How I Fixed This Broken Adirondack Chair

I’m partnering with Black & Decker to showcase the MATRIX, its newest cordless 20v max drill/driver with a unique line of attachments that’s more adaptable than any other multi-tool that I’ve had the pleasure of owning.

Hey friends, I’m sorry that every time you’ve come to our house and needed a place to sit, one of you has been stuck with the broken adirondack chair that I received over a year ago and even tried to fix. I’m a terrible host, made more terrible by the fact that I really didn’t care that the chair was broken and probably just told you to “lean forward, because it’s busted, oh, and don’t set your drink on the right arm support, thanks.”

I like a project full of purpose, and when tasked with the challenge to use the MATRIX for projects around my house, I expected that this one would be a good fit. The tool, I’m finding and legitimately appreciating myself, is highly functional and extremely convenient. It presents like a Wegmans prepared food buffet, satisfying the needs of many projects with attachments sold in assorted flavors, so, for instance, if you need an impact driver and a reciprocating saw, you can consider the MATRIX your two-in-1 product. The variety is not that different than the asian-italian-indian food combo I ingested last night, right? It’s 20V, and sure, there are many products out there that would compete with that spec, but for so many homeowners, crafters, creators, handy people, this would be a really great way to avoid an investment in heavy duty tools that may not get a lot of wear. All I would recommend is investing in a second battery, so that during longer projects you can always have one charging. But that’s my general advice relating to anything battery-powered though, not a criticism exclusive to Sir MATRIX.

It’s been warm, and we’ve still been enjoying the chairs by the campfire, but now that the barn roof has been rebuilt, we’re preparing to store things away for the season, so I may as well get it done while it’s on the mind instead of being burdened by it again in the spring. For this project I employed the classic drill/driver attachment, the impact driver attachment, the jigsaw, and the oscillating tool attachment, and you’re about to see how.

I started by removing the damaged back brace with the drill attachment to the MATRIX. To create a new brace, I used a scrap piece of 1×6 board (a piece of pressure treated scrap from our old deck pegolas) and traced the outline of the old brace onto it.

The original brace itself, you can sort of tell, has a bevel on one side which is enough to support the angle of the back boards, while still resting parallel on the chair. To accommodate this, I guessed, and made a slight pencil mark to know what angle the cut needed to be at, approximately. Doing it by hand, I knew would be tricky, but fortunately this cut didn’t need to be perfect, it would only support the angle that the chair back boards laid at… which is flexible by a few degrees… because I’m a handy human, not a machine that’s designed to produce adirondack chairs.

I used the jigsaw attachment to cut out the 1x board, and within a few minutes I had the brace cut.

To create the bevel, I considered two options: the MATRIX reciprocating saw attachment, and the oscillating attachment. Oscillating won, having a little more flexibility in the angle cut where I needed it, and causing the small board to reverberate a lot less than the reciprocating option. *Note: Within a few minutes of using this attachment, the markings on the saw blade did wear away–the black coating too–which might make the blade for this attachment not as beneficial or long-lasting in instances when you would need those measurements. See arrow.

I oscillated my little heart out. It worked really well, shaving away the desired angle in small slices like I was carving a turkey.

The fit against the back of the chair was great. With the drill attachment I pre-drilled a hole in the new board, and with the impact driver, bore a long deck screw in to cinch it together (because extra deck screws work for everything).

I also attached every backboard to the new back brace by pre-drilling the brace at an angle (kreg jig style) and then using a short deck screw to cinch them together. Not shown, not all that interesting.

The board that I chose to use is pressure treated, and while it stands out as new pine now, it’ll hold up to the weather well and age and discolor gracefully over the years.