One of the folding wood chairs that Came With The House™ had a loose arm that turned out to be due to a missing chunk of wood:
The obvious lay of the grain shows why it failed like that, surely hastened by the crack below the screw.
So I cut a snippet of brass tubing that, mirabile dictu, fit both the hole and the M6 screw, mixed up some wood epoxy and buttered it up:
The crack extended entirely through the arm and was more extensive that seemed reasonable to expect the epoxy to handle on its own:
So I slobbered soaked saturated the cracks with wood hardener and clamped them shut:
The hardener is intended to solidify rotted wood, but it makes a reasonable adhesive and, being much more liquid than ordinary wood glues, seemed like it would penetrate further into the cracks than anything else on hand. We shall see how this works out.
Rummaging in the Drawer o’ M6 Screws produced a better match to the brass tube than the original flat head screw:
It screws into a fancy tee nut in the upright chair rail, where a dot of thread locker should hold it forevermore.
I hit the exposed end with some sandpaper to smooth off the last of those smears and, after a few years, it’ll probably look like it grew there.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
5 responses to “Folding Wood Chair Arm Repair”
I don’t know about you, but I learned the term “mirabile dictu” from a classic chestnut of an Apple ad: https://imgur.com/FGcV5cq Most likely I saw it in Popular Electronics because I didn’t get my subscription to Byte until 1985.
If this reply looks like junk then my apologies. The wordpress comment editor seems to fail on the Firefox+Kubuntu 24.04 pair.
I have no idea where I learned most of the stuff I (think I) know … :grin:
And, yeah, the WordPress UI seems to be slowly disintegrating to the point where anything that is possible becomes mandatory and all else is impossible. They keep removing features or making them so awkward as to be unusable, with no obvious gain anywhere else; I do not regard the AI nonsense as a gain.
You could sandpaper a pile of sawdust and mix it in with the epoxy. With clear epoxy this often looks very close to actual wood, and it would probably somehow improve the look of your whitish epoxy.
It definitely wouldn’t look worse! :grin:
Another chair in that set has an arm with a similar crack, so I may get a second chance.
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