Repairing a chair, badly, then less badly
There is a wooden kitchen chair that came with the flat. Beech, probably, with a rush seat that has seen better decades. One of the back rungs started to wobble in the spring, and by August it had come out of its hole entirely and was living on the windowsill.
My first repair was a disaster. I squeezed a lot of wood glue into the hole, pushed the rung back in and stood the chair in a corner. The next morning the glue had dried into a shiny bead around the joint and the rung still turned in its socket. Wood glue does not fill gaps. It just sits there being hard.
So I read a little and tried again, properly this time.
First I scraped all the old glue out of the hole and off the end of the rung with a small chisel and some patience. Fresh glue will not stick to old glue, and this chair had clearly been repaired before by someone who also did not know that.
The rung was now too thin for the hole. The fix for this is old and simple: wrap a strip of thin cloth or a shaving of wood around the end, glue it on, let it dry, then sand it down until the rung fits snugly. I used a strip cut from an old cotton shirt.
Then glue on both surfaces, rung in, and clamp it. I do not own proper clamps, so I used a ratchet strap from the bike rack around the whole back of the chair, with folded cardboard to protect the wood. It looked ridiculous and worked perfectly.
Twenty-four hours later the joint was solid. I have been sitting on the chair for two weeks and leaning back on it more than I should, as a test. It holds.
The seat is next. That one I am less confident about.