How do you restore chairs that have wood damage? See how to take apart these walnut chairs, make replacement parts, reassemble the chairs, stain the new parts and restore the finish to shine. This is a difficult restoration as you will see a variety of skills are needed including woodturning and chairmaking.

The first step in restoring any piece of furniture is to gently take it apart. I use spreader clamps for this to prevent the parts from breaking when using a mallet. I turn the chair upside down and label the legs and stretchers. Then I use the spreader clamps to ease out the parts from the chair seat. To take the stretchers out of the legs should be easy, but unfortunately someone repaired the chair by hammering finishing nails into the joints. This makes it very difficult to disassemble the joints. You can see the technique I use to remove the nails.

With the chair base taken apart, I can then focus on making replacement parts on the lathe. I'm still new at woodturning so I had a professional woodturner give me some advice (off camera) so I could be more successful remaking the chair stretchers. I share some advice for those looking to get into woodturning, including a book from the American Association of Woodturning (AAW) called Getting Started in Wood Turning (see link below). I also show turning a stretcher to see the transformation from a block of wood to a new replacement part.

The next step is to fit the new replacement parts by drilling mortices and shaping the tenons. This is where chairmaking skills come into play. It's important that the mortises are drilled at the right angles so the chair will go together properly. When I was part way through this process, I realized that one of the legs was damaged beyond repair. That meant I had to turn another part on the lathe.

Once all the parts were fit on the chair, I glued it up and set it aside to dry. After that I trimmed the new leg to length and attached the metal foot from the old leg. The chair is now whole gain.

The new walnut wood needed stain so I found one that matched the chair color and applied it. Once the stain dried, it looked flat and the color was dull. I applied a coat of Howard Feed-N-Wax, which contains citrus oil to penetrate the wood and wax to protect the surface. It made such a difference, the existing chair parts looked dull in comparison. I decided to wash down the chair and apply the Feed-N-Wax to the whole chair for a beautiful shine.

This video shows the first of two chairs I'm restoring. The next video will show the assembly of the second chair as I share some gluing techniques, including repairing split wood. The link to that video will be added below.

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LINKS:
Spreader Clamps - https://amzn.to/3caGsEw
🇨🇦 Canadian link - https://amzn.to/3DfxzFF
Book: Getting Started in Wood Turning by AAW - https://amzn.to/30r4fxU
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Sawset Workshop Protractor - https://amzn.to/3Cgqwey
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Plastic Razor Blades - https://amzn.to/3qA9uGm
🇨🇦 https://amzn.to/3nauelG
Howard Feed-N-Wax - https://amzn.to/2YNq8GY
🇨🇦 https://amzn.to/3DfbLtZ

Note: purchases made with these links help contribute to our video production work

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See the tools we use in our workshop and the tools we recommend: https://www.amazon.com/shop/homeimpro...
🇨🇦 Canadian link - https://www.amazon.ca/shop/homeimprov...

This video is hosted by Scott Bennett, Owner of Wooden It Be Nice - Furniture Repair in Brooklin, Ontario, Canada. https://WoodenItBeNice.ca

#woodturning #restoration #damage