Hi folks,
working currently on some moller chairs, no 75. The left leg on one chair was damaged by a dog bites and I would like to change that leg. Fortunately, I have another broken chair that I could use the leg of. Never disassambled a chair before. Do I need for this just a hot air gun and a rubber mallet? Is there anything else I should take into consideration?
Many thanks for your help.
I'm sure that @leif-ericson knows about these.
It's possible (if not probable) that the seat rail tenons interlock inside the legs determining proper order of assembly/disassembly. I think there were photos posted in a past thread on the topic if you can find it in the archive.
Steady but gentle heat, steam, hot water, rubber mallet are all helpful.
Possible, but you'd need to remove the cord and take apart a few joints, with risk of damage to the wood if some stubborn joints don't want to come apart.
I'd try out a wood dust and hide glue putty for filling in the voids, then a combo of oiling and tint markers to match as required. That technique can offer surprisingly decent results.
You can disassemble this. I prefer @cdsilva’s solution. But if you must have a go: remove the cord. Remove the side rails from the rear legs. Then you get to a difficult point. You can try to remove the backrest from the rear legs, but there is a lot of short grain there and I expect it will just split. Alternatively you could cut the backrest off the legs with a thin kerf Japanese handsaw and drill out the center of the dowels, split the outside ring of dowel out and replace the dowels with you can remove the rear leg from the rear rail and put the new leg on.
Incidentally, I have a couple of factory backrests for this chair. They were never even finish sanded.
Thank you very much. Sounds more complicated than I thought. But since all moller chairs I have had
had surprisingly stable chair frames despite they were 50-60 year old, I expected disassambling this will
be not easy. I'll give it a try and see how far I can get. Will try not to split any legs.
Hey guys, it is irresponsible to advise someone to disassemble a chair - moreover with non-professional advices - if he has never done it before!
@Browkin, it is highly recommended not to disassemble the chair!
You risk completely damaging the chair if you've never done this before. It's real craftsmanship, you can't just do it incidentally if you have no idea about it.
cdsilva's suggestion is the best solution. You can get a very good result with his proposal.
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