Screws

Broken chair repaired

I might be getting old. I repaired a broken chair today. All I have left to do is cut off the protruding ends of a couple of screws. It won't make it perfect, but there will be less risk of milady snagging her nylons or some drunken lout gouging the s*** out of his leg. I have a Dremel tool and a kit full of attachments, there should be a cut-off disk in there somewhere, so it would be short work to actually make the cuts. But grinding things with a high speed grinding wheel generates grinding dust which needs to be cleaned up. Okay, cutting two quarter-inch screws isn't going to make that much dust, I could probably get away with sweeping it into the corners, but there's something about grinder dust that I just don't like. Maybe it's the way it goes everywhere. You might collect most of it with broom or a vacuum cleaner, but you know you are going to be finding traces of it in out of the way places for months to come. Or maybe the way that's it a nasty kind of dust being as it is made of not-quite microscopic chunks jagged rock and likewise tiny torn bits of metal. You don't want to get any inside of any electronic, or even plain old electric equipment. Could be the death of the equipment, or even you.

Dremel Model 300

The obvious solution was to take it up to the garage, but now that I've been thinking about it, I should probably take it outside. Let the microbes and natural corrosion work it over for a bit, turn it into sand.

This chair and its twin were the last things we loaded onto my truck when I moved younger son home a couple of months ago. Turned sideways, I didn't think they would struggle with the wind much, and they're made of wood so they ought to be able to handle being outside in the wind for a day. Well, they were fine, until this one wiggled around in his restraints enough to turn sideways and then we got on the expressway and wind broke the seat back off of its support. We didn't discover this until we stopped to check the ropes and the load. I don't know when it actually came apart, it could have been one minute or ten. In any case, the back of seat was still on the truck, caught in something before it fell off. So I had all the pieces.

DAP Plastic Wood

Well, almost. A strip of plywood got ripped out of the back of the seat back. It was only one ply about three or four inches wide. I patched it with some plastic wood. Nasty stuff. There's a reason they warn you to use with 'adequate ventilation': I came down with a killer headache. Took me a while to realize what the problem was, but when I did I turned on the exhaust fan (specially installed for just this purpose) and left it running for a day.

Testor' Gloss Black Spray Enamel

File and sand the patch to match, painted with some old Testor's black spray paint I had lying around. I just realized what a fortunate coincidence it was that the chair was black. Black is easy to match, especially it it's the back. Can you imagine if it was red or orange or something? It would be impossible to match, you would have to either paint the whole chair, or settle for a third rate repair like you might find at a ten dollar motel.

Gorilla Glue

Glued the bracket back on with Gorilla Glue. Did you know that Gorilla Glue needs water? Sounds a lot like the masonry cement Osmany used when building my daughter's stairway to heaven. Glue was strong, but not strong enough to handle an amateur weight lifter. Okay, he abused it some, but given the structure, glue wasn't really enough.

60mm x 6mm x 1 flat head machine screw

That's what brought us to screws. $1.78 at Lowe's for (2) 60mm x 6mm x 1 flat head machine screws and $1.78 for a package to 10 matching nuts. They also had a package with 4 nuts for the same price. I only need two for this project, but my inner hoarder says I am liable to need some of these, someday, so let's get the ten-pack. I was a bit worried that the screws might not be long enough. The seat back is about a half of an inch thick, the seat back support is about 3/4 of an inch, the 'rubber' spacer adds another 1/2". Add in the fact that these pieces are all curved, there was a very real possibility that the 60mm screws (that's 2 3/8") wouldn't protrude far enough to be able to engage the nuts. Such was not the case, obviously, or I wouldn't be worried about cutting off the excess. I think my error here was thinking that 60mm was two inches and not considering how much of a fraction extra there was. But it doesn't matter, these were the longest Lowe's had, the next shorter size would have been much too short.

Once I had the screws in hand and the rubber support glued back in place, it was child's play to drill and countersink holes in the seat back, run the screws in and fasten the nuts. One of the washers is kind of groady. I thought for sure I would have had plenty of washers to at home, but the only ones I found were these two. One is shiny new, but the other looks like it came out of the swamp.

Testor' Gloss Black Enamel

I painted the screw heads with some more Testor's black enamel, this time from a bottle. Now all I need to is trim the screws.

The 'rubber' spacer is a pair of metal and rubber circular concoctions, each about two inches in diameter. Two machine screws come in from the support and six wood screws go into the seat back. These six wood screws only went in about a quarter of an inch, and it's these six that let go when the wind caught the seat back. I tried to dissect this spacer, but given its inner steel structure, it was going to a hammer and tongs effort which would likely render unusable. Therefor, the choice to perform a second rate repair using glue and a couple of through-screws.