Glue Chairs

[Maurice Mcmurry]

At 85 my Father In Law went through a phase of gorilla gluing chairs and other genuine colonial antiques. The chairs are stuck together for sure. It is going to take some time to get them cleaned up. They look very odd in the meantime. The clear gorilla glue is non foaming. I would consider giving clear non foaming PU a try. If Tite Chairs is the same as the product I tried years ago, it is alleged to swell the wood as well as be an adhesive.

The description of Chair Lock is similar to the product I remember finding at Ace in the past. I have confused myself a little regarding Chair Lock Vs Tite Chairs. I guess I will have to try both. As a last resort I have used thickened epoxy on badly broken and worn out chairs.

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https://www.swingpaints.com/product/...c-Wood-Sweller

Based on the warnings Tite Chairs must be a version of Super Glue.

[stephen thomas]

FWIW - if you need them for any kind of glue insertion in whatever assembly: those hypo syringes in various sizes, and various size/diameter needles to go on them, are available at most local feed mill/ Ag centers. (Southern States, e.g.)
Needles can be blunted on a whetstone or grinder.

[Jimmy Harris]

FWIW - if you need them for any kind of glue insertion in whatever assembly: those hypo syringes in various sizes, and various size/diameter needles to go on them, are available at most local feed mill/ Ag centers. (Southern States, e.g.)
Needles can be blunted on a whetstone or grinder.

I get them off Amazon. You can get a bunch, dirt cheap, and they're already blunted. Plus they usually come with various diameter tips, so you can use them for oiling things, gluing things, cleaning out things, etc. and change the needle diameter to match the viscosity of whatever you're using. And if you're using them for PVA glue, you can clean and reuse them by just cycling some soapy and then clean water through them.

[Warren Mickley]

We disassemble joints that need to be reglued. We do not inject glue.

Hot hide glue is best for gluing. It grabs when put together so there is no need for clamps or straps and assembly is straightforward. Liquid hide glue gets soft and gooey under high humidity.

Many years ago a retired carpenter told me he used epoxy for gluing chairs. He said "They will never come apart." I remember thinking that sometime in the future a young restorer might give an estimate for repairing a chair, only to find that it takes much, much longer than he had expected because of the epoxy. Repairs with such materials are not ethical.

[David Storer]

I understand your drift on the ethics of using types of glue for repairs that mean that joints can not be easily disassembled. For me, however, ethics only really come into it if you are talking about vintage hand-made items that have some sort of intrinsic historical value.

If it's just a matter of fixing an old piece of shop-bought or home-made furniture that is falling apart from general use and abuse, I really don't think ethics comes into it. It's simply a matter of what will work well for maybe 10 or 15 more years and can be done relatively easily, quickly and inexpensively.

[Charles Edward]

I understand your drift on the ethics of using types of glue for repairs that mean that joints can not be easily disassembled. For me, however, ethics only really come into it if you are talking about vintage hand-made items that have some sort of intrinsic historical value.

If it's just a matter of fixing an old piece of shop-bought or home-made furniture that is falling apart from general use and abuse, I really don't think ethics comes into it. It's simply a matter of what will work well for maybe 10 or 15 more years and can be done relatively easily, quickly and inexpensively.

In that case: West System epoxy. Don't bother with anything else.

I have no idea what 'expensive' means to a forum participant. I have seen woodworkers so unaware of self that they'll talk about economizing on shop rags while standing in the midst of literally tens of thousands of dollars in power equipment and a hoard of hand tools. Then there are ones, similarly equipped, who happily use liquid hide glue well past its expiration date because they can't bear to throw out half a $6 bottle of glue.

[Richard Coers]

Using epoxy is kind of like doing a liver transplant and forgetting to put in the new liver. It's fatal, almost guaranteed to result in a broken part. You want the joint to fail, not an entire component. A glue joint that failed, with no split or broken parts, is doing exactly what the maker intended. And if they used hide glue they've done successive generations a huge favor.

How many times will the customer have you repair a broken joint before they take the work somewhere else? And how does it work when you tell your customers that you used a weaker glue so the joint would fail again? If the maker knew about wood grain direction in their chairs, the would be no purpose of using a weak joint as the failure point. When chairs fail in a part, the most often cause is short grain and NOT a strong adhesive.

[Charles Edward]

How many times will the customer have you repair a broken joint before they take the work somewhere else? And how does it work when you tell your customers that you used a weaker glue so the joint would fail again? If the maker knew about wood grain direction in their chairs, the would be no purpose of using a weak joint as the failure point. When chairs fail in a part, the most often cause is short grain and NOT a strong adhesive.

Thrown (turned) chairs should fail at the joint by the glue giving way from racking, shrinking and swelling over the years - a reglue fix.

When a joined chair fails at the joint, it often takes the upright with it, especially if the joint is pinned.

[Mike Henderson]

I've repaired a lot of commercial chairs (not antiques). Almost always, it's the joint at the back of the seat where the seat meets the upright of the back. And the reason for failure is not glue - it's wood failure. The joint is almost always two dowels. When you pull the joint apart, what you see is wood still stuck to the dowels. The glue on the dowels held just fine, but the wood in the back rail fractured because of the stress on the joint. There just wasn't enough glue surface area with two dowels.

The goal in repairing those chairs is not to make them last forever - it's to make them last until the owner decides to remodel and throw the old stuff away.

Because of the failure mode, the holes for the dowels will be too large - you can't just stick the joint back together. The easy way is to drill out the holes on both pieces of wood and put in a couple of larger dowels glued with epoxy.

A better approach is to put in a loose tenon, maybe using a Domino machine to make the mortises on both pieces. A proper sized tenon will have more long-grain-to-long-grain surface area and will be stronger.

But no matter which repair technique I used, I have not had one come back yet and that's a lot of years.

Mike

[Rafael Herrera]

From my point of view, what seems to be the problem is joint styles, like the two dowel method mentioned above, they are inherently weak. The weakness is mitigated by the reliance on strong glues. When the joint fails it damages the wood instead of the glue joint.

In industrial settings it might be ok to use these joints to save time, money or rely on less skilled labor. To repeat the same flawed process if one builds the furniture oneself is not ethical, if I understand Warren correctly. Keep in mind that ethics is just a set of agreed on rules, they're sometimes arbitrary.

A piece of furniture that fails at the glue line is easily repaired, one where the leg breaks and the glue line is intact goes to the garbage dump.

More and more this idea that a glue line that is stronger than the wood surrounding it is just marketing and actually encourages bad designs.

I also don't think that one uses hide glue if one intends the furniture to last centuries, neither did the woodworkers from the past, I suppose. They just knew the limitations of what they were using and build well. That their work lasts centuries is just incidental.