How to Repair & Age Wood: A Rustic Wooden Chest Repair by Fixing Furniture

[Music] welcome back to our Workshop today I'm working on this rustic chest it was built in a way that you can see the exposed Nails it's not fine joinery but it's a Sentimental piece for the owner they brought it to me because of a couple of reasons one is there's a large gap in the top and they're using this as a coffee table so they'd like that closed up and the hinges at the back of the lid have also come off you can see here there's a fair amount of damage on the back of this it looks like there's a little bit of wood rot some pieces missing so I'll need to repair that there are also some drawers on the inside this one's missing a pull and this one's come right off this one here won't really slide properly so I'll need to address that as well there's a lot of damage to the wood in this chest so my challenge is not only to repair that but also make it as least visible as possible 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 [Music] let's get into the workshop and start fixing furniture I'm not sure how to judge the age of this piece I can tell by the surface here it's been hand planed with a jack plane it wasn't smoothed down so this wasn't meant to be a high-end piece it's got some wrought iron hardware here and on the end and it's got square nails that are holding it together where do you start on a project like this the first thing I do is inspect the damage what I want to do is understand how the damage happened so I can repair it but also prevent it from happening in the future if that's possible so if I open this up we take a look at the hinges here where they've come off on this piece so here what I notice is there's a piece that's been patched in here where the previous hinge was someone's moved it over here I also see that there's a piece of looks like thin piece of wood going across here this area is a real mess here there's a hole down here under this hinge it looks like where the screws were has just pulled apart there's a screw here so there's a lot of wood damage here I'll have to look at and take this piece of wood off on the left side here you can see there's a great big hole down here so I don't know what's hiding behind this board and under here we've got some more damage where the wood is split on the underside of the lid you can see there are three straps here and these have been screwed on which explains why there's such a gap here that's because of wood movement the customer wants to use this as a coffee table so the primary goal is to close up the Gap in the lid and put hinges on this so it operates properly the first thing I'm going to do is take a look at what's going on the back here I need a secure spot to Anchor these hinges so I'm going to deal with that first I'm really curious to see what's hiding behind this piece of wood here now I want to be as gentle as possible because I don't know if I'll need to put this piece back on here to conceal some of the damage well my first discovery here is this piece has been refinished before you see here's some old dirt and grime it looks like there might have been some paint on this and this was put over top and you can see how consistent it is here so that's a refinishing job now underneath here I can see there's a line down here and a line down here that tells me that there are likely some strap hinges here so this would have been maybe the original strap hinge then there was another hinge put here and the Third location is here this has really seen a lot of abuse over the ears if I hold this up here you can see that it's been notched out so this drawer will operate properly because of all the damage under here I think I'm going to hang on to this now on the other end of it there's some pieces missing and I think they might be in there so we'll see if I can patch this back together again I'm going to set that aside for now and turn this around so we can take a look at what's going on with this wood here it doesn't look as bad as I thought it would be at the back here this is going to be visible there's a loose piece of wood here this looks solid along here there's a bit of a splinter missing here and over here it looks like someone's potentially nailed this together but you can see this looks like a six board box and an early Canadian Furniture the boards would be this large because they were difficult to harvest and they didn't have a wave gluing things together but if I look closely here I can see that there's a seam right here so this isn't old enough to be early Canadian Furniture but again it is hand planed so someone did use a lot of hand tools on this to get it smoothed out and looking this way now that I understand the damage that's happened to this piece I need to do two things the first one is to patch the wood so that I can secure the hinges to it the second one is I need to secure the hinges in a different way than what's been done so far because obviously this hasn't worked I've got some Hardware Solutions I'll be showing you as I go through this project but first I need to separate all these loose pieces and glue them back into place part of the reason I share these videos is so that people don't do something as silly as this this is a number 10 Robertson screw it's a square drive screw and that's what we use in Canada but someone's just taken this large screw driven it in here and just split the wood open it's just an unnecessary way to try to repair something it's never going to work there's a little tiny finishing nail here holding on the sliver there's a couple of finishing nails here and here there's a nail in here there's a lot holding this together I think there's been a number of failed attempts at repairing this over the years so just for fun I'm going to hang onto these nails and see how many I can collect on the bottom of this piece you can see there's some residue here it might look like wood rot but no this is wood filler so someone's tried to pack some wood filler in this crevice to try and solve the problem but here's another loose piece of wood so I'll need to clear this out get it cleaned up and then glue it back together on this side the Splinter is moving and I can see one two three four five Nails holding on this little piece of wood this is funny this nail even has glue on it look at that that's crazy here's more damage done by Fasteners there's a nail here a nail here and it's just split that block in half all right so here's another example of a poor repair you see right here there's a little bit of glue residue a little bit right there it's just fallen off a little bit here it's just falling off this is a result of someone putting glue between two pieces of wood and not clamping it this glue doesn't work PVA doesn't work unless you actually clamp it so I'm gonna have to clear that out so I get a nice tight joint here take the nails out and that way I can get this glued together and this will be stronger than the rest of the wood itself once that PVA sets you can see inside there there's some dried PVA so I'm going to have to try and split this apart so I can get that cleaned out and then close up that Gap foreign so these pieces are starting to come together now with the glue out of them and you can see there it's not perfect but it's much better than it was before so what I need to do is glue all this up clamp it up and we'll have a nice strong bond to hold everything together again okay 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 I let the glue dry overnight on all these parts because PVA typically needs 24 hours to come to full strength so I'm going to take the clamps off now and look at what I need to do to make a spot where I can secure the hinges okay let's see yep got a nice solid space but you can see there's a mortise down here and this is recessed lots of damage and I've got a hole down here let's see what this side looks like I need to replace this damaged wood here so what I'm going to do is cut a block and glue it in here but you can't just cut a square block because end grain to end grain these two pieces here would have no strength at all so in order to get strength what I need to do is put a scarf joint in so I need to cut this on an angle and then when the new block gets glued to the existing side here there'll be strength on that end here and here and that will make sure that that block is as strong as it possibly can be to stay in there to patch in a piece of wood like this and disguise it you need to make sure you're using the right species of wood if I were to throw a piece of Oak in here for example it would stand out when I put the finish on because the grain pattern is different so I need to find a piece of pine that's going to match here and luckily I have some vintage Pine that will help me in this situation you can see I've got a lot of wood in here and some of it is vintage up here I've got some Pumpkin Pine and some red pine there's some type of wood you just can't purchase anymore these are two boards I got from a retired Furniture finisher and their old growth Pine which means the growth rings are very tight and the grain pattern is very tight and that's something that I want to match here but it's also interesting to see when you add moisture to them how they react to the finish and that's going to help me disguise this repair so I'll just add moisture to both of these pieces of wood and we'll see what the color looks like so there you can see the color difference with the Red Pine and the Pumpkin Pine and this is a piece of pine that I just purchased from the lumber yard get it wet put it up here and you can see it just holds no color compared to the Vintage and then when we take a look at the end grain as well so here you can see the end grain is very tight here it's very open so the space between the Rings there's a large space here there's really tight spacing I'm going to start the process by cutting the angles with my dazuki saw this allows me to get a refined cut Japanese saw is cut on a pull stroke so the blades are thinner and I really enjoy using these I'll then use a rotor to clear out the base to lay it where I want to cut what I'm going to do is put some blue tape across here and then what I can do is figure out exactly where I want to cut so just line it up with the top edge here and here so the damage over here starts about there look at the damage back here I can see there's some loose wood down on this spot here so I'll need to go at least that deep there and on this side this whole piece looks loose so I need to come back a fair bit I'll come back to here at the top oh I've got the line there so that makes sense so I just have to figure out the depth from the top of the surface here down to here if I put a ruler on the top here I'll give me a line to reference from I need to go down three quarters of an inch so I'll mark three quarters of an inch down on the tape here and I'll draw my line across it there to there and then over here I need this cut on a 45 . and then the damage here I'll take back to about this point here just need to lightly hold that on the tape and then break my angle so if I take out a piece from here all the way over to here I'm just concerned about what this might look like that's a fair bit of wood I'm replacing but there's not that much missing at the front here so I think I'm going to change my Approach what I'm going to do is replace this piece back here behind the surface and leave the surface as is and then I'll just patch these little tiny pieces after I've got this part patched in the back on this other side it's going to get a little bit more complicated because I've got this built-in tray here I'm going to switch the tape around to the inside here because that's where I'm going to see everything so I'll just line up my marks again and then I can flip this over and I'm going to use a rotor to clean out the space in here now I'm going to bring in my large bench hook here and this will just help me stabilize this chest there nice and secure I'm going to start by cutting the 45 degree angles first and I'll pull in my handsaw and just follow the lines now this tape is pretty flimsy for a guideline and I want to make sure I get a machine cut here so I'm going to take my rotor and run it this way but in order to get that straight line I need to provide some spacing back here to run as a guide so I've worked out the right number of boards here to get me to a three-quarter inch depth and then what I'll do is run my rotor tight against that use it as my guideline and move that across here I just need to set this to a three-quarter inch depth and I'll be ready to go thank you [Music] now I'll just use a really sharp chisel to trim up these pieces here and get the corners nice and tight and ready to fill it in with a patch this area here my rotor couldn't get into so I'm going to have to clear this out with a chisel but it's a good thing because right here there's a piece of metal it's probably a broken screw and there's another finishing nail right there so I don't want my tools to be hitting those nails because I cut these at 45 degrees cutting a patch is going to be simple for this but you see there's a little bit of a void in here there's a little bit of a void here and the only glue that will hold when there's voids is epoxy so I'm going to epoxy these patches in with these blocks glued in here I can now move the chest off the workbench and start working on the top but before I do I want to talk about wood movement and compare this to the rest of the chest I'll set the lid here and you can see there's a large gap between these boards but when you look at the joints here these ones are all closed up and why is that well the wood grain is running this way here the wood grain is running this way here and wood expands and contracts across the grain so as this board here expands this one does as well so it's all being kept together this one here is expanding and Contracting if I flip it over someone's screwed down these straps here so what's constraining the boards from moving and therefore the Gap has opened up that's what I need to fix on this lid now to give you an idea of how moisture affects wood this is a branch I cut off a sugar maple in my backyard this is the crack that formed when it shrunk now this is a dramatic change because it was green wood to begin with but these boards here in the summertime when there's humidity in the air they will expand and in the winter time when we heat our homes and the air is drier they will shrink so this is an eight inch board I'm guessing it might expand or contract about an eighth of an inch over the season this distance in here is a quarter of an inch and it's winter right now so what I'm going to do is take these straps off and close up that Gap but I also need to deal with these bandings on the edge so these are held on with nails so I shouldn't pry off pretty easily there that's starting to go so if I look at the nails here it tells a little bit of the story this is a square cut nail this is a modern nail this has been added recently this is a square cut nail a square cut nail a square cut nail a modern nail and another square cut nail this one's moving back and forth when that would allow some wood movement this one it's firm this one it's for over here look how loose that is and this one the one it's so loose look at the wear here it's just a pocket so these square cut nails I think we're allowing the wood to move but someone did a repair where they put this in they put the straps on it probably caused the boards to separate foreign s up here and look at the joint there's a lot of dirt between these and there's even a square nail here I'm not sure why there would have been a nail underneath this piece let me just flip this over this is where the nail is on the joint but I see a cut off now here and here a little one up here another one here I'm not sure why there's this random sampling of Nails in here but you can see the joint here is fairly tight I just need to clean that up and I can glue these two boards together when you're gluing two boards together you need to use a jointer you can either use a power one or what I've got here is a number seven plane and this is known as a jointer plane so I'll clamp these up in the vise get them lined up and then plane the edges the first thing I want to do is clean off this joint because this will dull my blade so I'll just use a scraper to clean all this excess stuff off and then I can make sure I've got the boards level to each other as close as possible there was so much on these boards here I'm wondering if I even need to join them this off and stand this up and see what the joint looks like from the end here you can see these boards aren't a straight line and if I take my plane and hold it up here you can see this isn't flat so what I need to do is get it flat like that and the way we do that is take the two boards and sandwich them face to face together and run the jointer across and that way these will end up being a flat board when I pull them back this way so now we're going to do is put my plane on here and I've retracted the blade so I've got nothing coming out here what I need to do is Advance the blade just slowly you can see the Shaving starting to come off foreign [Applause] s are getting wider what I'm looking for is a shaving across both of those boards at the same time and then my joint is ready to be put together by clamping this together I can see I've got a nice tight joint here I've got a gap all the way along here and then over here I've got it tight again so what I need to do is just work on this little piece here to get it perfectly flat I was being careful not to take too much off of the front but I need to address that and we should be good to go with a clamp on here we've got a nice good fit so what I'm going to do is glue this up and I'm going to use a dark glue so PVA glue so this is going to be a permanent Bond I'm not using hide glue here and I like using dark glue when I'm working with pieces that have finish on them because if there is any that is noticeable such as in a knot like that it's more disguised than traditional Carpenters glue cabinet makers glue yellow glue whatever you want to call it so I'll just spread this on there's a debate in The Woodworking world of if you need to put glue on both sides of a joint like this and I say put it on both sides that way there's no guesswork of what do you got everything covered or not see as I'm going through a bright with a brush like this I could end up missing a spot but if I brush it on both sides chances are that's never going to happen because I've got good glue coverage on both pieces and then I'll clamp this up and I'll show you how many clamps you need when you're clamping things up because that can be confusing as well now clamping pressure radiates out at 45 degrees so if I go 45 from here I can see I've got clamping pressure across this joint do I have enough maybe maybe not but the next clamp I can put on is here that'll cover that off and over here cover that off take a look at the Joint if I don't have enough glue squeeze out I might want to add a little bit more pressure while the glue is drying I need to sharpen my smoothing plane this is my great grandfather's hand plane so it's got a lot of sentimental value and I keep it fairly sharp but every once in a while I need to tune it up so I'll take this out and I'll show you my sharpening supplies these are wet Stones so if I need to do some work where I'm taking out some damage this is a one thousand four thousand and I've also got a diamond Stone this is an 8 000. so I'm just going to touch it up on this and the wet Stones need to be flattened so this is a flattening Stone they do become dished so you need to make sure that they're flat before you use them so because I'm just touching this up there are no Nicks or dings I need to take out of the blade I'll show you how I do this now if you've never seen someone sharpened with a honing guide I highly recommend these so there's my blade and this is a holding guide made by Veritas and the honing guide makes sure that you've got a consistent angle when you're working on a stone so there's a guide here that is for setting it up and what I do is slide that on and set them gauge here for the width of the blade so I've got an inch and a half blade and I've got the angle already set to 30 degrees for the blade so now what I do is carefully Slide the blade in and line it up lined up with this then it's Square and to that point and then it's just a matter of tightening this up taking the guide off and now what I have is this rolls on the stone and this gives me the bevel I want now on this guide it's got a micro bevel setting so a primary bevel this would be up but I've got in the micro Bellow setting so right now I'm all set to start sharpening I just need to put some water on here I'm just going to set this down here this is a stone holder you definitely want one of these because the stones will move around in your workbench and this works with a diamond Stone and with the wet Stones as well just need to add some water here this is the lubricant nothing more than water and then what I'll do is put one finger on either side of the blade so blade down and push and what you'll see is a puddle forming at the end of the Stone that gets darker and darker and what that is is the metal wearing down and that's the sharpening working in action so there you can see a nice Keen Edge I'm happy with that edge so I'm going to take this out now and then I just need to lap the back so it's just a matter of putting the blade down and run it back a few times and what that does is it takes the Burr off the edge of the back some people when they do this they actually raise the blade very slightly but I find this works so just dry the blade off and then dry the stone off the strippers played possible I use a strop and a strop basically what you do is lay it on the bevel and then pull it backwards this drop is green because it has Compound on it and that's got a little bit of grip to it what it's doing is polishing the blade so after I go through and polish the blade here all I need to do is run once on the back and that just takes the Burr off so that starts to give me a really nice shine to the blade and then on the bare leather side same thing this is just even finer than what I was doing before that gives me a mirror finish across the micro bevel I can now reinstall the plane blade I back off the blade and I'll set it the first time I use it I produce videos about once per month and I've had people asking for more frequent content I can do that but I can't do it without financial support so I'm seeking a sponsorship and I'd like to partner with Lee Valley Tools on this I've reached out to them several times and I haven't heard from them yet and that's where you can help me if you can email social leavevalley.com and tell them you'd like them to sponsor the YouTube channel that would be helpful it would also be helpful if you can include why that's important to you I can get you more frequent content but hopefully we can get some support to make that happen I'll get this cleaned up here let the glue dry overnight we'll come back in the morning and then work on the chest the epoxy and these glue blocks have dried overnight so I can now start planting them but we had something really exciting happen last night here in Brooklyn Ontario we've had the largest snowfall of the year and I know we've got viewers from around the world some of you have never seen snow in person let me give you a quick tour on the outside of my shop so you can see what this looks like foreign looks like you hear a couple snow blowers in the background people clearing the snow I'll give you an idea of how deep it is here's a car driving down the street you can see it here just how deep the snow is and lots of snow in the car here so we've got some cleanup to do we've got some friendly neighbors that have snow blowers so when the snowplow goes by they'll clear out the end of the driveway so it really makes for a lot less work but still lots of shoveling to do here's the outside of my workshop it's a single car garage if you'd like to learn how to heat an insulated garage like this I've got a video on that I'll leave it in the video description it's time to go back inside and get warm I hope you enjoyed seeing my Canadian snowy neighborhood it normally isn't that snowy around here we've had green grass for about half of the winter now I'm ready to get to these parts here I'll get up my plane and set the blade just remove the plain blade forward and it's not engaging yet so what I'll do is just rotate it slightly until I start to engage with the wood okay so there's a shaving I want to make sure that it's running Square just adjust it slightly on this other side you can see it's sitting up much higher so I need a clean a fair bit off okay we're almost there a few more passes it should be level so what I'm looking to do is so there's a bit of rocking Happening Here just need to get this part down this is almost level here we go I'll roll this onto some padding and on the inside here I've got this piece of wood that's going to be covering this so I don't have to be too particular I can use a plane over here because you can see my plain blade will cover this area but over in here it's way too tight so I'm just going to use a chisel to clean that out let's Crank That chisel is perfect for this it allows me to get in this tight spot and work on a level surface and just pair away that waste I'm going to stand this back up now and we need to look at what I'm going to do here for Hardware and guess where I purchased the hardware the Valley Tools part of the problem was that this wasn't put together with a hinge that would work properly and prevent it from coming apart so I purchased a hinge that's meant for chest lids if we look at the edge here you see where the barrel is and this flange here this is meant for three quarter inch material but this is made out of one inch material so it doesn't really work there but if I put it over here where I patch this and slide it over here it magically fits so I think that's where this should go let me just line up the lid make sure it's going to work there too there are some screws that are broken off here so it looks like the initial hinge was here maybe a second one was here there's a bit of a patch and then this one here let's see how this lines up yeah I think that will work so we've got a little bit of patching to do here a little bit of patching to do here and then we can get that stained match on this side here there's a bit of patching to do as well but it looks like that's a good spot for the hinge now that I close that quarter inch Gap up in the lid I've got a bit of an issue here so we've now got a quarter of an inch now I measured this and talked to the customer about it there's two options one is cut the trim off so you only have a quarter round instead of a half round or a wrap it out a piece of the chest here so that the lid can come down and because we've got a piece of trim going all the way around that's half round it's going to look odd if it's a quarter round at the front lesser of two evils is to notch out the chest so I've just turned this around and what I'm doing is feeling with both hands but I've got enough overhang here it's flush at the back and that gets me lined up here that I can draw a pencil line so I know the rabbit that I need to cut in the front of this so as I Notch this out you can see the hardware here is going to have to come out and it's one of those trade-offs of closing up the Gap in the lid creates another problem of having to set this back so this is primarily a coffee table that's where the focus is and that's why the customers made this decision to take this out I now know how far back to set it but I don't know how deep to set it so what I'm going to do is clean off this Edge on both sides here glue it and then use these Original Nails to put it back on and then I'll know the depth that I need [Music] foreign is I'm putting a hide glue on here h-i-d-e Hide glue it's an important glue when you're working on Old pieces where you've got joints like this that might need to come off in the future High glue is a reversible glue which means I can put vinegar on it or you can heat it up and it will unglue so I'll just put this across both sides of this joint and then I'll put the nails back in the original nail holes and clamp it on and let this dry now I can mark my line here to make a rabbet so I can cut out this front corner here I'd normally use a rotor but there's a number of Nails in here and I think I've caught them all but I'm not sure if I have so I don't want to be running my machines here I don't want to be using my good tools either so what I'm doing is just replacing my blade here on my Japanese saw with an older blade and this one I've actually hit the odd nailer too and these blades are pretty fragile they can get damaged pretty quickly so I don't want to be using my good saw blade on this job so I'm going to be cutting straight through here just taking off it looks like about three quarters of an inch all the way along here I'll just be careful around those Nails there's one there and one there and then I should be able to fit the lid [Music] this is too difficult to cut like this so I just need to set it up in a way that I can cut it more easily there that's better [Music] okay with that off I'll turn it right side up and we'll test the lid so here's the lid so it's going to sit something like that but we've got this bare wood here and it's also a very straight edge compared to everything else everything else has been worn down with years of wear so I need to wear this down in antique it make it look like it was original first I'll take the saw marks out and then what I'll do is round it over so I'll start with a bit of a chamfer here and that'll just take off the front chunk of that edge and then we'll do is round it with sandpaper there's a nail right there and there I really got to be careful not to get my blades anywhere near them I'm just putting water on here to see what the color looks like next to this so it is going to need some stain it also looks way too new here you see there's nail holes here and there's rust stains I need to mimic some of that in here just to make this look more like it's older and not that this modification has been done recently I'm just going to find some old rusty nails here and what I'll do is drive those in and make some rust stains with them so we'll drive these in just a random spots here and then what I want to do is make them rust so maybe there need to do that I'll get out some vinegar by adding vinegar here I'm going to break down some of that metal I'll put it on the nail as well and that should give us a rust stain I'm also going to use my knife to cut a few marks along the green to allow some of that to seep in and look like the other marks as I'm working through the project I just add a little bit of vinegar to make sure it stays moist to encourage that staining I'm taking off the old hinges here to put on the new hinges now some people might disagree with this the fact I've taken a lock off replace the hinges but this is a rustic piece that this customer wants to keep as a coffee table and wants it functional as a coffee table so it's really up to the customer's decision as to what they want to do with it what I'll do is keep these slotted screws Mount the hinges with the slotted screws and we've got a little bit of history there now the key difference between these hinges is when this one gets to this far it wants to Rock So if this lid ever flips back it's pulling out and that's probably what's caused some of the damage here this hinge here will come back this far before it wants to pull but it can't pull back because it has this flange here so it's got that extra screw that's preventing it from damaging itself so this is something that's going to last much longer so I'll add this in here and the best way to do this is with a self-centering bit this is a drill bit that protrudes and there's an angle here so what it does is it goes into the opening you just push it down foreign hole every single time Big Time Saver that's really good for your accuracy I'm just installing one screw in each hinge what I want to do is figure out where the edge of this is so I can get the patching done on this side of the hinge I've got a little piece here I need the patch and out here as well so I'm going to cut this off cut a level and then patch in that piece here I've got a piece missing but there's original part right there but I do have a gap in between these so I'll cut it off here as well and patch that whole section together [Music] foreign I'm using PVA glue on this because I want a permanent Bond so I'll put the glue on clamp it up I want to make sure I've got lots of glue squeezed out and then I want to have clamping pressure across the pieces so they bond properly I can now set this aside I'm almost ready to do the staining of the finishing but first I need to attach these pieces of trim because I need to cut off the ends now these were put on with nails and in order to allow for the wood movement here I don't want to be using these nails at the end what I'm going to do is secure this at the front here so that miter stays closed and then back here I'm going to be using a pin nailer which is like a wire and that pin will allow it to move slightly with the seasonal wood movement here and won't Force the top to crack again foreign ER and the first third of this trim I don't want to be gluing all the way back here so we'll just line up these old nails at the front here put them in the same hole and I'll help locate the trim foreign [Music] on either side of the end here there's a slot where the old nail was so what I'm going to do is just right in the center of it drive a nail in give it a little extra support [Laughter] oh now to put the hinge on here you can see there's a couple spots that need to be patched here and here and what I'm going to do is just take some of that material that I cut off the front the little pieces in here and Patch them up I'm now ready to disguise the changes that I've made to this chest now if I were just to wipe on a stain and finish it would stand out to the eye that there's something different here so it needs some Artistry and I learned the skill when I was 24 I built a reproduction antique coffee table and I'll show that to you this coffee table sits in our living room it does need an updated color but it was built as a CD holder the drawers pull out hold a bunch of CDs and at the back of the table in front of the couch I built in a flip out drawer to hold the TV remote now you can see on the top here I've rounded the edges and smooth them off at the end I put some various dense scratches I've also put some works but the stain in this is actually three different stains so by layering on different stains in different ways you can make something look old and antique let me start by showing you what's happened with these nails you can see the vinegar has done a great job on these to produce some stains around them and you can see here these were some of the older nail holes and stains but if you look at the edge here you see how it's rounded over there's a little chunk missing here it's a little bit rough here a little bit different color there and then look at the color tones this isn't one consistent color so there's a little bit more orange here it's lighter here there's a stain here for some reason there's a little bit of color there different here so again this just shows you if I put on one solid color it isn't going to give me that vintage look that I've got here I'll start by taking out these little rusty nails I like using fencing pliers for something like this these are actually from my great grandfather great tool for restoration work now what I want to do is create a few marks on here I'm just going to use a round file I don't want a straight line here so you can see there I've got a bit of a warmer so you can see a bit of the green there so we're going to get some texture and the important thing is it's breaking up this line here so just really scuffing up the edge here key thing is you don't want any repetition of marks that you've made exactly the same if you were for example I've seen people do this take a hammer and hit it down here yeah you're putting dents in it but it looks like a hammer so you're looking to really just reproduce some of the damage and it's easy on a piece like this where you've got examples to work from rather than a reproduction where you're starting from scratch another technique is to take out a little piece of wood so on the inside here I've got some splinters that are missing from the edge and just see if I can get one started here cutting into the grain so there you see there's a little bit of a split Happening Now rather than cut it what I want to do is just twist it out what I'm doing is getting some wood grain exposed so it's not a cut surface if I look over here as an example you can see there's a piece missing here it's just breaking up that surface so I'm going to mimic that as well so I'm just going to choose a spot here go joke a piece of wood go this way gouge it a little bit deeper and there's a bit of a splinter coming out which is perfect that's what I like to see so I've got some wear created here I've got some good wear here but this is far too straight of an edge here so I'm just going to take a rough gouge out of it let's see if I can get a splinter there we go and then another technique you can try to create some damage is just right near the edge put your chisel and just give it a light tap and there you've got some breakage if you've seen some of my other videos I prefer to use water-based stains but when doing antiquing like this I learned a process using oil-based stains so that's what I'm sticking with here and I've got a variety of colors I'm just going to work in different colors as I see kneading them across the piece so I'm going to work with a piece like this I just take a scrap put some of the color on here I think that's a good start so I'll start with that as a base coat and then work up from there so I've seen the patch here but I realized I haven't aged this yet so this is the piece that I cut off here and you can see just how much wear is on that edge it's really rounded so the profile on a piece like this it's gently rounded on the long grain and on the end grain it's pretty blunt because that's where it's hard so what I'll do is just take a file and I'm going to reproduce the same profile that was there I've augmented this gouge here a little bit I'll just put another one roughly here and just try to flick that out and get some rough grain again just looking to mimic a little bit of damage so it looks old you have to be very careful on end grain end grain soaks up stain really quickly and you can see it just on the edge there so what I'm going to do is just seal up that end grain with some shellac and that way when I put any further stain on top it's not going to soak in this could look really really dark if I didn't do the ceiling well the stain's drying I can look at these drawers this one's operating freely this one's okay until it gets to a certain point here and then it's binding so oh looks like we've got a scar here oh there's a nail sticking out so I'll take that nail out see if that fixes the problem foreign still binding it's loose here and then it gets tight there are some rub Marks here and typically you clean the bottom of a drawer to fit it but this has Nails throat so I can't do that there are also some rub Marks here which correspond to these nails so I'll try and set these nails first see if that works Last Resort is to plane the top here I'm going to lose some of the patina here but to get the drawer working properly I might need to do that okay let's give it a try there we go could use some wax but we're fine there now you see these poles here I've got one pole down here but I'm missing one over here so I'll need to make another one and these are just made out of Oak so I'll curve that up you can see it's not even cut Square so a very rustic knob there uh sort of reminds me I need to put knobs on my drawers in my cabinet here so this one it's pretty stuck as well so I wonder we've got some rubbing happening happening here and here doesn't look like it's nails there's some rubbing action here I might have to plane this one to get it to fit on the bottom here where I've got friction I'm just going to set that now and then what I'll do is just put a slight rabbet in here to allow for the drill Runner and that should free it up foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign okay when I mount this pole here I need to make sure I've got a clean surface so I've got a good glue Bond and on the new one I'll need to clean off a space as well I just need to sand the edges here stain it to match and then I can attach them I'm putting on the second color here and you can see the difference between here and here and it might seem pretty light on camera up front here but comparing it to what it used to be it's a little bit darker so this has got a little bit of that orangey tone in it that's the base color and this next tone is really darkening it down it's got more of that brown color to it so I'll spread this on I'll let this go dry and then come back for the third color and we'll add some character to the wood if you learn a few new things here and you're enjoying this video please give it a thumbs up that tells YouTube this is a useful video and I'll share it with more people with two different colors of stain back here I can see the difference between the back and the front the front here has some different stains in it so it's more disguised I'll give you a close-up you can take a look so the back here you can see there's some stains but this is where the new wood is and look at all the staining that's happening here this is what I've been aiming for here but I have to dirty up the back of this over here it's less noticeable but you can see there's a Mark here that's a little bit darker so I do need to blend that in a little bit these Marks here the knot the stain this is disguising the fact that this is new you can see there's a stain Mark here and here as well on this end it does need a little bit of coloring just to make it blend in a little bit more with how this is appearing here you can only layer on so much color with this type of stain so my next step is to use shellac it's doing two things one is it's sealing the surface and the other is I'm going to be able to use pattern die to be able to add some of those stain marks in here to make it look older this is Amber shellac and I mix this up from shellac flakes it's got just a little bit of color in it not too much I've got some raw ombre dye here so basically what I'm doing is putting on coach lock here and shellac dries very quickly so put that on here and then well this is still slightly damp foreign to introduce a little bit of color this way now this is where the Artistry comes in so I'm looking to blend that in you can see how that is starting to look similar so I'll just do that along here and then once that shellac's dried come back with another coat she'll act rides very quickly okay so I need a little bit more color foreign blend in there it's looking good the hinge is going right there okay a little bit more down here to go just in this one spot touch it up so it might seem odd that I'm using a shop towel to put this on but it really is helpful just because I need to keep moving the cloth when I've got a little bit of dye on it so I'm not spreading the dye all over the place okay so a little bit of artistry here let's see put a mark there a little Mark here a happy little spot okay let that dry for a few minutes and then put shellac over top we should be good to go come in with the second quarter shellac lock in that stain it darkens it a little bit and we're good to go the Slack's dried but you can see it's a little bit glossy here the rest of the Finish isn't so when you take steel wool and you rub it on a glossy finish what you end up doing is putting small scratches in them and what it does is dulls that finish so I can take this anywhere from a high gloss down to a really dull finish just by using a four odd steel wool that's super fine steel wall I'm ready to put the hardware on here so I've already located it here on the bottom of the chest I need to transfer those measurements to the lid so put the lid on here [Music] turn it around so we'll line this up in the center I can feel a little bit of a gap underneath here and then I want to make sure I've got an even Gap up here as well so that nothing's going to bind okay now I can Mark they can just go now on a pile of screws I have here I don't know if I've got enough number six is to do all these hinges so there were four screws taken out here and with these new hinges I've got four five six seven screws I need per hinge so I might have to use some screws for my other collection this is my set of supplies and in here I've got lots of different size screws that looks like the right size so we use that to hold this hinge in place and then I can test to make sure it's in the right location now I can attach these hinges here and we're almost done to go apparently wondering what this tray here if this wasn't meant to be a toolbox it's an interesting piece it's pretty rustic definitely not a fine piece of furniture because of the way it was constructed with nails instead of dovetails it'd be interesting to know the history of it now driving in slotted screws can be difficult sometimes especially if they're worn so what I find is if I use a modern screw and screw it in first what that does is it opens up passageway for those threads to grab and that way I'm not doing that difficult work with a slotted screw just makes my life a little bit easier okay so now I can put in this panel here let's line up these holes and get this on here and I'll Notch it around the hinges actually I don't think I need to notch it around that oh and that means I can swap the screw out for that one and I'll have slotted screws foreign okay well that's working well the last thing I have to do is put on a lid stay and that's an arm that connects here and that prevents the lid from flying back and potentially breaking off these pieces of wood and the hinges here because of so many hinges being replaced here this is definitely something that's needed I was able to buy a lid stay in bronze so it matches the rest of this but I was having a challenge with the screws I don't have a vintage number five screws so I was able to find some online but you can see they're really new so I tried a technique of soaking it in vinegar and then in salt water and it did change it a little bit but not really significantly I found a technique that if you heat it up and you put it in coffee grounds look at that perfect foreign [Music] okay that's gonna work well now there was a number of screws that were loose in here but there's also no scungeon plate and it's a little bit warped but that goes here let me see if I can flatten that out and put that back on discussion plates are nailed on and I found these old-fashioned Nails here so I've got enough space and there's actually holes so one on each side I'll use those to tack this on [Music] foreign [Music] chest is now ready to go back to the customer and if you're wondering how many nails I found in this chest I pulled out 26 Nails about half of them were broken if you'd like to get notified every time we publish a new video click on subscribe and click on that Bell icon I'm going to leave you with another video right here that I know you'll enjoy thanks for watching fixing furniture [Music] all right

Channel: Fixing Furniture

Views: 195,019

Keywords: furniture repair, woodworking, furniture restoration, restoration, how to, wood glue, fixing furniture, wood repair, age wood, old wood, rustic, wooden chest, coffee table

Id: l7UPnpMNywE

Length: 80min 10sec (4810 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2023