From Red to Blonde, Refinishing Complete Dining Set

hey everyone it's trena from john's furniture repair here starting another project so i'm just in the works with this dining room stuff here it's a pretty huge job it's got six chairs in this table and they're going from this color to a natural blonde wood so we're having to remove all of this color everywhere and from the base it's got a pretty big hefty base down there too that we're going to remove everything and clean it up so i've got a few pieces in the mix here i've been working on chairs so far so i've got two chairs and clamps right now here that we had taken completely apart stripped down sanded and uh those are gonna be in clamps overnight and we've got another chair in the works on the sanding bench here and i'm actually stripping the seats but i'm not stripping uh the pieces because this fit there's barely a finish on this stuff and it just stands off pretty nicely we have to do quite a bit of sanding anyways so i'm just using a 180 grit to gently remove the the finish and give it a nice sand getting it all cleaned up to a nice clean natural look so um got a couple here that we finished our other clamps so they'll just get another light sand and then i'm just going to clear coat them in natural maybe do a little bit of toning this guy here so it's a pretty big difference from what they were i'll show you this is the last one that i have together here that i gotta do my thing to and uh it's a pretty nice change i think it makes it look a lot better not so dark so i'm just gonna get to sanding the rest of this chair here that's on the bench and uh get that one in clamps and then get the last one apart and that'll be six chairs let's get at it [Music] okay guys so i've got all the pieces sanded um and i always hand sand after using the machine with the 180 paper so i just want to make sure that i straighten out any little swirl marks that the sander might have left even though i did use a 180 in the sander there still could be some marks just to even out the edges and get everything sanded to the same level this is one of the back posts so the other thing that i do before um putting everything back together is clean out all the joints so in this piece i usually just get a for a tenon joint um just make sure the edges don't have glue on them make sure that there's going to be raw wood that they're going to connect to here and there's nothing impeding the way of the tenon coming in and then on the ends that are going into the back or the bottom of the chair seat i like to use a file just to get rid of any glue chunks and to rough up the wood so it's a good surface for glue so i've done that to pretty much everything uh the other thing that i always do is i keep a set of old forstner bits around for cleaning out dowel joints so this is a half inch forstner bit that i've got here and i just want to clean out anything that is left in that glue joint just so that it's a nice clean surface inside and that there's fresh wood inside for the glue to adhere to and i don't have to worry about something getting in the way when i put it back together i've got some putty on pieces that need it so i'm just using a water-based timbermate light putty because we're sticking to natural on these pieces i always think about my finished color instead of the wood color when i choose my putty so anything that you know little holes that were where the nails were anything that is a major defect or damage to the surface of the wood i'm just going to give a little bit of putty these are in pretty good condition though so they didn't need a ton so basically after i've done all of the drilling out of the joints and make sure i've gone over everything to make sure there's isn't any more putting or anything to take care of then the chair is ready for glue so let me show you how we do that okay so i've got the chair seat here all the dell holes are cleaned out you can see that is an imperial loyalist they had a wood burning label so that's kind of nice that stays after you clean it up so i've got the chair flipped upside down and my first uh pieces that i'm gonna glue together are the legs these chairs are funny because they have bigger front legs than back legs so because they have a little bit of a lean i guess so these are my two front legs these are my two back legs so i'm just going to lay them out and i've got my west system epoxy and sawdust mixture here so it's pretty thick and i'm just going to coat the inside of those dowel holes not too much just all around the edge to make sure that the dowels are held all the way around but not so much that i can't get the joint all the way seated i've noticed that these chairs actually are they look like they're not the dowels aren't all the way in and i've had a couple that i've just taken apart three times making sure that they are in but it just looks like they're not so they've stopped the turning too high up the chair and left the dowel kind of sticking out to a little bit more than i think looks good but when it was in that dark color i don't think you could really see it that much i might have to do some color work on those ends maybe painting a bit of the areas where you can't get the red out you can see all right and i'll also put uh some glue in the bottom h brace here together because we've got to put that all together before we put the legs into the chair all right so i always look at the nail hole where the nail hole is on the bottom and where the nail hole was right here i know that these two most likely went together that way same thing here we've got the nail hole here that makes sense except for that doesn't make sense so you just got to flip it up should have a wider front and back and so now that i know my back legs they're all angled properly so these uh this brick was here pick it up pop it on the chair get the back legs bent into place and give them a tap in good so those are all seated in i'm going to flip the chair over and get the top on before i get any of the clamps on the chair harder to work with when there's clamps everywhere so i'll just do the same thing coat all the inside surface all the way around on the inside all right and then the two back pieces you can always tell which one is the back because the nail holes that we putted are on the back so you want to make sure you get those pointing to the back you want to seat these all the way down in their groove right back where they came and we can pop it in the chair now that we've got everything together we can get some clamps on this guy most of my clamps are on the other chair but i still have a bunch of long ones here so we'll just make do with what we got i like these quick grips for chairs because you don't need a ton of pressure with chair joints and if you put too much pressure on a chair then you just end up pulling it out of joint a little bit so i'm just going to make sure this is heated down now i'm going to prop a clamp holding down the two back posts you'll notice a little bit of glue squishing out there and it kind of sits more upright so that i know it's sitting in its joint all the way down back make sure that looks good yep all right so that'll sit in clamps overnight just like the other two that we've got going just leave it on the workbench because i'm always banging my shin off of clamps anyways that's how we get a chair glued together and these ones are fairly simple so not a whole lot going on with these chairs but they're nice chairs i always thought of them as like nice cottage furniture kind of charming all right so there's only one more to take apart so i'll show you guys how we do that and then it'll just be sanding that chair up and getting it glued and and that'll be all six chairs so let's get the other one and take it apart okay so here's the last chair we've got it's pretty loose the back is rocking back and forth so the first thing that i do to take these off is just with a rubber mallet you guys can barely see a lot of them have screws which this one does going into the legs and into the seat these screws on these chairs have been so small that they weren't even doing anything but it takes from the seat to the h brace they just use screws now these are tiny though they didn't even go into the seats so i'm not really sure what the purpose of maybe just a wedge to keep it there but it's definitely not going back in because it's not structural at all i keep my clamps on overnight so when i take everything off in the morning it's not going anywhere and the screw is not going to help it not to mention that screws going into legs like this often weaken that joint and i've seen a lot of legs just break right off all right so now that we have that off we can see there's it's pretty loose here now these seats are tough to work on because right in the middle of this seat you can see how they've kind of uh carved it so that it's pretty thin here it gets even thinner right where it dips in for your butt here and it's only about an eighth inch thick so when i'm hitting this seat um it's very likely that these joints will split and the only way to get them out is to pop them out that way or use a heat gun that would help a little bit but i found that you know you end up burning the wood and the joint still doesn't come loose because it's such a big joint so i've just um been working at tapping them out carefully and they are pretty loose so that's not a big deal if these chairs were super super tight and i had to take them apart i would definitely have to do a soak on the joint with vinegar or the heat gun to get them out but i've been having some pretty good success so far and only one chair seat has broken on me but it was already split so i expected that to happen anyways so let's just see how it goes that joined on this side this side looks a little tighter good awesome so that went just fine now that seat is loose okay so i'll set that aside and for these joints i'm just going to pop them out mallet so when you're hitting it up against the rubber mat it's bouncing the joint and breaking the glue and then after that you need to hit at least three or four more times and it'll just bounce itself right out of the joint so it sounds loud and it's crazy but it's not hurting the the piece as long as you have a mat underneath it's also just bouncing right of that joint same with this guy good base taking apart now these guys are a little bit more tricky they've got nails pinning in the mortise into the or the tenon into the mortise so what i have had some luck with is just slowly pulling the nail out right back and forth because like if i start digging in here to get anywhere close to the nail it's going to make such a big mess you can kind of see it right there so it's quite it's probably a quarter inch in here but it's right next again the edge of the wood so it just wants to break out so there's been quite a few breaks but i've been able to pull out the nails pretty successfully so you can see just kind of pulled out the tenon it was barely on the edge of that one you can see where the nail was [Music] and those nails are still in there you can see them so that's one side seems like one side was always easier than the other so i'm just going to be really careful and just start to kind of pry and keep an eye on this wood here if it wants to break i'm just going to start getting some movement in the joint break the glue loose and i want the tenon to pull out of the nail i don't want the nail to pull with the tenon hopefully you can see what i'm doing here so here's the nail right here and i've got a little bit of a bite on it this one was a little closer to the surface so what i want to do is hold my putty knife i don't want to pry against the wood and dent it any more than it is it's already buggered enough so i'm just going to get a hold of it and then just use my putty knife as a surface to protect the wood around it there we go just work that out of there little buggers causing so much trouble the nails that are stuck in this back post i'm going to push through the back and get them to come back out right there same with this guy and then use my pliers again with the putty knife all right so everything is ready for stripping and sanding and that's how we take the chair apart guys so okay guys so i've got all the chairs prepped and lined up over here so they're ready to go i've got the table um the pullouts have these dowels that stop them from pulling out all the way so those are all out of the bottom so basically i'm going to take the pullouts out and then i think i'm going to take the top off of the base just so i can get right in there and clean everything up since it needs quite a bit of cleanup it's a pretty nice table i think it's going to come apart pretty easily to be able to sand every nook and cranny and get all that red out so i'm going to set up to take it out and get it all apart definitely need to go on the same side when they come off so they should just pull right out as we go so these little pieces of wood here are just a groove to fit into a slot on this piece and so it sits in that hole and it slides around for expansion and contraction so that's pretty cool so what i'll do is take these guys all off and the top should come off um and that screw of course too but i'll make sure to label these as well so they go back in the same spot so now that should be loose and that looks about loose but the this piece here is still doweled into the sides so i'll probably have to take this skirt off too because it pops out of this dowel so it which is easier to clean up that way anyways ugh there you can just see how it's doweled into the side of this guy here holding that whole center piece in so make sure to label this one as well awesome so the other thing that this tabletop has is a pretty good split right down the middle but at both ends it's not split so i don't think i'm going to be re-laminating this table i'm kind of thinking about doing an epoxy fill this table does have a little bit of warp in the leaves and in some of the pullouts which is why i'm so reluctant to take it apart all the way so i just kind of want to keep things pretty much the way they are so it's working okay now and it's not going to get much better just because it's all warped so i'm not going to try playing with a bunch of crooked wood uh so i think just doing an epoxy fill and giving it a good sand is probably what i'm going to do all right so we'll get this top off [Music] so i've got the half of the table base sanded to 120. obviously i had to do a lot of hand sanding in these areas and in these areas these areas here but i was able to use the sander for most of it uh and then i got to go back with 180 on everything on this side before i flip it over to the other side up so you can see i still got all the pieces on this side and the backs of those legs to do it's taking a while this finish doesn't strip very nicely and we are having to sand it quite a bit anyways so i just uh i don't usually but on this project i have four four went the uh stripping on most of it the tops of the seats and the top of the table will get a chemical strip before we sand but on the chair bases and the table base i'm just sanding off everything so lots of work and lots to go it's not a small table like even the the main part of the table is pretty huge so it'll be quite a bit of work getting everything back together so i'll keep working at it okay guys i've been doing some work here off camera i've got the crack all epoxied and it's filled this is stripped and ready for sanding i've already sanded the underside so that's all good to go uh the update on this is it's all sanded up to 180 with the hand sander and then hand sanded with 180 afterwards so that's all ready for clear coats these little areas in here were pesky buggers but they look pretty good so that's all ready to go i've got the two pullouts just sitting in um calls just so they don't warp anymore than they already are while i'm stripping them and these guys are off i wasn't going to take them off but to clean up the underside nicely it's kind of necessary so i just have them sitting in calls this one's already stripped while i'm sanding and prepping everything and once the the slides are back on i can take them out of the calls i know i'm not going to straighten them out i just don't want them to go any further so next up is sanding the top and the two pull outs and we've got all the chairs waiting here ready to go so we just got to get the table there and then it's off to the booth all right all right so i've been sanding the rest of the base and the two pull out leaves which are ready and i've just got the top left to go i've got the base reattached to the top and these side pieces put back in so everything is back together under here and cleaned up i've added these strips here um they weren't not they were not on there originally and i just feel like uh they should have been there in the first place and maybe they were forgotten because if you do lift the pull out too high when you're pushing it back in to underneath the table then it can scratch on that piece so i think that's a pretty important add-on uh this will get a little bit of a sealer coat underneath so i'll just have to tape that off which i would have thought of that before put those on there because i could have put them on after but it was just easier when it was uh all apart but probably should have waited anyways so everything looks good under here and the base looks nice and clean we were able to get all the red out of the corners and the edges so that's all done and basically now it's just sanding this top it's gonna need quite a bit of sanding because of uh the split that we had filled here i was able to straighten these leaves out a little bit there's still a tiny curve which is pretty unnoticeable and i've added actually on the back to the runners i've added an extra fastener to hold those pieces in place now i did make them the slots bigger than the screws so it can move back and forth it just will hold it from warping off of the um off of the runner itself there is still a little bit of a gap there because it's still warped a bit but that's as tight as i could get it to stay hopefully it kind of over time flattens itself out now that it'll be sealed so i'm just going to wind up the sander start with 120 get everything down go with 180 get everything down and then finish sand with 180 hand sanding all right let's get to it [Music] so okay we've got the table sanded we started actually with 80 grit because it was so uh damaged which i didn't notice right away uh and so it was about an hour and a half of sanding with 80 grit and then i moved to 120 and did quite a bit of sanding with 120 and then to 180 with the sander and then we moved to 180 with the hand sander so this table top has got a ton of hours of sanding on it and it looks pretty good now whenever you sand with 80 grit you really got to climb up the sandpaper ladder just to make sure you don't have any uh little swirls and and scratches from the 80 grit sander and i think we've pretty much got them all this is going in a natural color which will be a lot more yellow than it looks like right now but um hopefully that hides any little scratches that i missed it's not gonna have a stain that would make those pop out so i think it'll look pretty good so we are finally ready to take everything off to the booth for clear coats and uh i think i'll do at least five coats of post catalyzed lacquer on the tops of these and at least three to four coats on the chairs and bases of everything else so i'm gonna have to get a hand to get this over there all right [Music] do [Music] okay guys so i got a first coat on this table and it laid down just fine so the customer would like uh the table to be a little bit more yellow so i'm gonna do some spray tinting i knew it would be a little light so that's fine so i'm gonna mix up like a maple just like a colonial not colonial but a little lighter than that like a natural yellowed maple color and spray tint everything including the chairs and get it to a little bit more what she wants so i'll mix that up and show you guys how i put it on [Music] [Music] okay so i like this as a base from where to work from it's evened out everything and kind of done the job of a bleach toner and bleach toner is something that i use a lot in the shop it's kind of like a muted white wash very translucent just to kind of take care of really dark spots and to do any touch ups on stains just to make things fade away it's kind of like giving it a a fresh start bringing it back to like a lighter zone before you go into a deeper zone with a color so you can hide major defects with with bleach tone and use it to get a lot of different effects so that's kind of what this color is doing which is good because this piece had a lot of red if you remember and uh it was impossible to get all out so areas that that uh we didn't quite get out are kind of toned down now with this color so i think what i'll do now because it's not quite the maple color that i want it to be is use a straight burnt umber to give this a little more orangey mapley color and uh hopefully that's the ticket and i don't have to do any other coloring so i'm going to set that up in the gun and see how it looks so it's looking pretty good still a little light and a little bit on the too warm side so i think what i'm going to end up doing is adding a coat of raw umber and i think that for sure will get it for me different light here so give it that a little bit of a caramel tone that i'm looking for and you can't really see the color on the camera very well but it's a little bit more colonial than i want it looks actually pretty awesome on camera but standing here it does not so uh i'm going to add a nice green raw umber if you guys are familiar with the color it's uh here i can get it on i'll just put it on here it's a very green ish brownie color that you can see in a lot of old pieces they're used with it or they're stained with this color and it just kind of gives it that really super caramel brown that a lot of my old maple pieces have so i think that's going to hit it for me i've got all the defects and the red in the grain all muted nicely so everything's really even and it looks looking good so i just need to give it that final touch of color and i think we'll be good so let's get it [Music] so i just got a thin color locker to see all the color up i'm gonna let this dry for like two days just because we did a lot of color work on it but i love the color i like how it turned out too bad it's three stages whatever uh so we started with a yellow bleach toner pretty much went to a burnt umber and then to a raw under so we've got that nice caramel maple look now looks really good i've got the leaves in here just to make sure everything is on the same plane and i won't spray them in here for all the clear coats just so i can get nice coats on everything but i think it looks pretty good and uh i'll let it dry for a bit and give it a probably another coat before a stand just because i don't want to stand through any of that color work that i just did because it took so long i don't want to have to touch up a color in there so i'm just going to make sure that it's got a good heavy coat of locker on it before i do any sanding and uh but i just want this to dry quite a bit before i do that all right so that's four coats of lacquer today on this table so it's done it just needs to cure and then i can put the leaves back in and the pins and that'll be good to go the chairs all have one clear coat so we can start color work on these once they've cured and i sand them down and uh as you remember we had i think three different colors to go through so it's not actually a very easy tint job but just got to get through it so just going to let these cure for a little bit and then we'll get to color work all right so now that i've got these all sanded with 320 and they've dried a little bit i'm just first before i do any toning with the spray lacquers i'm going to go around with a little touch-up brush and some light walnut toner and i'm going to hit any of my little putty spots especially from the repairs on the backs so you can see here got a little putty spot here that i just want to hit with some color first before i go and do all the even toning over the whole chair because then it will just completely hide these marks and anything that's really dark and stands out i'm just going to give it a little touch of color just to make these things disappear good and then the other areas that i was concerned about were right where these um posts and joints come together it's quite dark down there i just want to hit where it's really dark with a little bit of this light color just to try to make that a little less stand outing stand outy whatever the heck i'm trying to say look at the front of it here i mean mostly it's the front that i'm worried about so right in here where there's all these dark spots just kind of want to put some of that caramel color over it and this one here and then the other area that i was kind of worried about was where this center rung can you really see meets this side post here i just want to blob a little bit of color in there so it isn't red so when i go to tone all these areas i want them all to be that nice caramel color so you just have to do a little bit more of an opaque application where areas are that you can't get the red out so i'll continue through all the chairs and do all the little touch-ups on everything even like areas like this where it's focused in here where you've got an area that was low and you couldn't stand it right out you can just blob a little bit of that caramely color over top so it stands out less [Music] so just so you know what the difference the color work is doing this is the raw clear coated piece and this is the tinted piece a little shiny because the lacquer is fresh but uh definitely getting a little bit more of that warm honey look on the piece this is still kind of blotchy so the color work really makes the difference i got three chairs left to do and then i'm done okay so i've got everything all the color work finished and under two coats of lacquer well there's three including the base coat so that might be good i'll look at it when it's dry after tomorrow but it's all looking really nice table has cured a little longer than the chairs it's a little less shiny these will come down too but we've got that nice warm glow going and uh yeah so i'm pretty happy with how everything's turning out i think it should be pretty much ready to go i'll see if there's any little areas that need a little extra color or a touch-up or anything when they're all dry and i get them together you can see maybe this chair here is a little lighter than the other two so maybe add a little bit of coat to that one but just minor things to touch up on and then this will all be ready to go so i'll show you guys when it's all finished and cured all right so it is done i did do another coat on the chairs so they've got four coats on them and they're looking awesome everything's got a soft warm satin glow these are still curing a little bit so they'll tone down to where the table's at but i think we got it looking pretty good there's the base all that work stripping it down now it's a really nice light set that's got a lot more character i think because the color is a lot lighter and you can see a lot more of the wood and all that kind of stuff yeah so thanks for joining me on this one guys and uh don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button and uh check out our other videos thanks again [Music] you

Channel: John's Furniture Repair

Views: 20,061

Rating: 4.9605913 out of 5

Keywords: Furniture, Furniture Repair, Shop, Woodworking, Workshop, Thomas Johnson, Antique Restoration, John's Furniture Repair, Trena, Dining Table, Maple, Strip, Refinish, Chairs, Sanding, Festool, Spraybooth

Id: tGHOjP0Tf2k

Length: 44min 7sec (2647 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021