We’ve had a couple of kids’ rocking chairs for many years now. Technically, they were supposed to be teddy bear rocking chairs, but somehow the kids refused to accept that. They were originally put together with small nails, which—as you can imagine—more or less utterly failed to hold them together. The remnants had sat in storage for quite some time.

My youngest child is two years old, and now that I’m doing woodworking and looking around for things on which to practice, repairing the rocking chairs seemed like a useful thing to do.

I finished pulling apart the pieces, removed the nails, drilled holes in the plywood for screws, sanded everything down a bit, and glued & screwed the pieces back together. (The circled area where the chair side is offset from its original position is where I learned the wisdom of the sage advice “Always do a dry run before gluing.”) I think the usual sequence is glue parts, then drill holes and apply screws, which seems like it might work better, but at the time (a few months ago) I hadn’t applied much thought or reading to the details.

After reassembling everything, I patched the countersink holes with wood filler, sanded again, and used a can of bright blue spray paint to make everything suitably colorful, with the results shown. I ended up spraying three coats, and had a few issues with runs, but eventually got it all to a reasonably satisfactory state.

The good news is, the new joinery was plenty sturdy enough to last the 15 minutes it took my son to break the back part off the rocker. The bad news, well, that’s pretty much self-evident .