Extensive Repairs to Old Dresser Part I

hi guys this is turn at john's furniture repair starting a new project in the shop today and it's this guy he's in pretty rough shape and it's a beautiful piece but someone has tried to do some repairs to lifting veneer and shoved a lot of putty in areas probably where there was missing veneer and chips and dents and things so it's in pretty bad shape and i'll show you a little closer up but basically we're going to be stripping the whole thing down doing all the repairs to the the surface and uh fixing the drawers they don't work very well looks like you know maybe there was some pieces of veneer missing and someone just kind of slathered some uh putty in so i'm kind of afraid of what i'm going to find in here hopefully not too drastic and maybe it's just an overfill or something like that we're going to take everything apart get it uh as many pieces as we can and start stripping it down so let's get to it okay guys so i've got everything out of the dresser everything's in pretty bad shape so i've got a rag here with some water and i want to do some investigating on these to see what the heck this is i'm just going to spray it with my this looks like water-based timber mates or something [Music] see if i can just wipe it off just want to see what we're working with underneath here before i [Music] okay [Music] major over puttying looks like i think he was trying to deal with um finish missing finish maybe he was thinking of painting this and just doing a clean up that way which if that's all he's doing then i don't care it's not gonna be a big deal we're gonna be stripping this finish off anyways so that's good what i don't want is putty under finish or under veneer i mean where i have to re-glue veneer and then there's putty everywhere but we've got you know lifting veneer here and i just don't want putty under it might be a bit of an issue here where he's puttied over loose veneer so do that repair we have to clean that out of there so it's kind of a pain in the butt but for the most part i don't think he's done that i think it's just surface imperfections that are being puttied here so i think we're good to uh just strip it off and let the putty come off with a stripping process and if not sand it so all right guys so this area here i can see that there's lifting veneer with putty everywhere so what i'm gonna do is soak this down and i'm gonna start scrubbing that off [Music] i usually like to do my veneer repairs before i strip and i can't do that if this is all over the place so i gotta get this off and see what's going on looks like there's putty right underneath this veneer piece here too i'm just gonna kind of gently scrub under there okay so i'm just gonna look underneath this piece i'm gonna get a little my scraper knife to remove a bit of a chunk that's underneath there [Music] anything that's stopping it from laying down flat needs to be removed or i could just break it off here that way [Music] so much for being careful okay so looks like i've got it all i'm just going to get a bit of eye glue here this is just some old brown glue high glue that i've needed to open up the bottle for so let's put it in jar and i'll just get that everywhere work it into these areas and i'm going to check the surrounding veneer looks like it's loose here as well so at the same time i'll do that make sure that's clean [Music] and then work some glue in there as well and i'll just kind of use my finger to push it right into the back of where that veneer is loose and i use hydraulic pressure wipe off the excess and there will still need to be some repairs to this area but at least i've got all the veneer down that was there okay now we'll just put our wood block there with tape so it doesn't stick to the wood and throw a couple clamps on it overnight [Music] all right so that corner is taken care of yeah again just some dents on the front of this face looks like more you know imperfections there is a lifted area veneer right here right in the middle of the panel looks like it's got some putty in it so what i'm going to do is slice it open try to clean out as much stuff as i can i'm gonna lose some i think i'm gonna make a new piece to go in here i'm just going to lose this piece here and we'll replace that i'm cutting it at a kind of a triangle shape so that when i put my patch in it's not like a square [Music] kind of blends in a little bit better if you use that shape for repairs so i'm using rawhide glue to do these veneer repairs because that's the glue that's in here already and also raw high glue is just the easiest glue to use for veneer repairs you know if you're lining up a little veneer piece and it doesn't quite work for you you just wet it and you can reposition it it doesn't need to be a disaster like with some other glues you would have to just destroy the piece and try again so it's always nice to be a little bit flexible when you're doing veneer repairs okay so i'll need to cut a piece for that okay so i've got a piece of mahogany here and i'm pretty sure this is walnut i'm not 100 sure but this straight grain part of this mahogany piece um works pretty good for this area and because we're going so dark um i didn't have a nice piece of walnut that would have worked here i mean i might in sometimes i have some things in here that i can save and it almost looks a little bit more like something like that but this is just old mahogany um this is a piece of walnut i don't think it looks right i think this is going to be my best bet for color matching i don't always replace um with the same one and if you want to scream at me that's okay if it was really in a prominent area and the finish wasn't going to be super dark and i needed to make sure that it was the same wood then of course i would do that but this is a small repair this is going to blend in just fine with the quiet grain so all right so what i'm gonna do is that i've got my little void all cut out and cleaned i'm gonna take a piece of paper and a pencil and i'm just going to um do like we used to do in kindergarten is a rubbing could have not in the middle actually let me just do that again good so that gives me an idea of the shape so i'm just going to cut this out and i'm just going to glue it on to my piece of veneer uh after i fit it in here with a little bit of raw hot glue so let me cut this off all right so i've got my piece now i'm just gonna see how it actually fits in here i'm going to kind of press it into everywhere and see where it needs to be trimmed a little bit i'm going to press it in with my knife [Music] [Music] do [Music] all right guys so i've got uh the bottom drawer apart that was in pretty bad shape and had all the blue tape on it and uh we can see why so these super deep grooves that are usually just grooves on this drawer front they've gone all the way through our drawer bottom have gone all the way through and i'll show you the culprits and i hate these types of drawer stops you've probably seen them before these are drawer bottom eaters right here and when your drawer wears out it gets lower and lower and lower riding on the sides here and once it gets low enough when these start contacting this just starts scooping out wood on the bottom of the drawer and soon you have pretty deep grooves and in this drawer's case holes so we're going to replace this and the second thing we have to do to repair that is repair the runners so these guys here are worn down along the edge that it rides inside the cabinet with so you can see how wide it is here and then when you look here you can see how thin it is so that's all worn down over time so what we have to do is glue and strip on of wood back onto these and resaw them in the table saw to get them back up to height so they won't touch those drawer slides but the other are drawer stops but the other thing is we're going to take those out of there and use wooden blocks to stop the drawer instead of metal just because that will never happen again with those so there are other repairs on this drawer obviously this is broken and uh we're gonna get a new drawer bottom made because that's not going back in and then we'll just re-glue the whole thing and get it fixed i'll show you how i do the runners before we put it back together and that'll be fixed okay so i've got these drawer sides for that bottom drawer that was all full of blue tape all glued up there's a couple cracks so i've decided after some measuring that this needs to be eight and seven eighths wide so what i need to do first is run them through the table saw to get a straight edge on the glide area and then i can laminate on a piece of hardwood uh to and then probably put them through again to make them exactly eight and seven eighths so let's get them to the table saw and run them through first okay so we've got our chunky pieces that we can just glue right on to the bottom and they'll get shaved and shaped afterwards so i'll grab my carpenter's glue which is the best glue to use when you can laminate two flat pieces of wood together you wouldn't want a gap filling glue here or an expandable glue like pva glue just want to go with straight up carpenter's glue all right so i'm not gonna be too picky about it i'm just gonna get it on there put a couple clamps on it good so that can sit for a couple hours and then we can cut it off and shape it we were lucky that we kept all of our dovetails when we had to saw that off wasn't too serious that we lost them all so those we don't need to cut back in just the glide okay so i'm just working on the cabinet of the dresser here the case and you can see that these interior drawer slides are in pretty bad shape there's pieces missing broken off this side is broken off the sides just worn off and these are actually really stuck in here none of them are loose and the joinery is all still really tight so i'm trying to figure out a way to repair this without removing them from the interior of the cabinet because it's going to cause a lot of damage and i'm thinking what i wanted to do was take them to the table saw run them through and put a new spline into these pieces but i can't get them out so i'm thinking of you know maybe just getting a chisel and working a groove in here doing a couple of drill points chiseling out a section and then just uh adding in a tenon into the pieces that are missing uh that'll work great for these little ones but like with me i have almost the entire piece missing on this one here as well as the top one on this side is pretty worn and missing as well i don't want to really do that to the whole thing it's going to take quite a long time and not a great method so i'm trying to figure out you know i might try to get some heat on the corner blocks and the joints and see if i can get at least those uh really worn ones out if not i'm gonna have to figure out a way to uh you know either get a router or something it's gonna be pretty tough though because working inside the cabinet you don't have a lot of space and freedom to do things like that so i'm gonna see if i can get this loose that's the first thing i'm gonna try all right i've got one out just put a little bit of heat on the corner blocks because they're definitely what's holding it in and they did pop out of the side of the cabinet so it's not really glued at the front or a little bit of glue i guess but mostly it's this joint that was holding it there so i'm glad i got that out now i can actually run this whole thing in the table saw and uh put a whole new tenon in there or just make a new one i mean that might just be as easy so i'm gonna try to get the other side out cause that one's still stuck in there okay so i've got my spline cut here actually it's a piece of maple and that fits nicely in there so the other thing you want to check before is just how it's going to slide in the drawer groove so you can see that slides quite nicely and freely through that group so that's working so now i'll just mix up some glue it's a little bit loose in there i might just actually put a little piece of veneer in either side and use white glue to glue this in i'm thinking that would probably do it because it is a little bit loose okay so now that we've got the two top runners dealt with this one's fine so i'm going to leave it alone but this one's missing a chunk so what i'm going to do is actually cut this off and groove this back into here so what i'm going to do here first is pop this at an angle like that good so now i want to make a groove in here so i'm going to cut along the line where the tenon should be going in and i would love to use the table saw to do this but getting these out is a real pain but good and then i'm gonna get my chisel starting coming back this way and just work it out of there cut a little deeper okay so i've got kind of like a groove with the ramp up i want to um have this piece kind of lay over this break or broken area so that we can fan it out and it doesn't get caught on just a flat butt joint so i'm gonna cut this off yeah that should do it so it's kind of just got a joint that comes that way so i'm gonna glue that in first and then i'm going to take my plane and cut it down um just so i can get it really meet up met up well rest of the winner but yeah that looks good so i'll make some epoxy to do all of these glue ups with i think even though that's a pretty good fit um just want to make sure it's strong because i mean although the rest of this tenon is in good shape and part of this board this one's going to be relying just on you know a quarter inch in on each side of this tenon so a good glue would be excellent here so i've just got one more of those types of repairs on this side so i'll do the same thing here um you know just this away at an angle make a groove and put my other little angled piece in here and uh yeah then the other one down here is good so uh it'll that'll be good for repairs on these runners i can just put these back in when they're dry so i'll get to getting this one and then get everything in epoxy okay so i've got everything in clamps i made sure to clean up the glue really well so i don't have to deal with that in the way of the slides so those will sit overnight and then these two i also cleaned up really good and they're all glued in there so yeah i'm happy with that so let those sit overnight now i'm gonna get this drawer back together we made a new bottom this is the drawer face it's all prepped and ready to go just put that over there and this is the new bottom that we made to replace this one with the big holes in it so that'll work much better and we've got our drawers uh sides here with the new glides on the bottom that we need to saw to with so these should be ready to come out of clamps now so let's take them out okay so we've got them out of clamps here on the workbench here they are all glued up so there's a little bit of a proudness on this side and this is the side that rides against the glide inside so what i'm gonna do first before we go to the table saw is just flatten this off with the plane i'm just going to use a hand plane this thing is duller than my jokes good so now what i'm gonna do is set my table saw up to eight and seven eighths is which is what we want the width to be on these guys so it's going to ride in the cabinet and i want this distance to be eight and seven eighths okay so we've got everything prepped let's glue this drawer together i'm just gonna use some tight bonds try to keep it all contained in these dovetails [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so got those two free only a little bit of cleanup and i'm gonna do a slight chamfer on the edge so it's not sharp and cutting into the the drawer side just to make it a nice soft piece a little bit of glue squeeze out here that i didn't clean up i tried to clean up most of it but i'll get that and then on the cabinet here we've got these two repairs that we did so get these off that looks pretty good nice and sturdy in there that's going to be awesome so i'll just need to do some uh work with the planer and the chisels to get those to come back to shape and then we've got the drawer that we glued up yesterday so let's get these clamps off all right so it looks pretty nice and sturdy guys not uh any side to side motion really nice and sturdy got a nice new drawer bottom here so the last thing i need to do to get this guy back together is put some nails going into the back here so i'm going to pre-drill those and put just three nails across the back here make it straight do one there then we'll do one here and on the other side [Music] great so we've got our drawer bottom all fixed in and this drawer is feeling sturdy so does it fit it's a good question our drawer slides down here are going to need a lot of work if you can see in the cabinet here most of them are loose for one one of them is out here and this one's not too too bad although it's not good there are deep grooves where the drawers have been sliding and i can feel quite a bit of a dip right at the back here where it's been stopping and just grinding away so what i'm going to be doing with these guys is uh probably taking all of them and flipping them over i've done that quite often if the wood is in good shape on this side then i just move the blocks over and this over to this side and then i can still keep the tenon now sometimes the tenon isn't right in the middle of this piece so that doesn't work but this one is so i can basically just take these runners out flip them after getting this all cleaned up and put them back into the groove upside down and we've got a whole new surface to run a drawer on so easiest way to do it i think and i like to keep the original pieces as much as i can uh even if we are moving them around at least they're still with the dresser so what i'm going to do is get all of these out and flip them but first i just want to see how that drawer fits so i'm going to pop it back in the way it was and it's actually the bottom drawer that we're going to fit that we fixed already so i'm just going to see how that's looking that's not too bad at all i thought it would be [Music] way tighter than that i mean it needs drawer stops put in because it's not landing where it's supposed to but in terms of sitting square in the opening it's pretty good and once we fix those slides it'll be even better it'll be a little bit more lifted at the back so i might take a little bit off because it is high quite high on this gap on the bottom but not as bad as i thought it would be so that's really good i think what i'll do is take maybe a sixteenth off on each side of these runners um but i'm only going to do that after i switch those around just to make sure i i have room to do that so let's get these runners out [Music] okay so now we've got nice smooth surfaces for the drawer bottoms to run against so i got to get these uh guides off of this side here this one's really deep look how deep that is can you see the groove goes right into there like a quarter inch these are worn but not as much as the sides but i'll flip these two so that this side is at the back and the drawer can run on this new side here we can save as much as we can lord knows the cost of wood these days is just really terrible and it's good to save wherever we can except for that one broke that's okay we'll make a new one there i'll just give those a little sand on the sander as well just to clean them up for the blocks okay so i've got the new uh guides or one new guide made here and got these uh all ready to go i just gotta scrape off a little bit of this gold glue so i'm gonna put a little bit of glue on the top of this one because it's here already and then i'll get some glue in the back joint and the front tenon and then i'll also get some glue on my tenon here and on the back corner good and then we'll just pop that into [Music] place so then i'm going to put one of the corner blocks on underneath never forget these guys they're always important to put back in place just wipe off some glue here the last thing we need to figure out is where these guys go so we know that when they're started they need to start just a little bit proud of the edge of the dresser here so you want maybe like a 16th sticking out so you're not in trouble of hitting the side of the dresser but then we need to make sure from that point it's square all the way back sometimes our drawer isn't square but we're going to start with these square so i'm going to get my square [Music] you

Channel: John's Furniture Repair

Views: 35,979

Rating: 4.9438019 out of 5

Keywords: furniture, john's furniture repair, thomas johnson, antiques, dresser, drawer slides, veneer, shop, workshop, woodworking, trena

Id: dBsbfGUmc60

Length: 40min 10sec (2410 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021