieces off right here so i'm going to saw those straight [Music] right there i want to kind of keep that chunk so i'm gonna try to keep my dowel in this area because maybe it will fit back together nicely who knows we'll check that out it'd be nice to have that wood there okay so now that i've got a flat surface here uh i'm going to use a forstner bit knock out the sawdust so there's my hole i'm going to insert my 5 8 dowel in here but before i do that i want to position this on the chair so let's take it over to the chair okay so i've got all the glue out of this side as well and i'm glad that i kept that little bump on this piece because this little bump fits right into this little notch here so really nice placement for me to know where this goes so it's not a great fit but it's exactly where it goes and it kind of tells me where the front of this chair was and everything like that so i could probably try to get a little bit more glue out there but um it's not gonna do much more so what i need to do now is put in my dowel finder here i'm just going to shave this off so i can get a clear mark of where i need to drill so this is the center punch it's just a little um you can find where you need to drill your center of your dowel by just you know drilling one side popping this guy in lining up your other side and giving it a good whack with the hammer on the back so i'll just back you guys up for that basically i'm just going to line this up here and hopefully that i'll be able to see a mark right in here sometimes i've added a little bit of color because i think it's probably going to land right in the middle of that part so i might just add a little bit of color on the tip of this so i can really see where it needs to go kind of paint the tip here with a bunch of color line up that tab in there the best that i can see that it goes and uh give this chair leg a couple of wax just gonna make sure i've got it in there hard to see barely made a transfer but i can see that it's right in this center point there so i'm going to get my 5 8 drill and i'll line it up as best i can with that little green marker and just pretty hand drill again try to keep real straight and i want to go right into the meat of this leg [Music] so i can see that there was you know where it broke there's a crack here too so i don't want to stop anywhere here i want to be into this solid stuff here that should be good so we're about down that far so i am happy with that so i'll just knock out the sawdust right there now i need to go find a 5 8 dowel perfect all right so now we'll line this up into the groove here and see how it looks good i'm happy with that all right so got the leg in what i'm looking for is you know if it's leaning off to a side this way or that way um it's got a little bit of a lead inward but so does the other leg so i'm not sure if that's because of the angle but i mean it could it could be when i glue it i'm going to maybe put a little bit of pressure on this way so it's kind of leaning in this way okay so next up is the dowel repair now um i'm not going to be replacing this piece if you look at the break it's really long and uh when i whenever i see that i'm confident that i can get this back in here and uh get a lot of glue surface that i can re-glue this dowel back on and these are handmade pieces uh by an individual that you know they they had their hands all over this so i don't want to replace something that i can repair satisfactorily so what i do need to do though is get this glue off of here so back to the heat gun to scrape off some of this glue and this one i really want to have the whole surface clean so i get uh new glue [Applause] on all of the surfaces i've got uh this all cleaned up and this all cleaned up now i'm just gonna look at how it fits here it fits quite badly which is fine i kind of knew that was the case it's quite splintered up and [Music] there's all kinds of things going on so what i usually do for stuff that's pretty small in diameter and needs pressure from pretty much all sides is i use hockey tape so what i'll do is get my epoxy all over this area and i'll just actually strap the whole thing with hockey tape and that is the best thing i've found or electrical tape actually and i'll use epoxy in this dowel joint as well so let's mix up a batch of that and get to gluing this together okay so i've got my west system epoxy mixed and i've got some sawdust for a thickener and a filler so i'm just gonna stir that up until i get my peanut butter so one thing i like to do with my dowels before i put them in is do a vertical lines where the glue can kind of squish out and there's not an issue with hydraulic pressure down there which can re-crack your leg and also just not allow your dowel to be seated all the way so what i usually do is take this over to the table saw and line up my saw so this is the height of the blade that's in and i just run it in [Music] and then the glue's got lines to go through so i'll show you guys how i do that all right so let's get some glue in here and i can see that it was cracked on both sides here so i'm gonna put actually quite a bit of glue in here and hope that when i um well not hope i know that when i hit this down um kind of quickly with the hammer the dowel will push some of the glue into those grooves from the inside and just the act of this being glued around a dowel as well will be will help those cracks so i'm going to get some glue around the perimeter as well just in all those little areas that we cleaned all the old gorilla glue off of so i'm gonna pop this guy in here and i'm gonna hit it down pretty quick see how it's bouncing and you can see the glue squishing out of those channels just gonna keep hitting it until it stops perfect grab some of this excess before it goes too far so epoxy cleans up with uh denatured alcohol so after i'm done this i usually just clean everything up that way i'm going to get the most of it off the stick here good so now we'll just get some glue into the other side of the leg same way all right the other thing i'm going to do before um getting this back in is get this guy with some glue on it because i want to have this in before this goes down because this is going to kind of come down like this so there's a little bit of glue in this hole here so i'm going to drill this out with a force of it okay so that's all clean in there now and on this side i'm just going to scrape off some of the glue right here and there will definitely be a lot of touch-ups on this chair so i know that we're going to be coloring here and now come down onto this new area here and all that glue is squeezing out that makes my heart happy that means everything is just jam-packed full of epoxy which is awesome i'll grab some of it before it goes too far again and i like where it's sitting i'm going to take my electrical tape here and i'm just going to strap epoxy and all everything nicely together so i'm going to try to get it all lined up hold it in place and just start putting pressure on as i go around holding the dowel as i go so it's not twisting good so i've got that whole thing covered i'm going to do another round it's going to be tighter and pressure up and down that's okay for breaks just get another round okay so what i want to do is clamp this leg down and onto this post so i'm going to just bring a clamp underneath the chair you want to be really careful when you're putting pressure on a leg like this and you can see that it wants to pull out this way so now i can add the clamp going back this way to keep everything lined up the way i want it to [Music] just enough to make it straighten out a little bit i'm gonna give it another squeeze just very little bits of pressure all right so i'm gonna use a walnut epoxy stick for mohawk and i just got a little chunk chuck uh cut off here so i'm gonna peel this wrapper off and knead it together i'm just gonna roll this into a little snake wrap it around the break i'm a rhymer and just force it into the crack all the way around all right so let this dry overnight and get out of the clamps tomorrow and see how it looks for touch-ups okay guys it's the next morning and we can take the clamps off so let's get all these guys out of here take off this tape so basically now we just have to do our cleanups on the epoxy putty and this broken dowel back here and uh the finish that we kind of wreck a little bit as we were working so i'm going to use a file to just smooth this out first and then i'll sand it i'm just going to get the general shape of the file great so now i'm gonna get some 120 and put the paper here i don't want to change how the chair looks i'm just going to be careful i don't sand too much good so i'm happy with that okay now the bottom sanded i'll flip the chair over and you can see the top [Music] needs a bit more i'm just going to use a timbermate water-based putty here and fill in all the voids i'm gonna leave it pretty heavy on here just because i need to do some shaping in that void so that'll need to dry pretty much all day for the front leg i can get to doing the touch-ups so i'm going to sand the finish all you know all around this piece here because this is damaged i'm going to use a 180 to do that just divide them this looks like maybe a shellac okay now that we've got it all sanded just gonna dust off the leg and this is some shellac i mixed up a while ago [Music] so i'm just going to put a coat on the leg nowhere else on this beautiful eucalyptus wood and once we get the shellac on we'll be able to see how we need to touch up the epoxy putty in that crack looks like it needs to be here we'll need probably two or three coats and this stuff dries almost instantly so i'm just gonna hit it again right away up top here with the second coat of shellac okay so i've mixed a bit of burnt umber with cordovan mahogany to get a reddish orange color here that i'm looking for [Music] okay so this is dried for most of the day today so i'm just gonna give it a sand hopefully it's dry all the way through i'm going to give it a little bit of a seal [Music] you can definitely see you know where the putty is and where the epoxy is for the colors so what we're gonna do is paint those areas out first and i'm gonna be using a blonde uh toner with the paintbrush just to paint out those areas [Music] so now that those areas are how i have all the dark areas painted out i'm actually going to mist over the blonde color just to kind of fade everything in the other side too and then what we'll be putting and misting over top is just a more concentrated yellow which is the uh natural light oak color which will more closely match up to this yellow but this opaque white is necessary just to mute all the dark this that [Music] outside okay so we've got the medium brown walnut toner that's just gonna add in a little bit more of an orangey brown kind of yeah that's what i wanted good so i'll just get a little sealer so i'm just going to buff it in here nice and smooth all the areas that we put the new finish on [Music] i have to fill up those grains with finish again [Music] so i'm gonna take my same top coat that i used on the rung and just gonna give it a that dowel goes through a good uh five inches six inches uh here right through the center post so that'll be nice and strong and uh this guy's got the repair uh here right across it's got a nice long break that we glued back together so it's gonna be strong as well i mean i don't think that people should be putting their feet on these parts anyways they're pretty thin uh in construction but anyways it's back to good now so i'm just going to give it a beeswax and call it finished thanks for uh watching me on this one guys and don't forget to like and subscribe and check out our other videos [Music] you

Channel: John's Furniture Repair

Views: 196,896

Rating: 4.9161439 out of 5

Keywords: furniture, furniture repair, john's furniture repair, thomas johnson, antique, chair, african chair, how to fix broken leg, woodshop, woodworking, restoration

Id: QbJBUDd3uIE

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Sun May 09 2021