The Most Recent Honey-Do Project

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monophoto

Member
Joined
Mar 13, 2010
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2,542
Location
Saratoga Springs, NY
This one is really weird - wife was shopping yesterday, and bought some decorative pumpkins - miniature pumpkins that are intended for table decorations. While bringing them home, she inadvertently broke the stem off of one of them, so, as the principle fixer of broken things in our house, it became my task to repair the stem

The stem had dried, and was essentially soft wood. OK - that suggests that some kind of wood glue would be appropriate. But the problem was that the stem was 'arty' meaning that it was twisted and bent, and the break was very close to where the stem entered the top of the pumpkin. So that created two challenges - first, it would be an end-grain joint which would be relatively weak, and how to align and hold the joint closed while the glue cured.

My solution was to drill small holes in both the stem and the top of the pumpkin, and then use a short length of toothpick to reinforce the end-grain joint while also providing a means of holding the pieces together while the glue cured. The hole in the broken stem was the same size as the diameter of the toothpick, but the hole in the pumpkin was slightly oversized so that there was some 'wiggle room' to allow better alignment across the break. I used Titebond which dries to a color that is not too different from the dried stem, so I didn't worry too much about glue squeezeout.

Ah, the things that being somewhat skilled with tools get us into.
 
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