I have a butcher block table that my ex drilled on, leaving a hole on the top. How can I repair? – Lorraine Mills
Rob Johnstone: Drilling on a butcher block table! I’d get rid of that bum, too. Without seeing the table, I am kind of guessing here, but my thought is that you could rout out some rectangular sections of the top (rout and then chisel square ends on the grooves) and then glue replacement pieces into the top. Likely you’d need to sand and refinish the top, but it would provide you with a good surface to finish.
Chris Marshall: If the tabletop is removable and the hole pretty small, I might even consider ripping that narrow strip of damaged wood out of the panel, then re-gluing the tabletop again. Depending on the hole size and how closely you spaced the cuts, you might only be removing a 1/2-in. strip of wood or less from the top. A cut on either side of the offending hole would do it. I’d carry out the procedure with a clamped straightedge and a circular saw with a sharp combination blade, ripping along the grain, then carefully run the cut edges over a jointer to smooth them. But doing this sort of surgery would depend on the thickness of the “slab.” If it’s too thick and beyond the cutting capacity of the saw, Rob’s suggestion might be the more logical approach here for you. Remove only a portion of the damaged wood, install a patch, and try to blend the new wood as well as you can with the old wood. Or, for a novel, funkier approach, you could use an inlay kit in a router and turn that drilled hole into a butterfly patch made of contrasting wood. You’d see the repair forever, but it would remain a conversation piece for sure and look intentional and unique rather than just a bad drilling mistake.
