How to Repair a Wood Chair

Series Summary

Furniture serves many important, essential functions for people the world over. In the last few thousand years, chairs, beds, desks, and tables have provided places to sit, eat, talk, work, gather, or sleep. Many people will spend more than a third of their lives in, at, or on furniture. It comes as no surprise, then, that humans have a unique relationship with this group of items they spend so much time around.

In some ways, furniture has become a reflection of personality. When choosing furniture for their homes or offices, people are known to concentrate on design, giving it equal or greater weight than function and stability. Many people pass furniture items down from one generation to the next, keeping the item as a family heirloom.

In this free video series, learn how to fix a broken piece of furniture you may have kept for years. Our expert will guide you step-by-step through a wood chair repair. Learn how to remove broken spindles and replace them with wooden dowels. Tips include using an epoxy glue, drilling the holes out, positioning the clamps, and more.

This series is an Equilibrio Films production.

Video Transcript

" This is Charles McMahon for Expert Village. We are going to have a look at a project for fixing a broken chair. Now this is a project that you only do if you have some spare time because it would be more cost effective probably just to break the chair up and use it for firewood and go out and buy a replacement chair. There is a certain challenge to fixing old things up so there is a little bit of an abusement factor involved here. Now if we look down here at this broken chair, this often happens with these kinds of spindle backs; people lean back on them, they get loose and at some point, they fall off. This chair is about 40 years old, it’s part of a set and so we are going to try to put it back together. You can see previously repair here using a dowel. In other words when the spindle broke, we just put a dowel in here but it’s broken again and you can see here that this spindle has broken off; the remainder of it is here. There is another spindle that broke off; the remainder is here, so we’ve got to make 2 new spindles and put it back together again. Here is another chair that we did the same thing too some time back. You can see these 2 spindles were replaced by a dowel and this piece across the bottom which also broke was also replaced by a dowel. "