Popular Woodworking 2007-04 № 161, страница 50

Practical methods to fix the common wobbly chair.

The chair I'm regluing is factory made, glued with animal hide glue and fin- or early 1930s. Once you have cleaned all the joints and replaced dowels as ished with shellac. The dowels are spiral-grooved and the nails used in the explained in the article, apply glue and clamp the chair together. stretchers are wire, not "square." So the chair is probably from the 1920s

As a woodworker, you must be asked now and then to reglue loose chair joints. Chairs are the most abused of all furniture and also among the most complex. The subject of chair regluing is huge and, to my knowledge, has never been covered well in the woodworking literature.

I love regluing chairs. Call me weird, but I get really deep into the subtle construction differences. Even with a set of six or eight factory-made chairs, I can get lost in the minutest varia

tions. I don't know how many chairs I've reglued during the last three decades, but it must be in the thousands.

There are two primary types of joinery used in straight-backed

chair construction: mortise-and-tenon or dowels. Mortise-and-tenon joinery is pre-industrial, though many woodworkers and a very few factories still use it to join legs and rails. Dowels are machine age because the dowels themselves are machined.

Dowel joinery is much easier and faster to cut than mortise and

by Bob Flexner

Bob is a contributing editor to Popular Woodworking. His video, "Repairing Furniture with Bob Flexneris available from Taunton Press, 800-477-8727.

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Popular Woodworking April 2007