Plantation Shutter Fix

Plantation Shutter Fix

When you make something, you can fix it. Fixing is just a smaller job than the initial build. Years ago now I made plantation shutters for most of our windows. The shutters are in panels and usually four panels are used per window.

Until recently they had worked fine, but as the children have been messing about with them I fully expected them to break something. As it turned out the first breakage of shutters was done by me. I caught my trousers on a 'safety' corner thing that I had screwed to our coffee table. As I got off the sofa my foot refused to reach the ground and due to the trousers wrapping themselves around the safety item it also refused to detach from the table corner. I crashed into a shutter panel and broke two slats.

I try to use screws instead of glue and I screwed these panels together. This means I can easily dismantle the panels when repair is needed.

Once the side has been removed I can access the slats. They are stapled to the control rod, but I don't need to unstaple them for this repair. Once I saw the end of the slats I found that four were broken, not two.

I could make some more slats if I absolutely had to, but decided to attempt a repair as most of the slats have just end damage.

Most of the slats have all the wood still attached, so I glue them up, but one slat has a chunk taken out of it and no wood remaining. For this one I use a small piece of wood shaped to the hole in the slat. This is then glued in to place.

All the slats are then clamped and left to dry:

 Once they have dried, they don't look too different:

That's what watching glue dry is like. The larger wooden block I glued in place needs to be cut down.

I started with my new crane knife, but the job was a bit big for it, so I moved on to a Japanese saw and removed most of it.

I then continued with the crane and got the repair close to the slat profile.

I have found that a black sharpie can be used to touch up dings in the stained wood. The stain I use is an Osmo ebony and the Sharpie matches it really well.

That's the slats with the fixes touched up.
Re-assembly is the reverse of assembly, as always and the fixed panel is revealed:

Fixed.