A Chair Fix

    This is a story about a new chair that was sold to my son Shawn and his family.   It was a nice looking chair, but as it was being delivered to his home it suffered a small misfortune.   This chair was being delivered in the back of a pickup.  It was not tied or fastened down in any way. This chair was enjoying the summer breeze and the Iowa sunshine when the pickup just happened to take a curve a little to fast and chair left the back of the pickup and went for a roll into some county road side ditch.  
   Of course the next dilemma is that the chair is now broken and the seller blames the pickup driver and the pickup driver blames the seller for not packing the chair correctly and so on.  Also this is not the chair that Shawn and his wife Vanessa had in mind when they made the purchase.  Suddenly there is a chair (or what is left of a chair) priced very reasonable.   Shawn and Vanessa are now thinking that if this chair could somehow be glued back together there could be a bargain in the works .   Thus comes the call for dad to come down for a visit and by the way, bring your glue and clamps along with you.

  I am thinking that this chair should be a breeze to fix.  (I have had this thought process several times before and by now I should realize that I often get myself in trouble by thinking that way.)  The pieces to this chair must of been joined together with some kind of dowel sticks and from the holes left in the frame not all the dowels were the same thickness or length.  I did bring some dowels along with me and we sanded and whittled on those to make up our own little connecting plugs for this job.

     It is hard to tell this from the picture above, but the little white plugs are what we made to fit in each of the joints.

    We used some "Horse Hide" titebond glue for this task.   It is recommended that this is the type of glue to use when repairing furniture.   It gives you a long setup time and once dried, it seems to provide a good bond.  
   This was one of those projects where this piece needs to go here before that piece goes there yet that piece needs to be in place before you can glue the other piece down.  (You have to be there to totally understand the previous statement.  I'm not sure why, but it seemed to work better if I just stood out of the way and bossed while Shawn did the placing of pieces and tightening of the clamps.  At least I felt it worked better that way. )   Several times we had everything clamped down and at the last minute we could see that some piece was still not quite in line to where it was suppose to be.    

   I'm sure that when they manufacture chairs like this they have some kind of jig to hold everything it place while the glue dries.




  We did have some difficulties and there was a moment when I was thinking that we should put this chair in the back of my pickup and I would just head down some Iowa county road and while doing that I would just take a curve kind of fast and we could see what would happen.
    But as it turned out, the pieces all came together, the glue dried and so far everything seems to be fine.

 

  It has now been about three weeks since we have worked on that chair.   It has been kid tested, cat tested, and baby tested.  So far it has held up solid.  

   One of these days maybe "I" will even test it out.  But for now I think I will let younger more flexible bodies sit in this chair.    Just in case.  

    If that glue job and those homemade dowels last for awhile, then this chair definitely turned out to be a good bargain for Shawn and his family.

    Enjoy summer.