Broken Roll-up Tambour Door Repair on a Hoosier Cabinet - a Fixing Furniture Restoration

[Music] welcome back to fixing Furniture I've Got A ho's your cabinet here that needs a lot of TLC there's broken Hardware on it some of the doors are coming apart and this rollup Tambour door has just Fallen apart now there's a lot of confusion on the internet about how to repair a Tambour door so I'm going to show you the right techniques and the right material to use so you can be successful at repairing a Tambour door stick with me I'll show you how it's done as a furniture repair business we're opening the doors to our Workshop to show you the tools and techniques to repair Furniture the front rail here you can see this has been broken off we give you tips to make your repair projects easier let's get into the workshop and start fixing Furniture if you've never heard of a Hooser cabinet before this is something that was popular in the US and Canada in the early 20th century because there weren't built in kitchen cabinets this was essentially the workshop or the work area for someone to be working in the kitchen for example here is a tip out bin this would be used for storing flour so the flour would be added to the top here and then if I open the bottom part here you can see where the flower would come out you take off the bottom here you turn the handle and that would sift the flour into a bowl these cabinets were invented in Indiana and Indiana is known as the hooer state that's why these are called hoer cabinets there was a lot of innovation that went on through the boat 50 years that these were popular um spice holders various gadgets uh if you grew up around one of these and you have a favorite Gadget put them in the comments I'd love to hear about that and also these were popular in Canada and the US but I'm not sure that these actually made it anywhere Beyond those borders so if you're in a different country and you have seen a Hoo your cabinet in your country I'd love to hear about it and where you're from so let's get to repairing the Tambour here there's a few issues that are going on the most obvious one is the backing here has come off and this is just duct tape it looks like someone stapled it on so that's falling apart and then down here the cabinet has pushed out on this side and therefore this is coming out of the track so I need to first of all carefully disassemble this and take all these tour pieces out and when you're disassembling and reassembling a Tambour door there may be an access panel at the back of the cabinet there could be Stoppers there remove the stoppers and the whole thing would come with the back now when I did a roll toop desk repair you can see I lifted up the gallery off of the desktop and that allowed the T to roll out of the case and that way I could put it back in again in this particular cabinet I don't have the ability to access the panel at the back so the only way I can get it back in is with this cabinet still apart here so I'll prepare the side here to glue it back together again but I can't do that until I've got the Tambour back in place I'll show you what it looks like coiled up over here this is the track here where the Tambour goes up and around and then Loops back in so this is where it's stored when it's in the open position I'll move the cabinet Off the Bench and then we can inspect the door so I'll lay this out on some padding here and get all the pieces in place so the Tambour on this particular one has a profile here it looks like a ship one overlap at the bottom and a recess at the top for the next piece so the reason you want to lay these out is just to see what the color looks like because there might be a slight color variation so I want to get them in the right order first the lighter ones are likely at the bot the top where they haven't seen much daylight it looks like the darker ones are near the bottom so I would say huh there's a Different Light variation across them oh there we go that looks better so I would say this is probably it like that so I'll line these up just close counts at this point but what I want to do is flip this over and to do that I'm going to put tape on it now when I put these ones in here you see there's some warp that's gone on here so I don't think I can take that warp out just by gluing this together so we'll see how that comes together but I'll need to clamp that down a little bit so I'm just putting light tack tape on here I don't want a strong tack on this finished surface I don't want to potentially damage the surface of the wood but this will just allow me to flip this over and keep all the pieces together I just need to take this pull off so that this can lay flat and then I can flip it over Okay so let's flip it over and see what's happening on the back side yep duct tape and Staples this is a good example of what not to do this is duct tape and it's just got Staples in it what was originally done was there's a piece of fabric here here and here attached to the top now I'm not a fan of using strips of fabric for doing tambers I prefer to have a full piece of fabric here that's what's going to give us the best operating door and that's the process I'm going to use so I need to take off all this duct tape and the Staples and this old fabric as well now these blocks here were used to hold on these strips but they might also be used to prevent the Tambour so this is the bottom from getting pulled into the top so I'm going to label these here and then take them off because I'm going to replace them once I put the fabric on I'm not going to use a scraper to scrape all the old glue off now there does seem to be a bit of fabric there there's some texture let's see what's going on up here okay so that's cleaning off well that will clean off well but you see I'm getting a little bit of fabric here so I'll clean up as much as I can and then what I can do is take some vinegar and see if that will work off the rest of the glue here we'll let that sit for a second and then come back to it there we go so I'll just keep working across here and I to get all that fabric off now the reason I'm taking this back to bare wood is because I need the glue to stick to the bare wood not the fabric and I'm using white vinegar and the white vinegar is reversing the high glue that's on here I can actually feel it and it's sticky High glue is a unique glue because it can be reversed it's the only one that can and that's why when you're working on restoration work it's important to use high glue so I'll be coating this with high glue to put the fabric back on but I have seen some products out there that are white glue for Tambour and I wouldn't recommend doing that it might work for your initial glue up but when you come back to repair it at some point in the future could be 50 years down the road it's going to be extremely difficult to repair the Tambour and be able to adhere another piece of fabric to it so high glue is the right glue for this that way it can be repaired in the future so I've cleaned off this section here just needs to dry and over here I want to show you some of this fabric that come apart you can see there's strings here and if I pull in that string it's just pulling straight parallel with the joints so what's happened here is the fabric has broken on each of these joints and that's because of the type of fabric that was used so when I go to put the fabric on I'll show you the type of fabric you can use that won't do this that won't break across the tambers an aoer attachment for vacuum is really useful here because it allows me to brush off the surface at the same time I'm cleaning up the mess I'll leave a link to this in the video description now I need to get this all clamped up before I apply the glue so I'm going to use a bench hook which I use for planting it's just going to make this a little bit easier so this is just a board that's got a 90° board at the front a small lip at the back I'll put it on the bench here and get everything set [Applause] up so this setup will work well for me with the exception of this piece at the end here this is thicker than the rest of the Tambour cuz this is where the handle is so I'm going to leave that off we'll attach that later so what I want to do is line up all these pieces so that they're straight on an edge like this so I'll grab a couple small pieces of wood my framing square and get that lined up so this is nice and square it's really important that this is square because if it isn't it's not going to travel well in the channels so I've got a piece I'm going to run here another piece here so I'll just set that aside for now get the framing square set up here do it this way and this is what I want to use as my reference so if this is a 90° angle this will be 90° when I clamp it all up so I just need to screw this to the edge here and we'll be good to go [Music] I'm almost set here but what I want to do is clean off each of the tambours first it's much easier to clean them off like this rather than after they're all glued together so once they're are cleaned up I can just line them up against here and then I can clamp them up now the best cleaner for cleaning off finished wood is just soap and water it's the mildest cleaner that you can have so just ring out the cloth and likely all I'm doing is just cleaning off dust but actually on this particular one are a few crunchy things on the edge there that'll just help make sure that these are going together well and they're going to look great once I've got them together I'll just dry them off as soon as I'm done here and then they're all ready to go I'll line them up and then we can talk about glue and fabric I'm all done cleaning it off and here's the drying rag I used you can see there's a fair bit of dirt there and look at all the filth that was on here so they didn't look that dirty but I always recommend cleaning things off because you never know what you're going to pick up this project be that much better because it's clean I can now line up all of these Tambour strips to the edge here and now I've got it square and what I need to do is put some pressure on this so the these are all nice and tight now in the center that's going to work well on the edges here you can see this is a little bit warped so I'll need some different pressure there and to do that I've got a straight edge here so I'm going to measure and install this parallel so that I can put some wedges in here get this tight and then we'll be good to glue the fabric [Music] on I'll get some wedges out and I'll put this last piece in here oops this is going to be fun I need need something over here to hold this flat so I've got a thin piece of maple here and then I've got an old furniture part here I believe this was a centered drawer Glide so I'll secure this to the Pine board and I should be able to wedge that together okay so that's nice and snug let's see if I can put this together now okay so I can slide this under here get it squeezed in now here I want to wedge it under this as well okay so that's not going to pop out anymore that's good now if I take a pair of wedges I want a thin one here and put them together like this as I push them together they become wider so I put two wedges in the center here squeeze them together and that gives me a nice snug clamping so that these are as tight as possible I'll do the same thing on the end here and see if I can take this warp out yep that's looking good so I'm just going to put this block on here and I'm going to let this sit overnight hopefully that'll take some of the stress out of this wood uh these wedges are really helping clamp head in now if you don't have wedges uh we sell these on our website wouldn't it be.ca these are chairback wedges for holding in chairbacks that are anchored to a seat so we sell those in packs of 12 you can find them there well I've left us sit overnight and we'll take the block off and check this out in a minute but I want to talk about fabric first so the backing of this is Fabric and as you saw before there were strips I'm not a fan of that because it's not giving structure and support to the whole piece so I'm going to put putting on linen now there are two different types of weaves for linen one is a plain weave and the other is what's called a 12 so the difference between the two is a plain weave is woven like this which means if you cut it you can tear it when you've got a twill it's actually got an angle design on it you can see it on the surface I'll show you in a minute but if you were to cut it and try to pull it it won't tear so that's what I'm looking for here I don't don't want this tearing on the slats like we saw it previously I want to use twill so that gives me really the structural support that I'm looking for long term on this piece let's take a close look here at what was originally on the Tambour so you can see the fibers here in a crisscross pattern and this is a thread I pull on that thread you can see how easily that pulls so this is a plane wave over here I get a really closeup look and you can see the pattern of the fabric there so it's more of a crisscross pattern and over here on the Twill you see those angled lines that's going to give us the structure that I'm looking for here so this doesn't break so let me demonstrate the plain weave here I'll just take my scissors cut a little bit here cut a little bit here and you can see I can tear this fabric so that's plain weave this is what you don't want to use what I'll do is lay out the size of the piece I need here with the 12 I'll snip it as well and see how it doesn't tear when you put some pressure on it so I want a piece that's oversized so if I cut it about here I still have that last section I have to go on here but just cut a larger section so I'll put a cut Here and Now with that cut I'll try to tear it and see it won't tear I've now got my toll cut and what I need to do is mask off the edges here so I don't get glue or Fabric in those areas where it's traveling in the channels but before I do that let's pull up these wedges and see if this is any less warped than it was yesterday it's tight there no there's still tension there okay well hopefully that fabric will hold it together I'll put these wedges back in and we'll get everything masked and lined up properly I'm also masking off my bench hook here so when I put the glue on I'm not going to make a mess of it now gluing technique is really important here I'm going to be using a roller to spread the glue but if I were to take the hide glue and go like this and put it on here it's going to seep into the cracks because of the amount of glue I'm putting on it so the glue goes on the tin foil here I use this to roll out and what I'm doing is applying an even coat across the wood that way I don't have a bulk of glue that might be seeping into the cracks so I want to spread it evenly and what you'll notice is the wood tone changes in color as I apply more glue so it's just a matter of getting a nice even coat across the whole surface here and then applying the [Applause] [Music] [Applause] fabric [Applause] [Applause] okay I've got glue across the whole surface and now I can lay the fabric down so as you can see I've got lots of excess here I don't want to be worried about where the edge should be where it doesn't cover an area it's just a matter of spreading it out and you want to get all the wrinkles out so working from the center pushing the f fabric to the [Applause] sides now it's really important that before you use fabric like this that you wash it wash it a couple times and hot water and dry it and that way it shrinks you don't want this stretching when it's in use so you can now start to see the pattern of the wood showing [Applause] through so I'm going to use the roller to help push on the the [Applause] fabric and as I work it in you can actually see the texture and if I work it in with my fingers you can actually see the glue working its way through so that's why I'm not concerned about using the roller that's got glue on it on the fabric but you can see the pattern developing of the wood just goes to show I've got good contact and I'm using a fair bit of force to do this I want to make sure I've got all of that fabric in good contact you can see down here where I had a little bit more glue it's uh really going to adhere well now I've got my putty knife here I'm just going to push it in in the corners here where my roller can't necessarily get enough pressure and then what we'll do is put some protective material on it and then clamp it so this is parchment paper because the glue can come through the fabric and I'm going to put a board on here I don't want the board [Applause] adhering to the fabric you can use wax paper as well so here's my board just make sure it's in the center and then apply some weight I had to film that very rapidly because I've only got about 5 minutes of working time with the glue before I have to get it clamped up so apply the glue get the fabric on get the clamping on make sure you figure out your clamping before you get any glue out now if you're a user of Instagram we're also on Instagram and I can't film every project that comes to the shop here but I do share tips on Instagram leave you a link here so you can get to our Instagram profile I'll leave this for 24 hours I wouldn't clamp it for any less than that 24 hours to allow that glue to come to full strength we'll take it out of this form and see how it [Music] looks so what I need to do now is cut off the material on three sides here this is where the handle goes on the bottom so I still need that overhang so let's peel this back and take a look so if I pull on this you'll see that it's sticking to the tape but if we pull the tape back this is where we've got the bare wood and that's exactly what we're looking for so I'll use a sharp knife and cut the fabric I want [Music] here [Music] [Music] w [Music] a [Music] every time we do this I find this is the exciting part let's see how it turns out so I'll pull the wedges out here covered in tape and that one stuck a little bit down here that tape [Applause] is okay and there we go rolling Tambour okay so it's nice and flexible it's sturdy those pieces at the top you see there it's crept a little bit here but I can't really control that because of the tension that's in the board so look at the edge here you can see there's a bit of a gap there at the top but we've got a nice tight Tambour all the way across here because it was clamped together and there's a bit of misalignment here but that gets fixed once it goes in the channel you can see here that'll ride in the channel properly so last part is to add the bottom here this is where the handle goes on so I'll glue that up next now if you remember this handle part here is too high and that's why I took it off so I could glue the Tambour properly but for me to glue this on now what I need to do is flip this over and glue it the opposite way so this is going to go this way this needs to go this way so I'll glue it on like this now I want to be able to clamp this so what I'm going to do is take this edge off that I had here before and then I can clamp it to the [Applause] board so I'll start by laying the parchment down here just so nothing sticks and then what I'll do is line up the Tambour against this fence over here straighten up the fabric and now I can glue this on here line everything up against that fence and clamp this down so that's going to work well I just need to apply the glue and I want to mask off these ends again so I don't get any glue on them so I'll just take a piece of masking tape and when you tear it off you get these rough edges I want a straight edge here because it's going to be uh put up against the wood there so a trick for you if you take a putty knife bend the tape over the putty knife you can then break it and you get a straight line so I'm just going in about an inch put that tape on and we're good there and that will prevent it from sticking I also want to set the fabric back from this front edge so I'm just going to take the masking tape and give myself about a/ an inch where there won't be any fabric glued to the bottom before I put the tape on here you can just see that glossy Mark there so that's where this has been running inside the runner but I'm just going in about an inch from that edge to get the fabric away now if you wondered how much glue it took to do this this was almost when I started so that's how much glue went on the back here on this side it's not going to take very much my glue brush is a little bit small for this application but it's just a small part so get it spread on here and then we can glue it up okay so to get the tightest joint possible here I'm just going to pull the Tambour to the front there's no resistance at the back I can now get it as snugly fit as I can line it up with my fence at the side and then pull it here so I'll just pull the fabric tight and then clamp it on I'll start the clamping in the center here so again just pull that fabric out once more make sure it's nice and tight and I'll put my clamp on I can now move this off the workbench and we'll look at the cabinet and see what needs to be done there in order to inspect this I need to turn it on its side and before I do that I need to take the Flower Bin out this just rests in two spots here it's quite a neat setup and this is also uh not really functional as a piece of furniture for the owner so in part two I'm going to show you how I put some shelves in here and how I take this off in a way that it can be reassembled if they wanted to do that but being able to put shelves in here for cookbooks is really going to help them out in their cabinet now the other part of the repair you'll see in part two is how I repair these doors that are coming apart and this Hardware here has a broken latch I purchased some new hardware here but you can see it's brass I need to age that to look like this so we can get this back working order so I'll close up the latches here and get this cabinet turned on its side so from this angle it looks like it might come together well there's a nail over here this nail here is pulled out and it's because it was nailed so close to the edge of the board so I'll need to pull that out and reinstall it and I need to clean something out a little bit here it's not quite closing tight so that's now coming down more and you can see this ardox nail this is a modern attachment so a modification someone had done there's also some debris in here so I'll just knock that out and then we can prepare these Runners for the [Applause] tamber now to prepare the Tambour for going in here I want to wax these channels if you keep these waxed that'll help prevent any damage because they don't have friction going through here I'm going to use a teal light here that's burnt down that'll give me a thin piece of wax that'll easily get in this channel so just open this up oh this is a little more brittle than I bought Burgen for so you don't need anything fancy here what I recommend is not using beeswax beeswax is actually sticky so it's not the right product here but what I'm doing is I'm putting wax on the Inside Edge here putting wax on this face here I'll go all the way around and then we'll be ready to put the tamboer in be sure to go to our website and subscribe to our newsletter for links to new videos Workshop tips and more now back to fixing Furniture so this section of the Tambour is now dried for 24 hours all I need to do is trim up the fabric and then we can test it in the cabin the last step I was going to go through is reing these blocks here but I've realized there's nothing under cabinet here that these are acting as stop blocks so they were really just there to help with those uh strips of fabric that were there so we're all ready for the test now let's get this in even though this cabinet is separated a little bit it's tight up here so if I try to get this into the channel I really don't have the ability to get this in here so what that means is I need to disconnect the back spread this out more to give me the ability to put this in here and this is why some cabinets have accessibility sections at the back where the Tambour will roll out and that that way it's serviceable I now need a way to open up this cabinet this way so I'll put a block in here and get a spreader clamp set up so this will allow me to Jack open the cabinet there that should give me what I need okay so get it started in this side I'll apply some glue to this rabbit here and then I'll spread it with the brush and then what I can do is clamp this cabinet back together again for clamping a large cabinet like this I've got 4T clamps that allows me to get the full length of this but it's not very common for people to have clamps like this so let me show you how to do this with two smaller clamps so pull out a 3ft clamp and you can see how far that comes here it's not quite cutting it so if I leave this clamp here and grab another clamp what I can do now is Nest them together and pull the cabinet tight so with it all clamped up let's check out the Tambour door wow nice and smooth with the problems on this tour door solved you can say the case is closed but this ho your cabinet still needs some TLC I've got some doors to fix broken Hardware to replace and I'm putting in some shelves so I hope you'll join me next time for part two of this video we've got over 80 videos in our collection at this point so I'll leave one right here for you to continue to enjoy thanks for watching fixing [Music] furniture

Channel: Fixing Furniture

Views: 16,207

Keywords: furniture repair, woodworking, furniture restoration, restoration, how to, wood glue, fixing furniture, tambour, tambour door, roll up door, roll-up door, Wooden It Be Nice, Hoosier, hoosier cabinet, twill, twill fabric, plain weave fabric, hide glue

Id: aJknJBW_oWw

Length: 41min 49sec (2509 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024