So I just got done building these beautiful outdoor chairs.
Dadgum it.
And now I've got to tear them apart.
I made a huge mistake, and I'm hoping that this is not going
to cost me all the cost of materials, which is well over $400.
Why don't we start with what the issue was and how I figured it out?
*sigh* It was stupid.
It might be hard to believe that I finished the chair
and put out an entire video and didn't realize I made a mistake.
And it's kind of hard for me to believe it as well.
But the reality is, I went straight from finishing it, completing the video
and getting it out for you guys.
And I actually never sat in the chair, so it wasn't until two days later
So it wasn't until two days later
when I was making the plans and realizing things weren't quite matching up .
So in a moment of panic, I ran out to the shop and this is what I found.
What is this, a chair for giants?
I accidentally attached the seat base
up three and a half inches higher than I was supposed to per my plan.
And I guess I was too worried about how much glue I was putting on it
and not where the position was.
Maybe a little pinch, a little sweet.
But now my feet don't touch the ground.
And this is more of a hand wrist than an armrest.
So this is not going to work, especially for my kids.
So I'm going to disassemble the chair and lower it down.
But the issue is it's all glued together and it might just rip apart
and completely destroy the legs and the chair base.
So I'm not sure if this is going to work or not.
We're going to find out.
So here's what we're working with on the front as well as the back.
I attach the seat base to the legs with glue and screws.
Now I can easily back out those screws, but the bond of wood glue onto
the wood is actually stronger than the wood is.
So if you've ever seen somebody break apart a joint, when that breaks apart,
the wood actually breaks before the glue does or don't get back.
So if I just start banging on it, I'm going to destroy the entire side of this
and who knows how much it might rip out.
But I do have some tricks up my sleeve
I'm going to try to use to weaken that glue joint before I work on it.
But we'll start off by taking out all the screws
and I have some plug downs that I get to deal with up here as well.
And the screws should just come right out.
All right. Here's the first challenge of the disassembly in this area right here.
I attach the upright to the leg with a countersign screw,
and then I plugged it with a cedar plug.
All right, I've got my pocket hole jig bit, and this is three H.
Let's see how this one works.
And this little tip was actually running into the screw.
So I need to change over just to a regular twist bit to finish it off.
All right. That worked. Great.
Now, I should just be able to back it out.
And it was easier than I thought it going to be on this one.
I'm just gonna go ahead and start with a me point bit
and just drill it right out.
All right. Honestly, even though this is my namesake bit, I would not use it.
Brad Point But it did tear out at the bottom.
I was a little bit afraid of that because they're pretty aggressive
on the other side.
That whole turn now are really clean.
So I would go ahead and do what I did on
the first one is the pocket hole jig bit and then go to a twist then .
All right, now we're only down to glue,
so I should be able to just rip this apart. Right.
No, I didn't. Blew this top.
So that was just the sound of the finish kind of snapping there.
So we're loose up here on the top.
But down here where I did the glue. Yeah.
What? Oh, the ingrain.
All right, check this out.
So in the back one, this is in right here on the side grain.
Now, the in grain connection versus the side grain is not as strong
as the rest of it.
But that leaves me the front, which is kind of shaking.
Oh, man. All right.
This is definitely loose.
But up here, that glue joint is still pretty strong on the front.
So I don't want to pry this off and damage that wood
because as I drop the seat down, then that is going to be exposed.
So what I did is I made some mockups and we tried a couple of ways that I've
seen online to break down glue joints and that's heat and then white vinegar.
So I'm going to use some of these mockups and see which one of those works better.
And then I will do it on this joint
to make sure that we can get the cleanest separation that we can.
So the first thing to do is remove those screws.
All right. So now it is just the glue joints holding these together.
So the first thing I'm going to do
is just wail on it with a mallet and just see if it will break.
And if it does break, how much would actually tears out?
So what kind of know?
Worst case scenario, what might happen on the chair? Let's see.
Well, I'm just going to go for it.
Oh, let's take a look at what happened.
So they are totally right.
This did not break at the glue joint.
It ripped all the wood off.
You know, that is a really deep
and nasty gouge that's going to be in the side of that chair.
We could repair this, but we're not to be able
just to sand it up and glue it back together.
We'll definitely have to do some work on it.
But worst case scenario, not too bad, right?
For these next two, I'm going to use one with white vinegar, one with heat,
and see if it's any better than just nailing it off with a mallet.
I'm going to go and pour the white vinegar
on one of them to start off
with and let it sink while I'm doing the heat on the other.
All right. I've got this 1500 watt heat gun and I've got this little
attachment on the front that's going to help me
just direct the heat right into that joint.
That's probably going to take a while. So let's just see what happens
after almost about 10 minutes of heating it.
I am definitely getting some disk coloring, but I am starting to see
a little bit of movement here on the.
Oh, look back. All right. So there we go.
The Heat obviously did do something
because on three quarters of it, the glue let go.
Unfortunately, at the front, it tore off a nice big chunk of it.
So does the heat work?
Yeah, it definitely does, because it did it for 75% of the joint.
Check out the vinegar.
All right. This is the vinegar soaked one.
And I'm just going to try to pry it a bit and see that does not feel loose.
I want to make sure we're doing this one justice.
So I'm going to take this back off,
give it another soaking and see if it has any effect.
All right. So I'm going to put this back on here.
Actually, let that sit for a while and put like two or three more coats.
I really soak this in vinegar.
That's really not moving much.
All right. So that white vinegar didn't really seem to do much.
I'm going to go ahead and throw some heat on it
and see if maybe that combination of the heat plus the white vinegar,
maybe that's the combo to go with.
All right. He did that for about 5 minutes. All right.
I think this is going to be it right here.
Okay, Dad. Got it?
Yeah. Myth busting.
What are we going to do?
So what were the learnings out of this?
Every single one of these left water had would tear out.
So I think the biggest thing that I learned is what glue is strong
and don't glue together things that you want to take apart later.
If you want to take it apart,
you can do it quickly with force and have some tear out.
White vinegar really didn't work for me at all in the heat gun.
We're pretty good, but on thicker things you're still going to have some issues.
So I'm going to take that, bring the chairs over and
maybe try to apply some heat because it's hinged.
I can get the heat in there and maybe that will release.
We'll just kind of play it by ear and take it slow.
And hopefully a lot of things don't rip out while I'm disassembling it.
I'm just having it on a lower heat so it's not as aggressive
because I don't want to make the finish,
get all gooey and nasty and get up in the air.
And I'm using a little card scraper to try to deflect the heat in there.
Just kind of keep it off of that finish, at least on the face that I'm going at.
So keep going, see what happens.
All right. Here's some woods snapping.
Oh, boy. There goes.
All right. So here we go. We definitely had some wood tear out.
And actually, if you
look at where this tore out, this is exactly where the wood glue was.
And you can see this leg here is pretty tore up.
So he didn't seem to work at all really in application.
So let me know in the comments in vinegar doesn't work. He doesn't work.
Do you guys have a secret way of taking apart wood joints?
Because if you do, it's too late for me.
But check the comments, see if other people have any good solutions
because this one kind of is what it is and we're just going to have to repair it.
I spent a lot of time finessing that other one
and basically got the same results as just knocking it off.
So I'm just going to try to lever this and hopefully that front glue joint
is kind of weak like the other one was.
Oh, there we go.
So remember what I said about Ingrain being not a good joint?
Yeah, that is not true.
This one completely tore out the back.
It really did some damage here on the backside.
And then the front one came off pretty clean. So who knows?
So I don't really know exactly what I have yet
because it's going to depend upon where everything is going to fit together
in the new assembly position, which is three and a half inches shorter.
So I want to clean up all the wood with my chisels and some Sanders
and then we can see where we're at and see what we're dealing with
and what kind of patching I'm going to have to do before we reassemble.
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With everything cleaned up, I'm going to mark up the new location.
And actually, here's where I had my issue.
I was using an off cut of two by four to hold up the chair.
And in my mind I was thinking two by four and I positioned this brace
to be at the same location as where the seat should actually be.
And that was my mistake.
So I'm not going to make that mistake again, at least not today.
All right, we can put the chair up there and see where it hits
and what all is going to be exposed and what needs repair.
All right. We've got some good news and some bad news.
We'll start off with the good news,
which is it looks like the connections are going to be nice and strong.
I've got the flat surfaces for everything to go back together,
but I do have quite a few spots where I need to fill.
Got some holes right here.
But the nice thing is, is
when the cushion is there, you will never see those.
So I'm not too worried about what's happening
on the inside of these face frames.
And now for the bad news you see right here as this came up,
we have now exposed the mounting holes and it's actually even worse
on the other side where the screws came in.
And there's just going to be some little blemishes here,
but it's so small and it's down underneath there.
I'm just going to fill it, I think with wood glue
and a little bit of the dust from the cedar,
because if I try to plug it, I think it's just going
to draw more attention to it. Now. The next one is slightly bad news.
I could just use this hole again, but now that it's lower,
I really want to have support higher up
so that can help resist the cracking of the chair.
When you have somebody leaning back on it, that means we'll have to plug that one.
I could just put another store in there and it'll just be as strong.
Now, you've probably heard of mixing sawdust
and wood glue to make a nice wood filler, and I've done that before.
But what effect does the actual glue have on it?
I actually don't know, and I want to try that.
So I've got some outdoor wood glue, which is kind of brown, a regular wood glue,
which is really yellow, and then another wood glue that is white.
So I'm going to actually mix these in and I've made a few holes
here in this little block of wood that are about the screw size.
We're going to mix up
each of these into a paste, fill it in, and then see which one looks the best.
They'll be a cool experiment because I've never really tried this
and I've got these little piles of sawdust that I actually sanded straight
off of this block.
And get it into a paste.
I'm going to put it in the hole.
All right. Here's how they look coming in.
I'm going to let them dry and then we can send them flush
and then see what everything looks like with finish on it.
All right. Here we go.
I'm going to tell you, I am a little surprised,
as I would expect, that the outdoor wood glue is definitely the darkest .
But I was really surprised.
The white one actually is darker than the yellow.
The yellow one to me looks like it blends better.
I'm just going give these a quick wipe with the wood sealer just to see how
that it will change the color, if any, after a little bit of finish.
This yellow one looks even better.
The brown is really contrasty.
The white one is definitely a lot darker than the cedar,
but this yellow one looks really good.
So for sure I'm going to be going with the yellow.
Now this is cedar, so I would test it on your own woods
because it's probably different with pine or walnut.
This is probably going to come out different for cedar,
definitely going with the yellow.
And I don't need to worry about it being outdoor glue.
It's gonna be covered in finish and it's obviously not holding anything structural.
So we're going to use this one for the patches.
All the repairs are done and I can start reassembling this
and get some more finish on it and then we can see how the repairs
look and compare it to the original one that I have not fixed yet.
And since you guys have already seen me put this together,
we'll just get a quick montage and get to the reveal.
After a couple of coats of finish,
Things are looking nice.
These little area repairs in the front here
can be covered up by the cushions, of course, but in the back, these plugs
look a really nice, long part I'm not really happy about is this front area here
where the wood did track off.
I didn't think it was going to be that bad,
but when I put the finish on it, we kind of highlighted where that crack was.
I thought I had sent it down flush, but obviously that crack went deeper
than I thought it was.
But it's behind the leg here and you probably never even see it.
Now, you guys know don't tell anybody, but in general, it turned out really nice.
Let me show you how it looks next to the one that I haven't fixed yet.
So here you go. It's all assembled symbol next to this one.
And this one looks really low right now.
And I think that's why I didn't notice it when I was building this one.
But when you put the cushions on,
it changes everything and this height is much better.
Now, all I've got to do is fix that one...
Hey Rodriguez you ain’t trying to change this one are ya?
Of course I'm going to change it, Chuck. It looks ridiculous.
No, man, I love it!
Feels like I'm driving a combine.
If you want to build plans for your own chair, which were correct
the entire time, there's a link down below in the description.
If you just want to see how I built it and how I build other outdoor furniture.
I've got a playlist cued up for you right there.
I want to give a big thank you to those folks
that have been joining the FTBT Builders Club.
And until next time, guys get out there and build something awesome.