My rodback chair is almost fully assembled. One more night to glue things up, and then it’s down to trimming and finishing.

In fact, pretty soon I’ll probably have two chairs! Well, two halves of one chair, anyway.

When inserting one of the spindles, the seat cracked. A few of the spindle ends might have been a bit too fat, but in this case the main problem was that this hole ended up directly over a crack on the bottom of the seat. Here, the crack goes all the way through the seat. I should’ve made this spindle loose rather than risk splitting the seat, if I had realized it might be a problem.

I expect I can salvage it, though I’m not sure which glue would be best to use here. Super glue might keep the crack from spreading, but it won’t fill the space to hold the cracked parts together. Maybe urethane (gorilla) glue would work better for that, but I’m not sure how to get it in the crack and keep it there; and I wouldn’t want it to push the seat apart even more.

Maybe I’ll use both. Start by applying super glue to the edges, and letting it dry. Then, clamp the seat lightly so it can’t expand any further, push some urethane glue into the crack, and apply tape on top to keep it in place while it dries.

The worst part will be finishing it. The crack will definitely be noticeable, and milk paint doesn’t stick to super glue. I’m not sure about the urethane glue, though.

I think the rest of my seat plank is not checked on the surface the way this one is. Both of my pine seated stools have check-cracks on the bottom, which are not a problem. The difference in this case is the spindles. With 9 holes across the back, I would have had to plan a lot farther ahead to avoid putting this crack in the middle of one of them.