I volunteer for an organization called the "Repair Cafe", whose purpose is to rebuff our throw-away culture by fixing things for people (for free) and thereby keeping stuff out of landfills. A client brought in an incredibly rickety chair that belonged to his mother. It wobbled excessively front to back and only a little less side to side. Usually we fix things right there at the repair event, but this one was going to need a workshop and some tools that I didn't have at the event, so I brought it home.
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| The Van Sciver chair |
This chair had an emblem on the underside of one rail indicating the J. B. Van Sciver Co., of Camden, NJ. A quick internet search found this company was in business from the late 1800s to about 1980. I'm not good at dating furniture, but it was all mortise and tenon construction and it used hide glue, so maybe it was made more than 50 or 70 years ago. The screws that held the seat to the rails were slot head screws, but they were clearly manufactured screws (not blacksmith-made).
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| J. B. Van Sciver |
I've seen several videos of furniture repair, but have only ever worked on a couple old pieces that needed some help. The first thing I did was to label all the parts so I could get them back in the right position during reassembly.
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| Parts labelled |
Almost all the joints in the chair were very loose, so it didn't take much to get the chair apart. Two "spreader" clamps helped with that. One complication was that the upper backrest rail was screwed to the legs (and probably glued), with plugs in the countersunk holes. Those joints were solid and I didn't want to take them apart, which meant I had to disassemble the chair in a certain order so as not to stress those joints.
Before I could do this, though, there were corner blocks under the seat that needed to be removed. And each had 5 or 6 small nails in addition to the glue holding them in place.
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| Arrrgh! Nails!! |
Some of the nails were proud and easy to remove, but others were tough. I bought a tool called a "cat's paw" that helped to remove the nails. What a bummer, though - I had to chisel out some wood around the more stubborn nails and thought I might have to replace the corner blocks, but in the end they were still good enough to use.
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| Almost fully disassembled |
The builders used hide glue in the joints, but it was mostly gone and what was still there was extremely brittle. I tested it to make sure it was hide glue.
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| The water test to see if it was hide glue |
The weird thing about this chair was that the mortises were WAY longer than they needed to be for the size of the tenons. It's no wonder that the chair was racking so badly! So I added some wood to the sides of the tenons to get a better fit.
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| A poorly fitting mortise and tenon |
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| Gluing some wood onto the tenon with PVA glue |
All the seat rail mortises were way oversized and inconsistent - some were about 1 1/2" long, some 1 1/4". But the tenons were about 1" wide. The wood I added allowed me to get a far better fit to the mortises and this should help keep the chair from racking over time. The stretcher mortises fit much better, but I had to thicken the tenons by gluing on some shavings. Some of the seat rail tenons needed this, too.
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| Here's a dry-fit before glue-up |
Since my hide glue is about 5 years old, I did some testing before using it. It has been in the fridge all that time, and it performed perfectly.
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| Testing the hide glue on scrap with and edge joint and a face joint |
I glued up the chair with the hide glue and left it to cure overnight. Later, I glued and screwed the corner blocks back in place. I managed to find some slotted-head screws in my stash that matched very well the screws used to hold the seat to the seat rails.
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| Two new screws holding the block in place |
And that was it. The chair is now solid as a rock and should be good for another couple of generations of users.
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| The repaired chair |
I did not try to fix any dents, scrapes or finish problems. But I did scrape away some tiny paint droplets from the seat. This was a very interesting chair and the owners are thrilled to have it in good condition again.
