Q: How do we repair broken spindles on the backs of two teak chairs?
McLean, Va.
A: If similar pieces on two chairs broke just from general use, there could be something wrong with the chair design, or maybe the wood is a weak type and not really teak. Keep that in mind as you decide how much time or money to invest in repairs.
Older chairs were built so they could be repaired, because chair joints almost inevitably loosen over time as people scoot them around or lean back and forth on them. Joinery on vintage chairs interlocks and is usually secured with hide glue. It softens when a little warm water is brushed on, allowing joints to be taken apart.
Carol Fiedler Kawaguchi, who has spent more than two decades repairing chairs of various vintages through her C-Saw antique restoration and repair business (cfkawaguchi.com/csaw) on Bainbridge Island, Wash., knows of four ways to repair a broken spindle on a chair. For a good-as-new repair, you would need to disassemble the chair, clean out the recesses where the spindles fit into the framing, make a replacement spindle and put everything back together. Tipping the chair over and inspecting how it’s held together is the first step; from there, it depends on the chair. If you want a coach, Fiedler Kawaguchi will be teaching an online chair repair class, New Life for an Old Chair, in January, where students can get customized advice on repairing their chairs. (Read more and register at bainbridgebarn.org.)
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For antique chairs, Fiedler Kawaguchi has sometimes been able to find replacement spindles online that are a good match. (One website that offers a selection is hardwood-stix.com/chair-stretchers-and-spindles.) For a modern but simple shape like your chairs have, you could probably mimic the shape using hand tools, especially if you start with a dowel that just needs to be shaved down to make the shape you need. A rasp and lots of sanding would work. Professionals would probably use a drawknife and spokeshave; a YouTube video, “Spindle Repair on a Chair Back” by Fixing Furniture, shows how.
Other options are less work, but the trade-off may be that they don’t look as good or aren’t quite as strong.
Instead of taking the chair apart to fit in a new spindle, you could make a replacement piece that’s a little too long, cut it diagonally to fit one piece into the framing at the top and the other piece into the framing at the bottom, then glue them together in place in the chair. A diagonal cut is essential, because end-to-end wood joints don’t hold well; the diagonal shape allows wood fibers to be glued more side to side, which is stronger. (Yellow glue would work best for this splice, because you would never want this joint to come apart.)
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Or, because wood flexes a bit, you could make a replacement piece just slightly longer than the broken part is now, with a taper at one end that matches the good end of the original piece and a shorter tapered end on the other. After cleaning out the recesses where the old spindle fit into the chair, you could set the good end into place, then force the spindle to bend a bit until you get the other end to snap into place in the other recess.
A final option, given that the chair has an upholstered seat, would be to reuse the existing spindle but accommodate its too-short length by attaching a piece of wood to the frame behind the seat, where the cushion would at least partially hide it. You could then seat the spindle in that block. Depending on whether the break was at the top or bottom of the spindle, the bend in the shape might not wind up a perfect match. But one beauty of this approach is that you wouldn’t have to stain a replacement piece to match the rest of the chair.
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