How to Remove the Seat of a 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.

One way to repair a broken chair is to glue it back together. I know what you're thinking. Glue? Sounds pretty ineffective and cheap. In this free video series, a furniture manufacturer will teach you how to take apart and put together a chair with glue. You'll learn how to remove the seat of a chair, remove glue blocks, clean joints, replace dowels, and ultimately attach new glue blocks to the chair. Once your chair is disassembled, fixed, and reassembled, you'll be looking at a chair that's in brand new condition!

Video Transcript

"A lot of times in old chairs and old furnitures you'll get a chair that's really loose and wobbly, you can wiggle it, you can feel it moving and all the joints come loose. What happens is the glue breaks down over a period of about seventy to a hundred years if it's an old chair. Newer chairs sometimes they break down even quicker. You can get a chair you might have bought and twenty years later it's coming loose. So the only proper way to fix it is to take the chair completely apart and re-glue it and that's what we're going to show you here today. First thing we want to do is remove the seat. If you got a seat in here it's got to come out. They're usually screwed on from the bottom so we'll take a hand drill. You want to get underneath there so you can see the screws sometimes they're so far up in the whole and you can't even see them. Once you remove the screws, set the chair back up, pop the seat out. Now we're ready, once we get the seat out to mark our joints. If you take this chair all apart, you want to make sure you get it back together again. So one sure way to do that is take some blue tape, tape all your joins and either use a numbering system or a lettering system. Whatever you want to do just so that you know this leg goes into this stretcher and this side rail goes back into the front of the leg rather than in the back. So, now that we've got our tape on here, just take a magic marker. I just use the lettering system it's easier. Part A to A, part B-to-B, C can be C and one more piece here. Just go through the alphabet. Once you get your joints all marked, you know were everything is going to go back to, you're ready to go to the next part of the process."