B’doing!
I sat down hard onto the old sofa and there was a loud crack and what can only be described as a b’doing noise.
When I took the cushions off to investigate it was obvious that was something was wrong as part of the sofa was sagging slightly.
Later that evening, I tipped the sofa onto it’s back to look more deeply into the problem. The was a small hole in the covering and I could feel one of the springs flopping about. I decided to try out my new multi-tool, the awl part was not quite right for levering out the staples so used a small screw driver to get them started. The pliers part worked a treat, allowing me to grab the staples and use the claw part of the hammer as a pivot to pull them out.
Once I was inside, I could see the problem, a broken spring. The ends of the spring are held in place with a simple clip. So you can remove the spring by sliding it out and don’t need to remove those clips from the sofa. With a bit of persuasion from the hammer part of the multi-tool, I remove the 2 broken parts.
Luckily it had cracked near one end. So I cut that off with a hacksaw then hammered it into shape, to match the other end. I tried to fit it at this point but it was too short and I couldn’t stretch it. So back to the Workshopshed and I crushed the spring in the vice stretching it out. I repeated this on different sections of the spring to try to keep it fairly straight.
The spring was refitted, the middle one in the picture below.
The last step was to replace the cover. I used some drawing pins for this as I couldn’t access to staples at the time. I was also worried that I might need to open it up in the future.
So a quick repair and I’ll have to be more gentle when sitting down.
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
