Wooden furniture of good quality lasts for years, but under the stresses of everyday use the leg of a table can develop a wobble or the arm of a chair can become loose. Instead of sticking a magazine under the table leg, it’s usually fairly easy to do a minor repair.
A good general home repair book probably will have instructions that can get you through the job. “Reader’s Digest New Fix-It Yourself Manual,” for instance, has an outstanding section on furniture repair.
Another source is the Internet. A good article on furniture repair can be found by going to www.acehardware.com and clicking on the “Helpful Hardware Man’s Corner” link.
Here are a few general tips from those sources and others on fixing a wobbly leg.
Preparing the joint
The first step in fixing a wobbly leg on a wooden chair or table is to determine how the leg is supposed to be attached.
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Many chairs have legs with rounded pegs on their ends that fit into round openings on the underside of the seat. Generally such chairs will have bars of wood called stretchers running between the legs to help hold them firmly in place.
Other chairs and many tables use glue blocks, wedges of wood braced diagonally across the corners of the furniture pieces and often attached to the legs with screws.
After spreading an old blanket or newspapers on the floor to prevent damaging the top of the furniture, upend the piece and examine the leg connections to determine what has gone wrong. Generally you’ll find a leg has become partially dislodged from its socket or the screw has worked its way loose.
If it’s a chair with a loose socket, you’ll need to re-glue the joint. Using a small block of soft wood such as pine to cushion the blows, tap the joint with a hammer or mallet to pull the leg completely free from the socket. Remove all the old glue from the leg and the socket using sandpaper or coarse steel wool. Because this area will be hidden, you don’t have to sand the wood perfectly smooth. Vinegar will help remove stubborn wood glue.
After sanding, check to see how the peg fits in its socket. It should have at least a little friction as it slides in and out of the hole. If it slides out too easily, wrap silk thread around the peg to build it up until it’s a snug fit.
Check the rest of the leg joints and spreader connections to be sure they are still secure. If they’re not, repeat the process you used with the first leg to remove the glue and prepare the joint for re-gluing.
Use wood glue to reattach the leg and to secure any other loose joints. Spread glue both around the peg and inside the socket on the underside of the chair seat. A cotton swab will help spread the glue inside the socket.
Clamping
Return the chair to an upright position and make sure all four legs sit squarely and evenly on the floor. Use clamps to apply pressure on the joint for 24 hours to give the glue ample time to set.
To hold the legs in alignment relative to one another, you may need to wrap them under pressure. You can do that by stretching an elastic bungee cord around the legs and hooking the ends of the cord together.
To hold just two legs in place, you can create a tourniquet-type brace. Loop a length of rope around and legs and tie the ends together. Place a length of wood or a dowel in the gap between the ropes and twist to tighten. When it’s tight enough, wedge the piece of wood in place.
With glue block construction, the problem is often just a loose screw. Retightening the screw may correct the wobble. If the problem is a joint that has come unglued, the steps used for a peg-type leg should work.
Sometimes, though, the leg can’t be rescrewed because of physical damage to the leg or glue block. In such cases, some ingenuity may be required.
Examine the damaged area and see if it’s possible to remove and replace broken parts. Sometimes what’s needed is a little reinforcement such as a couple large metal washers where the screw goes through the glue block.
If the screw is loose because the wood of the chair or table leg is deteriorated, remove the screw and shore up the screw hole.
A small hole that has become stripped can be fixed by applying glue to a wooden golf tee and tapping it into the hole. When the glue dries, cut off the part of the tee that sticks out of the hole, and you’ll be left with a solid base to drive a new screw.
In other cases a wood filler may be needed. When used as directed, wood fillers close gaps in natural wood and make furniture more structurally sound. In general, though, I try to avoid trying to set screws in wood filler.
The general principles here can be applied to other furniture repairs.
For instance, some chairs have decorative rods called spindles that form the back support. When a spindle comes loose it is fixed in just the same way as a peg-type leg.