Furniture Leg Repair - How to Fix a Broken Leg
George VondriskaDescription
Once people know that you do woodworking, they probably ask you if you can fix broken furniture, like a furniture leg repair that recently came into George’s shop. While every repair is different, here are some tips that will help you the next time a repair comes into your shop.
Them’s the breaks
Your first step will be to check the break to determine if the pieces will readily come back together. This is affected by the type of wood you’re working with, how the break happened, and whether or not you have all the pieces. This is the first go-no go point of the repair.
Clamping challenges
It’s not uncommon to run into unique clamping scenarios on furniture repairs. It’s not the same as assembling a brand new piece of furniture that you’ve just built. You may have irregular surfaces, and you need to be very careful that the clamps don’t damage finished surfaces. You may be surprised by the clamping device we used on our furniture leg repair. Once you know the repair will work, and you have an effective clamping strategy, you can put things together.
Finishing
Once the glue is dry and the clamps removed, you’ll need to do some clean up. Some repairs may require sanding to “feather” the parts together. You may also need to do some stain and top coat matching.
More info
Looking for more information on furniture repairs? Chairs, thanks to the abuse they take, are common items for repair. We’ve got some great strategies for chair repair. Looking at a piece of furniture whose veneer is shot? Furniture repair of veneered pieces is unique, requiring its own strategies.
You know maybe this has happened to you. You get these phone calls sometimes in the middle of the night. A friend of mine called me the other day telling me about his broken leg. And it's one of these things that it's news that you hate to get because he was afraid that this was a really bad fracture, they were gonna have a horrible time doing a repair. It was broken and only one spot, but they weren't sure that they could fix the leg or not. But honestly, I think that we're gonna to be able to fix this. It's a cabriole leg made out of mahogany, looks like a clean break. So let's have a look at what needs to happen here. So this is a real story. My friend Chris calls, he's got a leg on a piece of furniture that broke, so can it be repaired? And I'm not the number one furniture guy in the world but I worked with a lot of wood. So what I'm looking at to just determine, can I even do anything? Is, does it go back together fairly cleanly? The wood that we're looking at here is mahogany. That's good news for us because mahogany is pretty straight grained. So instead of this break, being all kerflooey and crooked, the break itself is pretty straight. When I put these two pieces back together everything is there, we're not missing any parts. And it comes together relatively seamlessly for being broken. So I think we can do this. Big picture what's gonna happen is we'll get some glue on here now, and then then we'll come back and we're gonna have to do some sanding and try to get some stain on here through some coloring in order to make everything match back up. So let's start with gluing, standard yellow glue is gonna be fine for this. And really the challenge I think is gonna be clamping, because we've got an irregular surface. Make sure I work glue in every place. This kind of break I've had good luck fixing at a real extreme, if you can imagine the headstock on a guitar. So had a guitar that had tipped over and the headstock cracked right off of it. Very similar break pattern, real straight grain like this was able to glue that back together and imagine the stress that thing is under. Strung, the guitar and about three years later, it's still holding just fine. Next thing I wanna do is make sure I'm positioned okay. 'Cause of course once that glue dries there's no going back. Now for clamping, I think the easiest way to pull this off is with this. This is a strip of inner tube, literally inner tube. I took a bicycle inner tube, cut it into thin strips and I use it for just this kind of stuff so I can pull wrap and yeah, I'm smearing glue around but, there's nothing I can about that. And I'm not worried about it because we're still gonna have that clean up step that we're gonna have to do later. So that glue excess is gonna come off. Okay, I'm gonna keep the wrap going here. Not that kind of rip. I'm gonna keep wrapping with the inner tube, then we'll come back later, pull this off and have a look at what my next suggested steps would be, to finish this up for Chris and Deidre. Glue has had sufficient time to dry, so it's time for the unveiling. I hope I don't disappoint Chris and Deidre here, especially since Chris is right there behind that camera. It's gonna reach over and whack me one. All right, initial inspection. Well, I'm pretty happy with that. That seam came together pretty well, it's pretty seamless right there. There's a little bit of a spot where some chips are out of it and they didn't come with it, there's nothing I can do about that. So here's the next step, we have to do a little bit of sanding. What I need to do is get the glue residue off the surface. Starting with a 120 grit paper here and I want to keep that sanding to a minimum. No matter what I do, this is going to take a little bit of work with stain and top coat. Now I'm gonna go to a pad cause it's gonna flex better, to match the contours of that leg up. I'm going to go back to my sanding pad here. I saw some glue gobs there. That's what kinda caught my attention and it's better to take the glue gobs off with this sander than with that sanding sponge. All right, here's the story morning glory. Some more sanding. And then my next step will be to work with some stains and get some color on this and try to get this repair blended back in. Let the stain dry. The glue guy out there, that's being obnoxious to me. There we go. Let that stain dry. Then come back and do some work with a top coat and blend that in. But overall I think what we have here is a leg that will live to dance another day. So furniture repair based in large part on the fact that, we had a good clean break and that grain making it pretty easy to get back together. The inner tube worked great because of the regularity of that surface we haven't had to find anything else that would clamp that. And I think we're gonna have a successful operation doctor.
As an additional strengthening of this joint I like to use a cheap drill bit to make a steel rod drilled in a diagonally to the grain of the wood. To do. this I chuck a steel bit (I would suggest a bit about 3/32” for this size leg) in a drill & bore into the repaired leg to distance slightly less than than the thickness of the leg. Back this out about 1/8”, cut the bit off about 1/16” from the surface. Then drive the bit back into the leg with a pin punch,so it is embedded about 1/16” below the surface. Fill the hole with a stainable wood putty. After sanding, stain to match and refinish. Result is a greatly strengthened repair.
Would have been nice to see the refinishing process - how you matched the color and blended in the final top coats. Also would have liked to see how the finished repair turned out.
George, this is an all too common occurrence on these cabriole legs. On a small table or stand just gluing them up will work just fine. (The glue joint may even be stronger then the wood.) In our shop, rather than a dowel, we will drill for a steel rod (extra long drill bit) after we've done the glue up rather than just a dowel on a chair or dining table for extra re-enforcement.
Two question: Will the repaired leg be able to perform like the other legs on that piece of furniture? How do you fill in where there is missing wood?