Repaired Spinning-Wheel Chair
Not for sale; this was a custom repair job. Dimensions: 46 inches high, 22 inches deep, 20 inches wide. This was not an upcycling project, but I repaired someone else’s old upcycling project.
The Story
This distinctive chair, made out of an old spinning wheel, is a family heirloom belonging to the parents of a friend of mine—the same folks for whom I turned an old wooden dining table into a Pennsylvania-themed display shelf, a coffee table, and four picture frames. They think it dates back to around the 1880s in Kansas and possibly pre-statehood Oklahoma. As my “before” pictures show, it had recently been broken so my job was to get all back into one structurally sound piece. I used screws and a nail to anchor some supports under the seat, and glue to fix some other broken bits. The biggest challenge was that the wooden dowels that connected arms to the vertical support spindles, and those spindles and the wheel (the back) to the seat, had all broken off. To repair the wheel connection, I used woodcarving tools to scrape out the two halves of the original dowel and replaced it with a new one (probably leftover from some old piece of IKEA furniture), which I glued into place. The four arm connection points couldn’t be treated the same way, so I used screws up from under the seat and down through the arms—and used wood putty and stain to cover up the latter two screw heads. In the end, the chair can be sat in very carefully, but leaning on the arms or back would not be a good idea. But I achieved the main goal, which was just to get it all back into one piece that its owners could display and admire.
