Repairing a Wobbly Table

Building a wobble-free table or wobble-free chair legs can be tricky. Sometimes you might be working with organic-shaped material, or other times perhaps there is the slightest slippage while you are gluing up. Whatever the cause, it’s common that a project wobbles just slightly when you take it out of the clamps. Never fear: repairing a wobbly table is easier than it might seem. In fact, repairing a wobbly table can sometimes be done in just a few minutes using the procedure that George walks us through in this video.

Repairing a wobbly table can be done with a few simple steps:

Set the table on a flat surface. Use a table saw or workbench that you know to be dead-flat. You don’t want to true your table legs to a surface that isn’t flat; otherwise your table will still wobble when you set it on a flat surface.

Force three legs to the surface. Put weight on one corner of the table to raise the opposing corner off the surface, revealing the total amount that the table legs are out of coplanar. Measure that distance and divide it by two. Then mark that distance across the bottom of each of the adjacent legs.

Cut legs down. Carefully cut to each of your lines. If the distance is “cuttable,” a hand saw can be used for cutting this. If it is too small to cut, then a sharp low-angle block plane can be used instead.

Test. After trimming the legs, set the table back on your flat surface and see if it will sit without wobbling. Sometimes you will need to do some fine-tuning with a block plane.

After your table is sitting flat, you’ll be ready to watch more videos on furniture building.