Shop Time Part 2 - Split a Leg

I had an interesting set back in the shop recently. As I was driving in the screw into a bench for the farm table that I built, I created a nasty split in one of its legs, and two smaller splits in another. My initial reaction was that the leg was likely completely shot, and I’d have to try and figure out some way to salvage pieces of the truss, or maybe create a new pair of legs and shorten the truss by a few inches.

No matter what was going to happen, I decided to step back and take a break. That way I could cool off from some of the emotions discovering what looked like a large mistake, and I could come up with more solutions to consider. I spent the time between my shop time for that day and the next looking online for potential solutions and consulted with my dad about what I would be able to do with the materials that I had on hand.

Ultimately I settled on putting epoxy in the larger crack and letting it cure for 24 hours. Then I took two screws and drove them into the leg perpendicular to the split. That seems to have held up nicely. The one thing that gave me some reservation in applying the epoxy, was that there wasn’t enough give to the split to clamp it closed, so I just applied as much pressure as I could with my clamps while the epoxy cured.

The smaller splits I didn’t drive any more screws in, but I used a combination of wood glue and epoxy to close up the gabs. After all of the epoxy had cured, there was quite a bit of overflow. I took a putty knife to that and scraped off all of the excess.

This whole experience had me thinking about learning to recover from mistakes. Not that long ago, I had similar experiences in the kitchen where something would go wrong, and I’d not know how to recover. I would get anxious and flail about the kitchen trying in vain to recover. Some of the most valuable lessons that I learned trying to become a better cook was how to recover from an error on the fly. I’m now getting to learn to recover from mistakes in wood working.

Thankfully my current project is very forgiving of small mistakes and gives me the opportunity to adjust more easily. I imagine if I were doing more complicated joinery, I would have to be more precise and detail oriented. With four pieces of furniture now assembled (I still have sanding and finishing to do on 3 pieces), I feel like I’ve made a lot of mistakes that I’ve learned from, but I think some of those mistakes will be the subject of the next installment of Shop Time.