Sofa Leg Repair Tips

When your 175 pound Great Dane takes a flying leap at your sofa, jumps on top of it, and one of the legs breaks off, what do you do? This may not be what happened to your sofa leg, however shifting, overloading and various types of abuse can cause sofa legs to fail. Most sofa legs are fastened to the frame of the sofa using a threaded bolt which is screwed into a tee nut. A tee nut is basically a fitting with four sharp prongs on one side and tapped in the center with a female 5/16 inch thread, and this gets forced into the wood on the bottom of the sofa. Of course, there’s a hole drilled underneath the threaded hole so that you can insert the sofa leg stem. If you have a large square sofa leg, say 4” x 4” square, there’s much less of an incidence of the sofa leg breaking off, but if you have Scandinavian style furniture with a slim round leg that’s more than six or eight inches long there is a lot of leverage against it and there’s a high probability that at some point your sofa leg is going to become damaged and a repair will need to be made. Of course, if the leg is made from wood, rather than metal or plastic, the leg can become cracked or split, which of course will cause the bolt to loosen and then you’re on the floor! Depending on the type of damage to your sofa and leg, there are several repair options open to you. If the leg is made from wood and is cracked or split, this can be repaired with good Elmer’s wood glue. The first thing you need to do is put something like a putty knife inside the split to lever it open a little bit, then flow some glue inside, and allow the split to go back together, wipe off any excess glue and tightly wrap wire, tape or something else around the outside of the leg to hold the two halves that have separated together. Wood clamps also work well. Generally speaking the glue joint, after it cures, will be stronger than the original wood. Once the glue has set, generally speaking, after about 24 hours, it’s simply a matter of reinserting the threaded stem of the bolt into the leg and then threading that into the bottom of the sofa. If the damage is more severe and the fitting in the bottom of the sofa has actually broken off, you need to turn the sofa on its back so you can access all the legs, unscrew the leg from the fitting with a counterclockwise motion, and then take a look at the tee nut. You can use a hammer or a mallet to tap the tee nut back into place but if all you’ll be doing is pushing it back into the same holes it was in before the problem will resurface. Any excess clearance made in that fit by the constant use of the sofa is going to cause that hole to be unsuitable to properly anchor the tee nut.

Therefore, pry the tee nut out, rotate it a few degrees so that the points are going to be on virgin wood, and then tap it in. Now you have a much stronger connection point. If this is the only problem with the sofa you can now screw the leg back in and turn it back over and you’re in business. If that doesn’t work, then you need a replacement tee nut that is larger and therefore will engage more wood and have more contact with the sofa frame and provide a stronger connection. This is a friction fit and the more contact surface the better the connection. Here again you use the same procedure making sure that you center the tee nut over the hole so that the threaded stem will end up going into the hole in the bottom of the sofa frame, tap it into place and then thread the leg back in. If the damage is really severe and the spot where the tee nut attaches to the bottom has been destroyed, you will need to move up to the next level of sofa leg repair and this is a tee plate. It is basically a roughly square steel plate that has a 5/16 inch threaded hole in the middle of it and the center portion of the steel plate has been stamped so it’s recessed about a half an inch. This particular plate fastens to the bottom of the sofa with 4 screws so that the flat side is against the frame of the sofa and the reverse side is facing down. Now you have to center the hole in the tee plate over the hole in the bottom of the sofa frame and then use the four screws to secure it in place. One of the things you need to pay attention to is typically these tee plates are angled at about 12 to 12 1/2 degrees so that the leg does not fit perpendicular to the bottom of the sofa. If that’s the case and your other sofa legs fit perpendicular to the bottom of the sofa you will need to change all of them. Another situation that develops is that if more than one leg becomes damaged and or the damage to an individual leg is such that it cannot be repaired, the solution is to buy a set of replacement sofa legs. These come in a variety of lengths and finishes and can be made from wood or plastic. Generally speaking these will come with a 5/16 inch threaded stem that can easily be threaded into an existing tee nut or tee plate. Many times these are the best option to correctly and adequately repair a damaged sofa. Tech Team https://techteamproducts.com/

makes a variety of sofa repair items and we happen to like their products quite a bit, especially their number 710 Sofa Leg Tee Plate repair set https://www.amazon.com/Sofa-Chair-12-Degree-Furniture-Hardware-Included/dp/B07CTXZK1T/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1546974517&sr=8-20&keywords=sofa+leg+repair which includes 4 plates along with all the necessary screws and fittings so that you can reconstruct the mounting points for all for your sofa legs and end up with a rock solid sofa once again.