My son and his wife have bought a used round dining table. Made from solid oak (modern manufacture) it seems that something has caused it to become split at one point. I don't want to wade in with glues/fillers/clamps etc. without seeking professional advice first. So I'd welcome advice and guidance on how best to proceed.
The table is round (approx. 1.4M dia) constructed of modern 'engineered'(?) oak boards. There is a segmented ring of oak running all around the underside edge. Once straightened up I had planned on fixing a steel flat bar (on edge) along the inside edge of the segmented ring under the table top. I think this would hold everything in place but first I need to get it closed enough and possibly filled or glued?
Photographs here:
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very much appreciate your views on how to best approach this repair and what to use.
I don't think that's fixable! Looks like the wood wasn't seasoned sufficiently before being made into a table, and it has relieved its built-in stresses by splitting. If you force that split together, it will split somewhere else.
I think the best bet is leave it for another few months and see if the gap opens any more.
If it is stable, simplest "bodge" option might be to fill it with epoxy and dust with some similar wood dust on top to disguise the fill, then polish it up a bit.
I'm sure someone will come along with a better solution!
Firstly I'd leave well alone for a few months in the room where it will be used. I bought from my late fathers house a wooden table that my grandfather made, having spent several years in a house with the central heating set on "nuclear" there were big gaps between the boards making up the top and some warping. Its now spent a year here and the top is now flat and the gap no longer able to swallow large pens...
glue to hold it together. See what it's like once the table has equalised with its enviroment in three months time. I'd then go for the "PVA and wood dust filler" route on what remains. Get the wood dust from underneath near the crack, it will colour match and thus be almost invisible,
My attempts with PVA /sawdust were not successful - the colour match was very poor and the fill much darker. What I did succeed with recently on a turned piece was filling a cavity in the wood with sawdust and then dropping CA glue in - I succeeded in getting the in- fill to be sufficiently proud that I was able to turn it flush with a well sharpened tool and then sanded such that it blended in remarkably and took a full polish.
I got away with this without experimenting, but I should have done so in reality - the turned piece could have tolerated a darker feature - so I would recommend that before you start you get hold of some oak and in some way reproduce the crack and see what works.
Thanks to all who replied and yes, you all pretty much confirm my own fears/feelings.
My initial gut feeling was to clamp it (top to bottom) using a couple of angle iron bridging bars across the split - well protected of course. Then to drill and screw a heavy (4mm) flat bar against the inside ridge of the segmented section underneath. I reckoned if I made this bar around 300mm long with three screws each side of the split it might just about contain it. I didn't expect this to narrow the split very much, if at all, and would then have filled the split. But what with? I've used the glue and sawdust mix many times before with mixed results (texture/colour etc.). I've also used clear apoxy resin with sawdust - grips very will but becomes very brittle, so perhaps not for this repair.
I've watched (is it) the Restoration Man on Sky. He uses hard wax for a lot of filling type repairs - might be the way to go? I agree that the split may creep but If I can get a strong enough fix with the flat bar screwed to the back perhaps that might do it. Anybody have experience working with this hard wax stuff?
Problem is I probably won't get a second chance if the first attempt messes up!! :(
"It was im" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@bt.com:
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Well with wax you do :-)
Specialist hardware shops and good mail order places such as Axminster Tools sell dyed waxes for filling. You can blend one or more wax sticks in order to get the correct shade. I'm not to sure if that gap would be to wide to fill with a wax based filler, leave the table in situ for a couple of months to see whether it shrinks.
Another option would be to use to Brummer Yellow Label. Sand down the table surface and re-finish.
You say it's a used table: was the split present when you bought it or has it developed since? If the split has always been there, in my opinion others are unlikely to develop but forcing it closed could create unwanted tensions that trigger other splits nearby. If it's only just happened the surface of the split may still have the moisture content of the inner wood (the outer few cells of a piece of wood are always drier than the remainder once the timber has stabilised) and may not yet have dried out and shrunk away from the crack.
I'm afraid that in this context I'm uk.d-i-y's answer to "The Flight of the Phoenix"
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because although I'm doing this sort of repair all the time, it's with the smaller and thinner pieces of wood on stringed musical instruments. If the crack is small and stable then in this context you might get away with the wax filler mentioned above. Otherwise, you might find one of my two different approaches will work, depending on the size of the crack and the stability of the wood.
The first is to glue, clamp and tie the split. I use hot hide glue because it's strong when used properly and has a self-clamping action when drying. In your case, you might consider clamping by temporarily attaching plastic bits, like these, where the screw-holes won't be seen
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second approach is to splice in a bit of new wood. I keep hundreds of old scraps so that when I need one I can usually find something that will match age, type, colour and grain and once it is spliced in, the repair can be almost invisible. A rummage through the scrap bin at your local timber yard might produce something suitable. For larger cracks, I plane the splint down to size: for smaller ones I use the actual shavings from the plane.
You could experiment by screwing two pieces of hardwood parallel to each other on each side of the split underneath the top and at least 4 cms from the split, Then you can try cramping the crack shut. The experiment is to see how much force is needed to close the crack. If a small amount is needed you may get away with gluing but if a lot of force is required then filling may be the only way out as indicated above.
Don't buy cheap shit furniture. In particular, don't come to me, tell me my tables are too expensive, go away and buy one of these, and then complain back to me when that splits. Oh look, nice big end grain edge to a table - but then they've got a good wide belt sander to smooth it and a spray room to make it all smooth afterwards. Cheaper than real cabinetmaking anyway.
No clamping is going to fix it. Oak is stonger than steel. Any credible mild steel strapping applied to oak will find the strapping being distorted as the timber moves.
The "big fix" for this is to saw down the crack, re-joint and re- assemble. Sounds drastic, but it's actually fairly invisible afterwards. Usually - you do lose a blade kerf of width, which can be an issue if it's circular.
The "reasonable" fix for this is to use a filler. I would favour two: depending on whether I want to re-finish the table afterwards. If you don't, then it's the usual coloured hard waxes (Liberon sets, from any good toolshop, like Axminster). If you're going to re-work it anyway (I make lots of pieces like this from Nakashima-style "naturalistic" timber with all sorts of splits in it) then I use West System epoxy mixed with phenolic microballoon filler and coloured. Scrape it smooth afterwards with a card scraper.
Mostly though I'd ignore it. I wouldn't do anything to a table like this (maybe just wax) until I'd had it in its final location for about five years, to give the timber a chance to really season and stabilise.
Also check how the table top is fastened to the underframe - it needs to be able to move cross-grain, to allow for this sort of movement.
If you can't afford solid oak, you certainly can't afford badly-made solid oak.
Most of my furniture is reproductions of and variants on styles of over 100 years ago, built with the same materials and methods, and intended to last equally as long. It is, incidentally, mostly of oak. That out-lasts the '73 oil crisis, the Great Depression of 1929, two world wars and Thatcherism. Buying it cheaply because you can't afford any better this year is short-sighted.
If you can't afford a good solid oak table, buy one made from a man- made board instead. It'll look nearly the same, and it won't split like this.
What's wrong with putting a dutchman in it? that would have been the traditional way to fix a defect during manufacture. Either do it well so its invisible or do it badly as a feature.
I second what Andy says. The best table I ever bought was made of MDF core with black-stained birch veneer, all on a chromed steel frame. We used it from 1974 to 2002, and I sold it for about twice what I paid for it. Dreadfully 1970's, but then...
I think I would go for wax in this case, and be prepared to do some more now that the table has moved house. You can't pull a split like this together, and it may open or close, and probably will - seasonally anyway.
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