Craft · Repair
Fixing the same chair three times
A kitchen chair came back to the workshop three winters in a row. Each repair taught me something the first one should have.
Ines Varga, Editor2 min read
The chair arrived in a shopping bag. Not the whole chair, just the back legs and two stretchers, wrapped in a tea towel. The rest was still at home, the owner said, leaning against a wall because it could no longer be trusted with a person.
It was an ordinary kitchen chair, beech, probably eighty years old. Nothing about it was valuable except that a family had been sitting on it for three generations and wanted to keep doing so.
The first repair
The joint between the back leg and the side rail had worked loose. The old glue had crystallised and let go. I cleaned out the mortise, cut a thin shim to take up the slack, glued it with hide glue and clamped it overnight. It looked good and it felt solid. The owner took it home.
A year later it was back. Same joint, same side.
The second repair
This time I looked at the chair instead of the joint. The rear legs splayed a few millimetres more than the front ones, so every time someone leaned back, the whole load went into that one rail. My shim had made the joint tight, but it had not changed where the force went.
I rebuilt the joint and added a corner block underneath the seat, screwed and glued, to carry some of the racking. Better. It lasted almost two winters.
A repair that only restores the original condition also restores the original failure.
The third repair
The third time, I asked how the chair was used. It turned out to be the chair at the head of the table, the one the grandfather had always tipped back on, and now the grandson did too. No joint was going to survive that for long.
So the third repair was partly a conversation. I made the joint as strong as the wood allowed, replaced the corner block with a slightly larger one, and suggested the chair move to a place at the side of the table. It has not been back since.
What I do now
When something comes in for a second repair, I stop treating it as a joint and start treating it as a question:
- What is the load, and where does it really go?
- Has the object changed since it was made, or has the way it is used?
- Is the part that broke the weakest part, or just the first one to give?
Most things that fail twice are telling you about their life, not their construction. It is worth listening before reaching for the glue.
