Too Many Tenons - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson of Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a good example of a problem that we run into with a lot of furniture. Not just antique furniture, but new furniture also. You look at this chest of drawers. This chest of drawers is upside down as you can see here. And you look at this front leg and you think, geez, this is a nice sturdy front leg. It's an inch and three quarters by inch and three quarters. That's a pretty good piece of wood. The back leg is one inch by an inch and three quarters. That should be pretty sturdy for a big chest of drawers like this. But the fact is that it's not. Because what they've done is they've cut a tenon into this leg from this style right here. And the back that comes in, they've also cut tenons into the back from the back piece into this leg, taking away almost all the wood in the lower part of this leg. Where you thought you had a leg an inch by one and three quarters, you're left with thin little pieces of wood supporting this cabinet. And in fact, this leg has broken. It has very little support for this cabinet. I could try to cut in a new piece of wood and scarf in. It wouldn't do any good. There's just not enough wood here. Anything I do is just going to further weaken it. So I'm going to epoxy this back where it belongs and then add some corner blocks in here to support it. And that will be as strong as it can be and will also keep the leg original, which is important also. Okay, now I've taken the clamps off. I'm going to clean off this excess epoxy and then make support blocks. So this leg's at an angle, so I just need to strike that angle. It looks like a good fit. Now I'm going to drill for some screws. When fitting a corner block like this, it can be very helpful just to chamfer this corner away to make sure that it's not hitting first and taking away from your glue surface. Now I know that that inside corner isn't interfering with my glue surface. I like this repair because I was able to save the original leg, which was completely shattered. Making a new leg would have been totally impractical and wouldn't have solved the inherent problem of this leg of how they cut too many tenons into it and greatly weakened it. And the blocks I added could easily be removed if someone felt it necessary to do so in the future. It looks pretty good.