Brasilia Table Found In Garbage Gets A Makeover | Mid Century Furniture Refinish & Repair

a few weeks ago i got a message from a local viewer who said that she had a mid-century modern dining table that needed work and she was wondering if i would be interested in it i was and here it is it was made by the broy hill furniture company for their brasilia line of furniture it's in really bad shape it looks like it spent some time outside judging by the dirt and grass and stuff on it there's lots of peeling veneer probably from being in a damp environment there's really not much left of the finish but what is left is in really bad shape not sure what this black line is from but i hope it's just from water if it is then oxalic acid might clean it up the legs were pretty solid but again the finish was destroyed i noticed that the aprons on the two halves of the table were not lining up and it looked like they were a little bit warped i wasn't sure how i was going to fix that but it seemed like a good first step would be to just remove anything that i could off the underside of the table the apron came off just by removing some screws luckily that wasn't glued down there it goes and then this extendo rail thing also came off just by removing the screws with all of that removed it would be a lot easier to move the table around since it was really heavy what was left of the finish would need to be removed but before i did that i glued down any spots where the veneer was loose and i used super glue for this one reason for using super glue is because i couldn't see inside those crevices where the veneer was loose so i didn't know if there was still some old glue in there or if there was dirt or what maybe in there that would have prevented wood glue from sticking so i knew the super glue would stick to just about anything this piece had a veneer seam that ran down the center of the board and the end of it was just a little bit loose i could just barely lift it with my fingernail and for something like this very thin super glue works great to just dribble it in there and get it stuck back together again and then i did some repairs where the veneer was chipped away here i'm tracing out the spot where the veneer is missing [Applause] and then i put that piece of paper on a new piece of veneer and cut out a patch and then glued it in and i'm doing this work before i remove the old finish because i knew i'd probably get some glue squeeze out and doing it this way that glue squeeze out would just get on to the old finish which i'm going to remove anyway as opposed to getting onto nice clean stripped wood there was a spot on the apron where there was a pretty big piece of veneer missing so i just straightened out the line a little bit to make it easier to cut the patch and then i took some tape and outlined the shape with the tape transfer the tape to the new veneer and cut out a patch and actually it was pretty deep so i had to cut out two patches to fill it one of the corners of the table was flattened as if the table had been dragged on that corner so to fix that i wanted to glue in a little piece of walnut and then shape it to match the rest of the corner first thing i did was to just flatten out that spot so i could get a good glue joint and then i took a small piece of walnut and glued that on and then shaped it next it was time to remove the finish or what was left of it i used a stripper on most of the table this is qcs by stripwell and this didn't take long at all because there was barely any finish left on the aprons i just scraped it off because it was practically falling off on its own anyway once the finish was removed i still had a bunch of dark black stains there was this black line that i pointed out earlier in the video and there was also some really dark black spots all along one edge of the table i've been feeling that edge may have been sitting on a damp ground for a long time and turn black so to try and remove these i applied some oxalic acid to the table it did work really quickly on that black line that disappeared maybe within five minutes or so but it didn't do much of anything for those darker black spots and i tried sanding them a little bit and scraping them but that wasn't going to work because this was a veneer and there was only so much that i could sand and scrape before i went through the veneer so i figured there was just a couple of ways to go with this i could either put new veneer on the table and i think this table was a good candidate for new veneer with those black spots and also there was a whole bunch of other defects in the top that i didn't get on camera so it was probably a good candidate for new veneer but that would have cost probably at least two hundred dollars for enough veneer to cover the table and i didn't want to spend that so i went a different way and decided if i couldn't get those dark stains out i would just try and darken the entire tabletop so that they wouldn't be so noticeable and to do this first thing i did was to apply my vinegar and steel wool mixture and that's what i'm applying here and to make this i just dissolved a piece of steel wool in a bottle of vinegar let it sit for a week or two and when you apply this to something like oak it turns it black i had never used it on walnut before but i tried it on a few pieces of scrap and it did seem to do something it didn't turn it as black as when i used it on oak but it was darkening the wood so first i applied that and it did darken the whole top but i still wanted it darker so the next thing i did was to apply sodium hydroxide which is also known as lye i had this two-part wood bleach kit that i'd use on another project and the way it works is you apply one solution which is a sodium hydroxide and then the other solution which i think is hydrogen peroxide and that bleaches the wood but i noticed when i did that that when i put the first solution on the sodium hydroxide it actually darkened the wood in a really nice way it kind of made it look old and it's kind of hard to see what it's doing in this shot so so here i'm demonstrating it on a piece of walnut and i just wiped on some of the lye just to a portion of the wood and then once it's dry you can see that that spot is a little bit darker and if i wipe on some mineral spirits just to make it easier to see you can see how much darker it is than the rest of the board and it doesn't turn a black it's just a nice deeper richer color so i just used that same bottle from the bleach kit and applied that to the table top and make sure you follow the proper safety precautions when using lye it can be dangerous and the same goes for anything else i use of course so once the lye was dry on the table top i wanted to add one more bit of color so i got some gel stain and i was going to use the color candlelight but i didn't have enough of it so i mixed in some antique walnut with the candlelight and then applied that to the table top which added a nice warm color over the whole thing and i feel like it just kind of brought it all together i didn't get footage of myself applying the gel stain but here it is after the gel stain was applied and here i'm spraying on some shellac i'm just doing this so that i can see the color better without some kind of top coat it's a little flat and dull looking so this isn't the final top coat i'll be adding that later and that will be lacquer the shellac made it easier to see the color of the top and i liked it it was dark but not black and it was a lot harder to see those black stains they just kind of blended in and i thought the whole thing had a nice rich deep color to it but then i needed to get the apron and legs to darken up a bit so that they wouldn't clash so much with the dark top here you can see how much lighter the raw veneer on the apron is than the table top and i began just by applying the vinegar and steel wool do here it is after the vinegar and steel wool dried and you can see how much darker it got and i didn't put the lye on it didn't seem to need it i thought it was dark enough considering that the apron would be underneath the table and wouldn't be getting as much light as the table top anyway so it would naturally just appear a little darker since it would be in shadow but i did apply that same gel stain so and for the legs i ended up just applying a couple applications of the vinegar and i didn't even do the gel stain the legs just had a richer color naturally than the rest of the table did so they didn't seem to need the gel stain and then i could apply the clear top coat to everything for the top coat i'm using a clear satin lacquer and then i could start putting the table back together this table has the ability to come apart so you can put a leaf in the middle and it has this latch on the bottom that's supposed to keep the two halves together until you want to open it up but when i got the table this latch wasn't working correctly and when i put it back together it still wasn't working correctly the way it's supposed to work is this hook is supposed to latch onto that hole and then when you want to separate the table you lift up on the latch and the hook comes out of the hole and then the back part of the latch pushes on the rail to open up the table and if i put this in the original screw holes from the factory it didn't line up i don't know if it ever did correctly but it didn't anymore so all i did was just to move it over a little bit so that that hook would go into the hole and then when you pull the latch up it pushes on the rail to separate the table and i had to figure out what to do about the warped apron so that they would line up when the table came together and the simplest solution that i came up with was just to get some of these brackets and screw them onto the warped pieces to straighten them out and it worked well and here it is all finished thanks for watching

Channel: Dashner Design & Restoration

Views: 665,251

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Id: lmVFuGflWb8

Length: 22min 15sec (1335 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022