A Broken Leg

We have a repair of a wardrobe’s broken leg. Much of this type of furniture may look good in a catalogue but can be very fragile when moved. And as you can see both its leg and a corner of the chipboard base have broken off. This furniture is fragile. This is what the legs looked like originally.

It is simply not possible to restore such damage and reattach the original leg with its original fittings. The use of contemporary materials in this type of furniture’s construction such as chipboard and MDF, coupled with the sectional sizes of material used and the fixings employed sometimes make for challenging mends. 
 
Firstly we repair and rebuild the corner using two part epoxy filler. This builds the corner back to its original shape. The filler works well both as a filler and as an adhesive. It is ideal for such jobs.
As mentioned trying to reconstruct the corner with the original leg will not be possible. However we still need this wardrobe to stand at its original height to match its identical twin. 
 
Here is the original leg and below it the gluing up of timber sections that will make new ‘legs’. 

The gist of the repair idea is sketched out here.

Here are the new legs in place. They are much chunkier than the originals legs but they were designed that way as we needed a large surface area to glue them onto the wardrobe and span between the repair and ‘solid’ wood.

Whilst this piece of furniture might look like real wood it is chipboard covered with a foil printed to look like wood. The above photo shows the foil peeling away. And the photo below that shows  the foil has been stuck down with superglue. The tape holds everything in position whilst the glue dries.following

As an aside the workshop is interested in all things heritage. Seen in the graveyard of St Edmunds Dudley was a gravestone. This monument was erected in 1786. For this locality unusual because its made of slate. It’s safe to assume that this would have been Welsh slate. The photo shows the relief sculpture at the top of the stone. Rather fine for its era.