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

Remodeling an English Breakfront

This Just In


All Done 10/24

We met with a client recently who asked us to remodel an antique breakfront that had been in her family for a while. It is a nice example of simple, classic, 19th century English cabinetry. Frame and panel English oak doors, with a pine case, cornice and interior. Her request was to put the paneled doors in the center where the glass was, (flat screen tv moving in) and move the glass doors to the outside. This would have been easier if all the doors were the same size, which, unfortunately, they were not, the paneled doors being 3" narrower than the glass doors ... We had at it anyway and should finish tomorrow sometime. I'll let the pictures tell the story ... Click to enlarge ....

The cabinet as we found it

Doors off .. shows early "adjustable shelf" detail

A disassembled door waiting to be cut down, re-coped and reglued

My man Jim, heating and chipping off the ROCK HARD old putty after he knocked the doors apart with a hammer and block. He was able to save all but two of the unbroken wavy glass pieces. Fortunately, we have a small stash of old sash with similar glass.

This photo, when enlarged, shows the pieces we cut off, the shaper set up for recoping the cut rails and muntins, and the contoured backup block ( a negative of the molding and rabbet shape of the muntin and rail profiles ) we made so that the coping cutter does not blow out the existing molding. When making doors like this, it's best to run the cope on the ends of the rails and crossbars before we add the molding detail so we can skip this step usually..

The clamped up doors with the newly coped muntins and rails, note the old protruding tenons ..

Where we are today ... 10/23
We should be able to recut the old glass and reglaze the 'new' doors tomorrow, polish the whole thing up and send it on its way ....