Ornae Archives
Testing hard disks on Mac OSX
the emergent property seems to be crap
Apple's iDisk network traffic is encrypted
Boneless country ribs, experimental recipe,
Humans, natural organizers to a fault...
All across the changes in six throws.
Political labels, meaningless?
The writing zealot has a new friend, and some silly sentences...
Lily Allen: chirpy brutality. Nice work if you can do it...
Trance, downbeat, brazilian, funk, and jazz? That's a genre?
An obsession with flags
Afraid of "Big Government"?
Curated computing", WTF?
Fire under mountain, PI/Grace
hearts's desire
Finally, sensible thoughts about terrorism from a bomb disposal guy who should know.
On Apostrophes
Who wants an overgrown iPhone?
Christians and creationism.
decision
new rule ... no more throwing bears at people.
Drowning
She was looking for "The Door Into Summer"
..under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world...
On community...
On time...
On Spelling
The History of Tolerance
Motives
...The tug of the future. The reason you tried...
...political posturing gone horrifically awry.
...and she was determined not to be afraid.
...finite horizons of predictable problems and predictable joys...
...There is only a gradual wearing away of the sharp edges...
Code as literature, the most important element of style
Deconstructing Wall Street Newspeak
Requiem
Fake Steve Jobs, backfiring?
DRM, Denial of Rights Management
Bill O'Reilly, John Edwards, and racial slurs.
The widening economic disparity
Oh man, here comes Rita
Katrina slams New Orleans. Is There Blame?
Apple users have another tempest in our teapot.
Carving up trees as therapy.
If a tree falls in a hurricane, does it make a noise?
Torturing your customers, A Business Model
What! Bean mush again mom?
Automatic poetry on eBay
Flaming on Miami Beach
Cautionary tale
It won't die Jim!
Fresh Timber
More on Music
Almost Worthless Music
E-Commerce
Formalisms, Frames, Footstools
The Opposite of Minimalism
Lots of Photos
Repairing breaks
Beasties
Period influences
Sweat shops and consumer goods
Galloping furniture
Calm Interiors
Ode to Keith Haring
Good junk
Broken chairs
Floors in Florida
Shoji in America
About Ornae
Repairing breaks · Saturday April 10, 2004
When my grandfather repaired a broken chair leg, he bored a few holes in each side, then glued in some pins. While there were jigs to help align the holes in either side of the material, positioning was critical in both dimensions, and flush repairs on complex parts were really tough. Also the cross-section of the pins didn’t provide enough strength for demanding locations like the rail-to-stile join. These pictures show chairs with stiles broken at the rail.
In 1955, an engineer and woodworking hobbyist, Herman Stiener, developed a system to replace the dowel with a small oval plate of wood. He also created a unique self-indexing saw which could precisely carve vertical slots in the joining faces. This was the Plate Joiner, also known as a Biscuit Joiner. The combination of the much stronger “biscuit” and the easily aligned joining tool, made impossible repairs simple. Bear in mind that the ‘biscuit joiner’ is really just a ‘biscuit slot cutter’, we still have to do the joining with biscuits, glue, clamps, straps, jigs, and friends.
I used two biscuits in each stile, aligned to maximize load distribution from front to back, where the stiles are subjected to the greatest stress. In the center picture, above, and here you can see the biscuits dry-fitted in their slots.
After gluing and clamping, and some minor surgery to replace wood lost from the splat, the two chairs are strong as new, only waiting for a little touch-up where material was splintered off the breaks.
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