by Nathan Perkins

Created on: November 21, 2011   Last Updated: November 23, 2011

Here is a technique for repairing the dowel on the back of a dinning room chair that could save you time and money. 

It can be very difficult to repair a dowel rod that has split, especially when it is part of a chair or handrail and the opposing ends are permanently attached.   The shaft on a dinning room chairs can easily get a diagonal spit up the grain.  Even if the chair is not expensive it may be part of a dinning set and difficult to replace.

Paying someone to repair such a break can get expensive and if you have a clear or semitransparent stain the repair will be less than satisfactory.  I estimate a $50 cost to this small repair.  But here is a technique that requires little skill and has great results. 

If you are not a woodworker and you try to make a traditional repair you would use a clamp some glue and small screws covered over with wood filler.  Then you would sand and painted the area.  This would take a lot of time and there are a lot of things that can go wrong.

Try this inventive repair out on a broken stick or dowel rod before you fix your chair and you will see it’s potential. 

Take a heat shrink splice kit for electrical repairs.  It will simply be a bag full of plastic tubes that shrink when heated up.   There are heat shrink splices that also happened to have clear sleeves.  This is the best choice if you chair shows the natural grain.  Slide the plastic sleeve over one end of the broken rod.  Pull it past the edge of the break, high enough to line up of the two broken ends.   Then slide it down over the break so it is about even on both sides.   The break should be in the middle of the sleeve.  Use longer sleeves for longer splits.  Remember they do shrink.

All that is left to do is heat shrink it.  It may turns out that your hair dryer gets hot enough to do the job if you don’t have a heat gun.  The other options include using a lighter.  Be careful not to burn anything.  Move the fire around and keep it far enough away from the surface to not cause damage or use a torch.  Again this can burn the chair or the splice sleeve.

The best tool to use, of course is a heat gun.  They are actually designed for such repairs.   But if you don’t have one the idea is to blow heat onto the splice until it shrinks around the area where the damage had been done.   These

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