Child's Sunday School Chair - Epilog: Repairing the Original

I've never done any furniture conservation or refurbishing, but I thought I'd try my hand at fixing the original chair.  Some may recall that the seat was split, most joints were loose and the center spindle was falling out.

You can see the seat split and the center spindle not quite reaching the arched rail

The seat had been "fixed" with metal plates screwed to its underside.  The center spindle had been fixed by adding a dowel to the top, but it was still too short to reach the arched rail mortise.

I soaked some joints in water and found that the chair had been glued with hide glue, as the remaining glued jelled after a while.  This made it easy to remove the old glue and prepare the joints.

A wedge glued into the bottom of the arched back rail.
I was able to remove the wedge after soaking the joint for a few hours.

I started by removing all the old finish using a spokeshave and/or a scraper.  This revealed a couple things that had to be addressed.

Shaving and scraping off the old finish

The arched rail had a crack near the its top, close to one of the spindle mortise holes.  I cleaned it up, got some PVA glue into the crack and clamped it up.

Crack in arched rail

Not quite as good as new, but pretty good

For the split in the seat, I planed the mating surfaces and glued in a 1/8" thick strip of cherry.

Seat clamped up

For the broken center spindle, I made a new one out of cherry.  This worked out really well.

New center spindle dry fit with the rest of the back

Most of the undercarriage joints were loose, so I glued some thick shavings to the tenons and later fit them to their mortises with fine rasp work around the tenons.

Scabbing on shavings to beef up the tenons, using masking tape as clamps

Something else I fixed, but didn't get any photos of, were the tenons at the top of the legs.  At least one of them was not long enough for the depth of its mortise.  I mean not even close!  So I moved the tenon's shoulder back a bit to make the tenon longer.  The leg then fit deeper into its mortise and this had the effect of lifting that leg a little, which threw the whole undercarriage a little out of whack.  Nothing a little twisting of the undercarriage couldn't handle.  But later I had to shave off two of the feet to re-level the chair and get all four feet touching the floor.

Re-gluing the undercarriage with hide glue

When I glued the arched rail and spindles into the chair, I seated the arched rail about 1/4" deeper into the chair than it had been originally.  This tightened up the fit of the two remaining original spindles - they had not been quite long enough.  I also cut the kerf for the wedge of the arched rail ends a little deeper.

The end of the arched rail, glued and wedged into its mortise

And a closer view - note the old chip out just forward of that mortise -
could have fixed that, but opted not to bother.

I used a brown milk paint to finish this chair.  That kept it's color close to the original.  Two coats of paint and two coats of a wipe-on poly and it's done.

This color of milk paint seemed thicker than the green I used on my version of this chair.
Note the foamy stuff - not sure what to do with it.

All-in-all, the old chair looks great and I have little doubt that it's ready for another 50-100 years of use.

Fully refurbished

As found

And here are the two chairs side by side.  What great fun.

Original on right, my version on left

There were a lot of firsts for me with this project.  It's always good to try out new techniques.

• First time making tapered tenons and mortises (other than practice)
• First time (or maybe second) using sightline and resultant angle techniques
• First time using milk paint
• First time refurbishing an old piece of furniture
• Probably other that don't come to mind as I write this

I ended up giving this chair back to the woman who was getting rid of it.  She seemed thrilled that it can now be used by her great-nieces and I was happy that she could keep it in her family.  The other side of this coin - when I brought it back to her, she gave me another broken-down chair.  It's a bit like a Jennie Alexander post and rung chair, but different in some respects.  If nothing else,  it'll be interesting to study.  Maybe I'll document it in the blog.