One of my hand-made steamed and bent Windsor chairs has suffered a broken arm recently. I made this chair from the one piece of wood, cut from a Japanese cedar tree that died in the drought in our garden. It was probably about 80 years old. It was a fine tree and the wood was too good to waste. So I decided to make a chair out of it.

As this tree was only small. It was hard to find a good piece of straight grained timber. for the lang arm. There was a fault in the way that I made it. I couldn’t find a piece of straight-grained timber that was of the correct dimensions for the job, so I used what I had. There is only so much straight grained timber in one tree. My tree had quite wavy grain. I compensated a little by sawing it out along the grain on the band saw, instead of just in a straight line on the table saw, but there just wasn’t a long enough section for me to use without the grain running off along the grain.

I used this piece where the grain ran off on the bend. It worked really well for almost a decade, but finally split when someone put a bit too much pressure on it, possibly leaning back on the back two legs and stressing the bent back. (I wasn’t home at the time)

I glued the broken arm back together, but it started to part company on the bend and split again within a year, even with careful use. I re-glued it, clamped it securely for 24 hrs. until the glue was well and truly set, then decided to reinforce it with a brass strip behind, where the split had re-started.

It’s a broken chair, no doubt about it, but its a well-loved and valued chair that I spent a lot of time building, all the way from cutting down the tree, seasoning, sawing, cutting out, carving the seat base and spindles then fabrecating and assembling the whole thing. This chair has an added history. It means something to me so I used brass to give the repair some added value. A bit like the way that I use gold to repair one of my beautiful, but damaged bowls. What I’ve done here is like kinsugi, but it isn’t kinsugi, because kinsugi means gold repair.

Maybe this is some kind of brass chair bodging variation on kinsugi. Perhaps I should call it brassugi?