Wood repairs

Solid timber moves. A panel 900 mm wide can change by two or three millimetres across its width between a humid August and a February with the heating on, and a piece of furniture that stops it moving will split instead. That single fact explains most of what is in this section: why a table top cracks, why a chair joint works loose, and why a runner glued along its whole length takes a carcase side with it. The entry on filling a split without hiding it starts by measuring the same split a fortnight apart, because that measurement decides everything else.

The method here is always the same shape. Find out what has actually failed rather than what is visible, take the repair back to clean bare wood, put solid timber where material has been lost, and choose an adhesive on whether the joint will ever need to come apart again. That last decision has its own entry in the finishes and glue section. Clamping pressure is given in terms of what closes a joint line, never in figures nobody can measure at a domestic bench, and every repair described here has gone back into daily use in a house.