Renovating a 1930's Sprung Rocking Chair

I brought a 1930s sprung rocking chair of mine which had begun to fall apart. I intended to try and get away with a few minor repairs but it was soon clear that it needed a lot more

Fortunately Nick was an expert at this sort of renovation and convinced me it was worthwhile to take it back to basics. The photos show Nick beginning to strip off the covering fabric, taking it down to the wooden frame and me sanding it down with full kit on - mask, anti-vibration gloves and power sander. Under Nick's tuition, next stage will be to repair the frame, then onto the upholstery stage

Nick starts to take the Chair apart and remove all the fabric and cushioning

Once Nick showed me what to do, I then removed the rest of the hessian and other coverings

I then spent ages removing all the tacks and as many of the staples as I could 

Using a very handy palm sander I sanded down as much of the wood as possible, concentrating on thise parts that wouldn't be covered by fabric

A lot of the wooden joints had come apart and needed to be carefully dowelled and glued together

 

Some strategic screws also had to be put in place. One or two splits in the wood  had to be fixed and sometimes new splits occurred. Nick's patience in this "two steps forward, one step back"form of progress was amazing

 

There was a lot of glueing and clamping involved, sometimes using straps rather than clamps. Niick showed me some handy tricks like using nails to keep straps in place, and clamping some difficult angled joins overnight and then only gluing them when they had been stressed into the correct position

 

 

One of the metal spring holders had broken, but Nick managed to fix it using a crimpers tool which enabled two pieces of metal to be connected to each other by compression 

 

 Whilst Nick was more than happy to move on to a re-upholstery stage, I decided I had learnt enough for one project. Fortunately, just half a mile away from the Shed there was C. McCormack, a re-upholsterer, who finished off the job for me. I got the material from "I Want Fabric" in Salford which had a warehouse full of upholstery rabrics to choose from. Job done!

 

Bernard enjoying the renovated rocking chair 

Concreting the Back Yard

  Concreting Day

We decided that the back yard needed concreting. After looking at the oprions we decided to go with pumping the concrete rather than using wheelbarrows. Thanks to funding by Southways Housing (our landlords) we were able to do this and today "Barrow Mix Pumping" came in the morning and completed the pumping, the tampoing and clean up in about 2 hours.

Chris had done a great job (assisted by others) in preparing the shuttering and eveyhing went very smoothly. There is a photo at the end with Aaron, Dan and Steads from Barrow Mix. They even refused to take the traditional tip for their hard work because we are a charity. Many thanks and what a great job you did

Concreting - the video

 

The Day after - all dry and ready to use