Valuable Saarinen chairs have de-laminated bent plywood legs

[garlanre]

I have these amazing chairs designed by Eero Saarinen in the 1960s. In good shape, they are worth a lot of money. Unfortunately, mine need complete restoration. The legs are a mess, as you can see by clicking on the link below (for some reason, I can't post pics here).

My question is how to repair the legs. I think I can fix the broken veneer to make them at least presentable. But I don't know how to fix the de-lamination. Do I just glue and clamp them? Is wood glue strong enough? Is there some other glue or adhesive that I should use? They need to be strong to hold people's weight. And the repairs need to last, since I don't intend to go through all this work again.

http://s1187.photobucket.com/albums/z39 ... %20Chairs/

Thanks!
Rebecca

[preeng2]

Rebecca,
If it were one lamination on the outside I would say you would have had a chance. But I don't believe that a leg with that many delams throughout is going to be repairable by you. In order for wood glue to work, you would have to be able to get all the old glue off the surfaces to be glued, and sand it back to raw wood. Maybe if you could completely disassemble all the laminations, scrape off the old glue and sand back, you might have a chance to re-glue. But you would also have to make up some clamping jigs that would conform to the finished leg shape. It would be a tough task for the novice.