Repairing the Leg of a Victorian Side Chair - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

This is a really nice antique side chair. I'm not quite sure how old it is. It's a very interesting design. This looks a little bit like Art Nouveau to me, but it's very much kind of an early Victorian design. But what's happened here is that this leg is completely broken off, and what I want to do is dowel this back on. And it's difficult because this is so ragged. There's no great way to drill a dowel when it's like this. So I'm going to glue this back where it belongs, and then later I'll then cut this, and I'll have a nice surface to drill my dowel. So as you can see, you've got the seat well protected with plastic, and I've clamped a board across here that'll give me something to clamp to when I clamp this leg on. Now even though I'm going to cut this and re-glue it later, I still want to make sure that I'm gluing it up square now. Okay, so now I've got the leg glued back where it belongs, and now I'm going to cut the leg off. I'm not going to cut right where the break is. There's a great place right here that'll be a better place to make the cut right below the crack. The dowel will still go through the crack either way. So I'm sawing. I'm going around and around the leg. I'm not just going to attempt to cut straight through. I'm going to go around and around so I make sure that my cut is always right in that little groove there. So now I've got a great surface that I can mark off and drill on both sides and put it back together again. All right, now I'm going to use a center finder, which is a device that I can put on an object like this, and it helps you find the center. I'm going to drill this freehand, and I'm going to drill it as straight and true as I can. But the fact is I don't mind if it's going to... I want it to be a little bit sloppy. When I glue this together, I'm going to use epoxy, and that will allow me to make sure that the leg is perfectly straight. All right, I cut a dowel for the glue-up, but I am going to put a vertical slot in this dowel to help relieve pressure during the glue-up. This is where the slot allowed the air to come out. All right, the leg is very solid now. All that's left is I need to do a little bit of touch-up work here where the original break was. So if you remember, this leg was completely broken off. It was a very ragged break. I glued it back together, then cut it to give me a smooth surface so I could drill and put a dowel in there. And it looks pretty good.