Feltwell
Member
- Messages
- 6,378
- Location
- Shropshire, England
Thanks for the follow up Wobs, and thanks to yourself and Dumsey for the positive comments.
I was reflecting today whilst I was painting - as you do - and I've had a bit of a shift in mindset on these sort of repairs over the years, that the job above nicely illustrates. I used to think that for it to be a "proper" long lasting repair there had to be mechanical attachment of whatever new bit you were putting in, usually using screws. What I've come to realise with experience is actually sometimes the opposite is true, and if you can get away with it keeping anything metallic away from these kind of repairs then it's better.
The screws & brackets that were put in here to hold the section below the "holes" were put in 14 years ago. The brackets were rusting, the screws were corroding and in one case had split the timber. I reckon they had another 14 years or so before the repair would fail. Yes, you could use stainless screws, but they're a faff (very soft & easy to snap, need predrilling) and in the future I reckon there's a good chance you'd snap them or round the head off trying to get them out. If you have to use screws though, they are undoubtedly a better option than plated steel.
Put the repair pieces in with epoxy and they really are rock solid, and if they do rot in the future - clearly being a rot-prone area, though hopefully using hardwood will reduce the risk - then you take them out in exactly the same way as the original rotten section was removed - a saw! If you can use dowels or biscuits for extra strength then great, but I've attached some small sections of trim with epoxy alone and even then they are very, very solidly attached - in a highly scientific experiment 18 stone of not-even-slightly-petite Feltwell tried pulling an overhead piece of trim off, I was able to swing on it with no problems! The epoxy seems to stay a tiny bit flexible though, so it should accommodate the future natural movement of the timber.
I ruined a router bit on this job by hitting an old, corroded hidden screw that someone had used long ago, another reason to avoid metal if you can.
Similar story with exterior repairs where for example you have 2 pieces of wood that are coming apart - clamping, then drilling and inserting beech dowels with PVA glue is a better bet than screwing them together in many cases. Apart from anything else filler used over recessed screw heads always seems to fail eventually, whereas filling above a dowel doesn't seem to.
I was reflecting today whilst I was painting - as you do - and I've had a bit of a shift in mindset on these sort of repairs over the years, that the job above nicely illustrates. I used to think that for it to be a "proper" long lasting repair there had to be mechanical attachment of whatever new bit you were putting in, usually using screws. What I've come to realise with experience is actually sometimes the opposite is true, and if you can get away with it keeping anything metallic away from these kind of repairs then it's better.
The screws & brackets that were put in here to hold the section below the "holes" were put in 14 years ago. The brackets were rusting, the screws were corroding and in one case had split the timber. I reckon they had another 14 years or so before the repair would fail. Yes, you could use stainless screws, but they're a faff (very soft & easy to snap, need predrilling) and in the future I reckon there's a good chance you'd snap them or round the head off trying to get them out. If you have to use screws though, they are undoubtedly a better option than plated steel.
Put the repair pieces in with epoxy and they really are rock solid, and if they do rot in the future - clearly being a rot-prone area, though hopefully using hardwood will reduce the risk - then you take them out in exactly the same way as the original rotten section was removed - a saw! If you can use dowels or biscuits for extra strength then great, but I've attached some small sections of trim with epoxy alone and even then they are very, very solidly attached - in a highly scientific experiment 18 stone of not-even-slightly-petite Feltwell tried pulling an overhead piece of trim off, I was able to swing on it with no problems! The epoxy seems to stay a tiny bit flexible though, so it should accommodate the future natural movement of the timber.
I ruined a router bit on this job by hitting an old, corroded hidden screw that someone had used long ago, another reason to avoid metal if you can.
Similar story with exterior repairs where for example you have 2 pieces of wood that are coming apart - clamping, then drilling and inserting beech dowels with PVA glue is a better bet than screwing them together in many cases. Apart from anything else filler used over recessed screw heads always seems to fail eventually, whereas filling above a dowel doesn't seem to.
