A chair from a different era

Seems like I've been doing a lot of repair and restoration work lately, and this bent willow rocking chair is a good example of one of my recent projects.

Someone called me about fixing a broken rocker on it, but without seeing it, it's hard to know how much work it's going to take. The owner of this chair said she thought the chair was from the late 1800s, but I couldn't verify that. Either way - it was beaten up, and in bad shape.

Turns out the rocker had been broken for a while, and someone had attempted a repair. The repair may have worked, if they would've just put glue in the wood and clamped it. But just putting two screws by themselves led to failure.

I said I’d do my best.

Each leg was held to the rocker with one screw, and four nails – all very rusty. I guess that's how they did it a hundred years ago!

The wood crumbled as I took out the screws.

I decided to notch the leg a little higher, for more gluing surface and an area to add an extra screw. 

I took the old rockers off and traced them onto a piece of hickory, the hardest wood I could find that would match the willow decently. 

Once I cut and sanded them, I shaped them a little differently, to make the area that attached to the legs a little bit wider. That way they could accommodate two screws instead of one. 

After distressing and staining the new rockers, I attached them with glue and screws.

But the legs were rotted, cracked, and deteriorated, and although the owner of this chair assured me that this chair was only for decoration, I was concerned about the integrity of that joint. Here you can see the bottom of this leg that was rotted out.

I didn't know how I was going to repair the bottoms of the legs. Wood filler is too weak, and bondo seemed like overkill.  But then I called a buddy who suggested five minute epoxy made by Gorilla. 

 I didn't realize that they make two types of the epoxy – I chose the Ultimate, because it was darker in color. The other version was clear.

Once mixed – this epoxy hardens very quickly, and is rock hard. I've used other five minute epoxy that take hours to cure, and don't really harden to my satisfaction. But this stuff was rock hard super fast.

Once the rockers were glued in place, I repaired the legs. Luckily, due to the aged nature of this rocking chair, I could leave the surfaces, a little rough and pocked. 

And just like that – this rocker was back in service.

Repairing this chair taught me a few things – old wood can seriously deteriorate, and that make repairs like this much more challenging. But the second thing I learned – never underestimate a good epoxy!