ANOTHER antique chair repair!

[markharrison]

I have a set of Australian Red Cedar Balloon Balloon Back chairs (C1880) two of which were so badly damaged I thought they might be better off as firewood. ARC is a terrible timber to make chairs from. One of the balloon backs shattered like glass when it fell backwards on a tiled floor.

The top of the rear legs were seriously compromised and cracked open from the pressure of the dowel so the balloon backs had parted company from the legs.

I thought about getting them repaired by a restorer but the cost would have been prohibitive. Frankly, they would not have been worth the cost.

In the intervening ten years since the damage happened I have picked up a few skills myself so I have repaired them. I don't know if the repair methods I used would be what a professional restorer would have done but then they are still with us and in use.

The damage
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The back leg repair process

I sawed a straight edge into solid wood which I then hand planed dead flat.
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I then glued blocks into place with hot hide glue
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Then shaped them to blend with the chair with chisels, spokeshaves, and rasps.
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I will follow up with the rest of the repair process shortly.

[markharrison]

Part II

So here the chairs have been reunited with their balloon backs. The one on the right is the new one I made.
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The rejoin was not perfect so I reshaped to blend the parts to get removing as little as possible of the original chair. Here are the blended backs after reshaping. I have coated the timber in diluted hide glue (aka sizing).
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More to come...

[markharrison]

Part III

So to the leg. You saw the damage in part one but here is another with a broader view.
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An attempt with minimal change was made by me long ago to keep useful but you can see it was a completely half-arsed job by how crooked the leg was. I decided that I either turned a new leg or I attempt to make a better minimum repair. I decided I would start with the latter and create a whole new leg if the repair was not to my standard. It also has the benefit of keeping the chair as original as possible. Plus I am not the most gifted turner!
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The next step was to get both ends of the leg as flat as possible, find a centre point and drill a one inch hole.
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Unfortunately I made a complete pig's breakfast of boring the one inch hole and it ended up being way way off centre. I should have bored a pilot hole first for the lead screw of the bit to follow. Lesson learned! At this point it was either fill or make a new leg. I filled the hole with polyester resin (this is the centre of the leg and completely invisible) then drilled a pilot hole; then I drilled the one inch hole.
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Now I test fitted a test turning to replace the coved piece. I undercut the piece to ensure a clean fit. The final piece was glued using epoxy. I don't normally use epoxy but I felt it was justified in this instance. Any further damage to this leg would mean a whole new leg anyway. That and I had already used polyester resin anyway. Why stop there?
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Here are the repaired chairs with their first coats of shellac.
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The new timber is too obvious so I tinted some of the button lac with Feast-Watson spirit dyes to get a close, but by no means perfect, match. I expect over time it will end up being closer and it will be hard to tell the difference. I then buffed the chairs with wax and 0000 steel wool to get an even(ish) sheen. And they are now back in my dining room.
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[Xanthorrhoeas]

You have done a fine job. Balloon-back chairs always seem to be problematic and fragile. Was the dowel in the broken leg fitted by you or in the chair when you bought it? it seems unlikely to be original in an antique.

There were a lot of reproduction cedar balloon backs made sometime in the 1960's or 70's and many of those were faked and sold as antique. In my raw, inexperienced youth I got suckered and purchased a set of them. Sad story, the 'getting suckered' bit didn't end there, when i realised they were fakes I put them with a dealer to sell on consignment - they did sell them, but then closed shop and disappeared without ever passing on my share. The world is full of rogues.

ARC does work for chairs, despite its light-weight and fragile nature. We have quite a few and the oldest (late 1830's) have survived completely intact apart from wearing down the bottom of the front legs (must have been on a stone floor). Some slightly later rail-back ARC chairs suffered the same fate as your balloon backs when our then very young children sent them sprawling on our wooden floor. But, all were repaired satisfactorily and still serve us well.

My rule for adhesives is that if you are repairing an original joint that was hide-glue, then you must use hide glue (nothing else sticks to the original hide glue). If you are doing a repair that may need to be reversed at some time - use hide glue. But, if you are repairing a smashed piece of timber that was always meant to be intact, then a modern high-strength adhesive like epoxy is quite reasonable and probably better. Gap-filling epoxies like Epox-E-Glue (Boatcraft Pacific) can be coloured with spirit stains or dry powders to make them match the timber, an added advantage when timber has been literally shattered. The issue using non-reversible modern adhesives is that you cannot stuff-up - you have to get it perfect first time.

David

[markharrison]

You have done a fine job. Balloon-back chairs always seem to be problematic and fragile. Was the dowel in the broken leg fitted by you or in the chair when you bought it? it seems unlikely to be original in an antique.

Thank you for the positive feedback. I was completely winging this. I felt that whatever I did was more reversible than a fire...

That dowel was added by me. That was the half arsed repair I was talking about.

There were a lot of reproduction cedar balloon backs made sometime in the 1960's or 70's and many of those were faked and sold as antique. In my raw, inexperienced youth I got suckered and purchased a set of them. Sad story, the 'getting suckered' bit didn't end there, when i realised they were fakes I put them with a dealer to sell on consignment - they did sell them, but then closed shop and disappeared without ever passing on my share. The world is full of rogues.

I do not believe these fall into that category. I bought them from one of the better auction houses in Sydney (Lawson's IIRC). They exhibit the same sort of wear you described with the front legs and there are chips in places that would be too far even for a faker. Some of the dodgy repairs that were previously done may even predate that era.

ARC does work for chairs, despite its light-weight and fragile nature. We have quite a few and the oldest (late 1830's) have survived completely intact apart from wearing down the bottom of the front legs (must have been on a stone floor). Some slightly later rail-back ARC chairs suffered the same fate as your balloon backs when our then very young children sent them sprawling on our wooden floor. But, all were repaired satisfactorily and still serve us well.

Lightness in a chair is not necessarily a bad thing but the joinery of a balloon back (or kidney back) is so not satisfactory for ARC. I have a pair of rosewood kidney back chairs of a similar age and they have never been repaired as far as I can tell. That said, the kidney back chairs are more stable on their legs than the ARC chairs. The ARC chairs are fairly tippy. The back legs taper inwards quite a bit as you can see in the photos. I like the look of them but it is a design flaw in my opinion.

My rule for adhesives is that if you are repairing an original joint that was hide-glue, then you must use hide glue (nothing else sticks to the original hide glue). If you are doing a repair that may need to be reversed at some time - use hide glue. But, if you are repairing a smashed piece of timber that was always meant to be intact, then a modern high-strength adhesive like epoxy is quite reasonable and probably better. Gap-filling epoxies like Epox-E-Glue (Boatcraft Pacific) can be coloured with spirit stains or dry powders to make them match the timber, an added advantage when timber has been literally shattered. The issue using non-reversible modern adhesives is that you cannot stuff-up - you have to get it perfect first time.

David

Pretty much how I feel too. The only epoxy I used was for the leg repair. That decision was principally driven by the fact that the mortises I drilled to join the tenons was not perfect enough in my opinion to satisfactorily use hide glue. I had to use a Forstner bit in a hand drill and there was a little wandering and unevenness. Drilling free hand in end grain (even in ARC) is not that easy even with a pilot hole. I needed the gap filling qualities of epoxy more than anything else.

[rustynail]

A very satisfactory repair. Considering your dissatisfaction with cedar as a chair timber you have been most diligent.
There are always Fors and Againsts with most timbers. Cedar is no exception.
I make a lot of chairs and still prefer cedar to other timbers. Here is why: Strength to weight ratio, insect attack resistance, glueability and stability.
Granted cedar is a soft timber and turns a vulnerable face to rough handling or poor design.
The balloon back chair design is not based on sound engineering and when combined with a soft timber leaves much to be desired. Mind you, an unstable specie of a much harder nature will also give trouble as joints open and close with climate fluctuation and eventual failure will be the result.
When designing a cedar chair it is critical to factor in the softness of the material to allow for this shortcoming. This done, you have a chair that will stand the test of time.