Thread: repair a table

Hi Sabine and welcome, we need photos, so if you can put a few on. A picture tells a whole lot more than words.

Originally Posted by sabine

G'day!

Got an old timber table with fold down sides. Card table? Quite heavy for it's size about 48cm across with sides down, plus 28cm extra on each side with sides up and 76cm long and 75cm height. The sides are held up by pull out support bits.

The main top section is made of 4 lengths, outer 2 wider than the inner 2 and the sides are each made of 2 lengths. The legs are slender and square tapering slightly thinner and slightly outward at the bottom. The edges of the table top are planed that old fashioned simple planing style all around, sides down or up.
The table is dark brown, and I think the wood is fairly brown, definitely not light colour.

Problem is over time the 'strap hinges' have bent causing the top pieces to lift and the centre pieces have come loose and they now come off.

Does this make sense to anyone?
Would I just try to buy replacement hinges, take the old ones off and redo it that way? Where can I get these? Bunnings?!
Is this an old card table perhaps?

G'day and welcome, Sabine.
It would be great to see the piece. But at the outset, let's say that Bunnings is almost certainly going to be the place that you will NOT be going. It sounds like the table wants to be re-built, and that could be fun. As a result, using good glues and techniques, you'll end up with something that is at least as good as new, but probably better. There are so many products available these days and the forums will give you many hours of happy learning. Hinges and such are special items, and there are places to buy them of course. You may decide upon a length of piano hinge, or some other type....perhaps a gate hinge, but without seeing what the existing hardware looks like and what it does, it's hard to make recommendations. Do post a picture and you'll get a flood of ideas!

Big Mike

Okay photos coming asap.

Hi and thanks for your response!
Here are some photos! The good camera is being repaired so hope the table is obvious enough amongst the clutter of toy/spare room. Timber is in good nick just some chalk scribble, thanks kids, and cobwebs!
cheers
sabine


don't argue with a fool, or you may be mistaken for one

Hi Sabine - Looks like it was left in the weather for a bit - those top boards have comprehensively let go, haven't they?

This should be a very straightforward repair - dis-assembly already mostly done. Mark your boards so's you can rejoin them in their present sequence (maximises chance of getting a good surface, if they haven't gone off independently since letting-go of each other). I'd clean up & re-joint the edges, & re-glue, using a judicious biscuit or two if necessary to get the top alignment as close to perfect as the boards allow. With luck & a modicum of care, you may not need any levelling of the new surfaces, so won't even have to take off the old finish, unless you wish to do so.

I'd get myself some pretty solid new hinges - they obviously don't have to be flash, to stay in keeping with the original. The reason I suggest this is that I'd bet much of the reason for the bent hinges is the single centre slider supports for the flaps. There would be a lot of force on the hinges whenever someone leans heavily on a corner. Not much you can do about that now, though, without adding more supports, which would mean chopping more holes in the skirt, which is against the 'rules' for restoration, but perfectly ok for a 're-make'.

Good luck...

thanks for that! and would i put the new hinges where the old ones were? and do i just take apart the top? and what do you mean by 'biscuit' like a wedge? and someone said not bunnings for parts but where do i get solid hinges and what are they made of? and and and lol!

Does anyone have ideas about the timber this is made of? An unstained section of timber (underneath) shows the timber to be a yellow brown and hardwood i guess. my fingernail cannot dig in.
The lengths are straight and true, just lifted off where hinges bent or where they were nailed, 2 nails per inner lengths, and nailed from underneath. There are no attachment marks from the top so it is reasonably nicely made. I think proper care needs to be taken with a table made like this such as not leaning heavily on the corners when the sides are up and also when lifting the table using the cross bar underneath to lift it rather than the table top itself. I'm not going to sand it at all I just want it to work well and look nice.

Originally Posted by sabine

thanks for that! and would i put the new hinges where the old ones were? and do i just take apart the top? and what do you mean by 'biscuit' like a wedge? and someone said not bunnings for parts but where do i get solid hinges and what are they made of? and and and lol!

One thing at a time!

You will probably find your new hinges don't match the original screw holes. This is a good thing, because fresh screws in fresh holes will be more secure, anyway.

Looks like no taking apart needed! Just unscrew the couple of pocket screws I can see on the underview, and remove the cleats screwed under the flaps.

A biscuit is a very carefully contrived bit of wood that fits into a slot cut by a special tool. Since you asked, you obviously don't have a biscuit cutter. You can buy a bit for your router & smaller biscuits made by Triton that do the exact same job. Biscuits, dowels, tongues serve no other purpose than for alignment during assembly & clamping. If your boards have remained straight & aligned to each other, and you are accomplished at jointing perfect 90* sides, you don't need anything, but if as is more likely, the boards have twisted or bent a little relative to one another since the glue let go (a long time in the last, by appearances!), you may have to use something to help keep the table surface aligned as much as possible when re-glueing.

Much as I detest the big B myself (for several reasons), they usually have a pretty reasonable range of utilitarian hinges that ought to do the job. The person who said that may have been expecting to see something fancy like 'rule-joint hinges'. You only need those for the fancy edge on the flaps called a rule-joint, 'cos it looks like the joint on the old folding Boxwood rules that were once de-rigeur in any woodshop.

Cheers,

Originally Posted by sabine

Does anyone have ideas about the timber this is made of? An unstained section of timber (underneath) shows the timber to be a yellow brown and hardwood i guess. my fingernail cannot dig in.

Not the foggiest, but I'm sure you will get lots of suggestions, and the variation will be extreme.

Trying to id a wood from a picture is a mug's game. Especially when you don't know where it's from. So many woods around the world look superficially the same - that's why so many entirely different species have the same common name.

My (not very helpful) 2c....

Sabine, think of biscuits as easy-to-use dowels. They don't provide any real structural strength - although they're often misused that way - but they are a major help in keeping pieces aligned when gluing up.

Replacing the existing hinges would be my preference as it keeps it closer to original. However I recently repaired an almost identical drop-leaf table that had had the hinges replaced a couple of times and doing it again wasn't a feasible option without incurring a major rebuild. Way too many screw holes already to add more.

I used piano hinges on the underside of the table instead, but whether you can get away with it depends on how much of a gap is on the underside of the joint when the leaves are opened.

Originally Posted by IanW

Trying to id a wood from a picture is a mug's game. Especially when you don't know where it's from. So many woods around the world look superficially the same - that's why so many entirely different species have the same common name.

Yeah, but it's fun. I'm also sure that a lot of mills play the same game when deciding what name to sell their milled wood as. "Well, the tree was a River Redgum but it doesn't have the obvious resin lines. I reckon we should sell it as Forest Redgum..."

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

Yeah, but it's fun. I'm also sure that a lot of mills play the same game when deciding what name to sell their milled wood as. "Well, the tree was a River Redgum but it doesn't have the obvious resin lines. I reckon we should sell it as Forest Redgum..."

All too true, Skew (about what gets sold as what).

And yeah, having a go at picture id can be fun - at least it gives the inquirer a few ideas to follow up on. I recently asked for help myself, & got several answers that turned out to be spot on, so occasionally, (particularly when provenence is known), it's do-able.

But sometimes I see some really wild suggestions!

Cheers,

....can't believe how long it's been. Now able to start projects....

I have taken apart the table. It has 6 little screws per hinge, 4 hinges and 2 larger screws holding each outer top pieces to the frame. Of the inner top pieces 1 is still held in place with 2 large screws, the other was not attached with screws but to a centre slider with 3 thin nails. I wonder why this one was left relatively unattached.

All the boards are straight and true.

I'm wondering if wood glue will be enough to close the gaps appearing in the corners. Only dowelling holds the frame sides to the legs.

You can see the side flaps are held together just with a cross piece which even after tightening the screws still allows the 2 pieces to slide along each other a bit. Any ideas of how to prevent this movement?

There are no cleats on this table. I have tried to show exactly how it is made by taking the photos to reflect this. I hope to restore this table to a non-wobbling, non-bent top item. I will not sand anything nor add anymore screws or nails than were there originally. All screw holes are original and the screws were nice and tight.