Another Interesting Repair

We fixed a desk for the niece of one of our longtime customers recently. It was her grandmother's desk, and one of it's legs had been broken (and repaired) several times. She had moved to a new house and could no longer prop it in the corner as she had in the past. It was a cool piece with nice carvings, some slick hardware that pushed out the flap supports when you pulled open the desk front, and onyx drawer faces and gallery details inside. It took some creative gluing and clamping to reattach the carved foot but it looked pretty good when it was done, if I do say so myself ... Click the photos to enlarge them ...

Badly repaired break

planed the ends smooth

Figured out how much was missing

We screwed a piece of plywood to the other three legs to locate the broken foot contact and put a temporary leg the right length in place so that when the leg was fixed, the desk would sit level.

Finished the joinery , doweled it as it was and glued it up with the broken foot

Rough shaped it

Did some minimal suggestive carving

Opened it up and found we needed to get rid of the blotter paper that was taped in there and get some leather down.

Stretched a piece of leather over some scrap plywood, made a luan ply pattern and cut the leather to exact size. masked off the desk and sprayed 3M Spray 90 adhesive on the leather and the desk insert. We put a piece of wax paper under most of the leather and slowly pressed the leather down and tugged the wax paper along, stretching the leather as we pushed it ( glued it ) into place. In the end, the width was good but we had to trim about 1'4" off the length in place.

There were some sweet onyx drawer faces that needed some refitting and handle reattachment and the two columns in the center were 'secret' compartments ... Loved the whole thing when it was done and so did the client when we dropped it off last week.

A Worthy Repair

Ok ... Your client has a nice chair ... this one was particularly nice as is a lot of this client's stuff. A while back, we repaired the NICEST, original finish, writing arm Windor I have ever seen. There's one like it in 's book, but it's not as nice. Here's a link to that repair story .. it's a good one and we used the same technique to repair this chair which came to us with it's arm snapped off at the joints.. Our goal is always to create new joints joints with integrity, yet leaves as much as the original wood as possible. Here's one of our best repair tricks .... click the pictures to enlarge them ...

We've excavated the broken tenons by starting with a small hole in the broken part and 'drilling up' with larger bits until we can break away the thin wall of the tenon that's left in the original hole. Then, in this case we sanded the broken arm to a point, leaving the wood on the top sanded just to the point where it broke, as it entered the mortise hole. That left us our original length to go by. Then we turned a short piece of new wood with the proper size tenon on it, stuck it int the hole and swung the arm, with it's new tenon in the front, around and traced the scarf angle onto the new piece sticking out of the back leg mortise, cut it and sanded it to fit. Carefully holding the two pieces aligned, I drilled a 3/16ths" hole for a dowel which kept the scarf joint aligned during gluing and clamping.

Get some pressure on it any way you can. masking tape is good, duct tape is stronger and stretchier, but can pull off an old finish so be careful with it.

This technique can work with almost any broken round tenon on a stetcher or spindle.

The finished chair