I have been asked to repair a Danish modern chair. See attached photo. The joint is doweled together. What is the best glue to use?
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Replies
Always use hide glue for joints, especially chairs. Chair joints will all loosen over time, and you need to be able to repair them more easily. You can glue hide glue to old hide glue. You can loosen joints with a little water and heat (steam). this is not possible with other types of glues.
Regards from Perth
Derek
First step is to find out what is was originally glued with. In a perfect world, and if you are building a chair I agree with Derek... however if it was buit or previously repaired with anything other than hide glue you'll be doing some digging and maybe even redrilling if you want to stick with dowels.
Depending on how far apart you take it, and if it's "just a chair" and not restoration of a valuble antique, consider dominos instead of dowels for reassembly, or epoxy if you need a solution to fill gaps. Not all repairs meet museum standards.
I'm in the middle of repairing chairs assembled with hide glue 80+ years ago. After removing all the old glue regular old tightbond II is replacing it. Perhaps it was the wrong glue for all time but... it's been very successful so far. There are a few old pieces of mine knocking around after 25 years that are still successfully glued together, so I'm fairly confident about using tightbond II. 99% of the hide glue joints were loose after 30 years. There were repairs done before I was born. And now again. Though I'm NOT trying to repair M&T joints with finishing nails.
I find myself using hide glue more and more lately, especially with more complicated glue ups that can't be done in phases (such as all the M&T joinery with many slats that all have to be glued at once in a Mission style piece). I haven't had any issues with it. I guess if it was good enough for 18th century fine furniture, it's good enough for me.
The use of loose dowels in a chair seem like a bad idea to me; personally, I would try to use snug fitting M&T joinery, or in a Windsor or other country-style chair, integral dowels that are at the end of the spindles.
If you are building a stool, make especially sure that the joinery is properly fitted and tight so that it isn't wobbly - nobody wants a "loose stool" (credit to Mr. Underhill).
Agreed. M&T joints are preferred over dowels. These chairs were wobbly for decades. Mom wouldn't let me take them because "you'll have it forever" and now I actually do. I wasn't too concerned about being period correct or anything like that. I just used what I normally use. Tightbond III has a very long open time and is my go to for more complicated glue ups.
Hide glue won't strike over something else. You need to somehow get some crumbs of dried glue out of the joint and look at it. Take a picture. Post it.
I have a set of factory made doweled dining chairs that my parents bought about 1960. My father was gluing them back together by the mid '60s with plastic resin glue. I was gluing them back together with Titebond I in the '70s/early '80s. I took them apart in the mid '90s, sanded the dowels and the interiors of the holes with coarse sandpaper to give tooth, and glued them back together with epoxy. They are still rock solid after 30 years. Dowel joints are terrible joints for chairs (explained by a long ago FWW article) and need all the help they can get to stay together. Regular glue doesn't do the job with the seasonal dimensional changes and lack of side grain (the holes are virtually all end grain.)
There is a myth out there that epoxy is not a reversible adhesive. I had a potential disaster on a very challenging, time intensive project, where a M&T joint that I had glued with long-set epoxy seemed to be set up, but overnight it shifted out of position before the epoxy finally set up. Fortunately I called the epoxy maker's tech guy, who advised me that epoxy is softenable with acetone. I drilled very small holes into the joint area and injected acetone for a day or so with a hypodermic needle till I could pull the joint apart. Cleaned up the mess with more acetone, and glued it back together successfully.
I suspect that, as a factory made chair, that is not a valuable antique. Use epoxy!
Okay then. Here are a few pictures of the separated parts. The shoulder of the long grain failed as well as the dowels. I couldn’t see any old crystallized glue remnant. Any further suggestions?
Air bags. That chair was in a high speed wreck! I don't see much glue at all on the dowels, almost like they were only there for alignment. If the fit is good just add glue and clamp it up.
Epoxy without a doubt. I am partial to system 3 gel magic in the caulking tube with the mixing tips. It is a structural epoxy and you will have a feew hours of open time to get everything clamped up and cleaned. Use acetone for cleanup. Buy more mixing tips.
I recently restored a set of Eric Buck Danish chairs. Made by Mogler in 1950 and not exactly the same as yours but similar. They were in fact put together with hide glue. Virtually all Danish chairs are factory made and you would be wrong to think that they (some) are not valuable. Vintage by certain designers can be quite valuable ,especially now with the renewed interest in mid century stuff. Many of the more popular( Wegner lounge chair ,Buck bar stoll etc.) designs never went out of production and are produced today and often by the same factories that built them in 40s, 50s and 60s.
Chairs under go a great deal of stress as a rule and coupled with the fact that people sit in them improperly ( lean back,stand on them etc. ). I sweat bullets when some huge person sits in one of my chairs! There are advantages to hide glue in chair making. Better to fail at a joint and become loose than to fail in some other way, like break! Chairs require a certain amount of flexibility. With hide glue repairs are relatively easy. You can get them apart with minimal damage. Hide glue will liquefy at about 210 degrees Fahrenheit, well below a temperature that would damage the wood.None of that would not be true using epoxy and would also lessen the value if it is in fact a classic.