Chair Repair for DIY Dummies

Bow frame spindle-back chair

Long before there was an internet or Wikipedia, college freshman taking the required composition course were often told that Reader's Digest was not an acceptable source. That got our staffer thinking: just how acceptable is "information" reworded from a Reader's Digest article by an utterly clueless freelancer and posted at a content farm – especially at eHow.com? Well, we took a look at "How to Fix Chair Legs" (now¹ at HomeSteady.com), a reword job performed by Darci Pauser. It wasn't pretty...

Pauser found a post on RD.com among the content that is now at FamilyHandyman; something called "Reglue a Wobbly Chair." It's still out there, although spiffed up a bit in the past eleven years. Darci's problem was that the instructions were for taking apart and reassembling an entire wooden chair (see the spindle-back bow-frame chair used in the post above), a far more complex undertaking than a loose leg or two.

We'll be frank: Pauser did a remarkably crappy job of "synthesizing" (i.e., copying, rewording, and pasting) the instructions in an attempt to limit the repair to the legs alone. According to Darci, in order to fix what one can only assume is a loose leg or two on a chair, one must completely remove all legs. That's gonna be difficult for many chairs, particularly those in which the leg extends to form the back. oops... What Pauser should have said, and would have if she'd had the slightest idea of what she was doing, was that the methods for fixing a chair leg vary widely because the construction of chairs varies widely, as does the reason a chair needs repair. Many can be fixed without complete disassembly; often with a little glue and a band clamp or two. Pauser's ignorance of the process is sufficiently deep that she actually includes these instructions: "Use a dead blow hammer to remove any legs that are loose, but not completely broken off."

If only Darcy knew what a dead blow hammer is... and

"...screw legs to the frame through the existing holes..."

It's too bad our Dumbass of the Day didn't have enough experience to realize that the "existing holes" would be so enlarged as to make them useless. That's probably why her step wasn't in the original – perhaps the content editor wanted it added? Who knows how far the incompetence spreads for an eHow post...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_6546152_fix-chair-legs.html

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