How to repair veneer on antique furniture

[Music] [Music] hello everybody welcome back to the channel now if you've watched our previous video on how to french polish you'd have seen this cupboard and what we did to it now in that video i pointed out that this piece needs some serious veneer work it's got a lot of pieces missing so what we're going to do today is show you how we repair those veneers we're going to cover veneer choice where we get the veneers from how we color it how we apply it so there's lots of elements to veneer repairs but we're going to start with veneer choice and for that obviously we reclaim it off old pieces of furniture and the age of the furniture is very important the period the quality of the veneer obviously on a piece like this is very important because we don't want to be putting veneers on that you have to hide under wood stain you don't want to be darkening a piece of furniture to hide your repairs you want it to be as light as you can have it as natural as it can be and because this is such a beautiful color that's the wall how we want our veneers to be we want them to match him perfectly and if you can spot a slight color difference as long as that veneer quality is there it's a job well done now as a general rule of thumb veneers got thinner as the years went on in furniture manufacture in the early days early georgian pieces really thick hand-cut veneers as you got to victorian times it became thinner in edwardian times thinner again so you really it will help if you've got a piece of furniture the same age as the piece you're repairing that you can then reclaim the veneers off that what we've got here is a georgian chest of drawers front you can tell that by the handles tell by the construction and well then you can just tell that it just looks that old but the veneers on this are really thick and they'll be too thick for this piece you don't want to be putting a veneer into a piece of furniture and having to sand it so much you you'll risk sanding the original finish of the original piece too thick what i've got here is a drawer front of the same period and i can see through the grain of the old shellac polish that's on there that the grain would be right in the color would be right and it's the same with these pieces of old card table i've got again they're just pine veneered with mahogany and i think this is the one we're going to use from experience i think this will be the color and the grain pattern that will match this piece the best so what i'm going to show you now is how we remove those veneers off the drawer fronts get them prepared and attach them to the piece now old veneers are stuck on with animal glue um it's got a very distinctive smell to it but it becomes soft when it's warmed up now these veneers are stuck on with animal glue so i'll use a hot air gun to gently warm that glue and as it softens i'll use a scraper to lift it off before i do that i'm just going to score a line down because i need little crossbanded sections of this and by that i mean the grain on the pieces that we're repairing go against the grain of the construction of the unit for two reasons one it makes it more decorative and two it can hide the construction of the cupboard so what you have is sort of long sections of straight timber giving you that structural strength and then across it you have the veneer running in a different direction so we need to score our line down our side of our card table when we take it off it will make it easier to get off because we're not trying to remove one big piece and it'll be almost ready to size to start working straight away for the first repair we need about two inches we'll oversize it a bit because when we come to put it on there's a there's a bit of a tip i'm gonna give you when it comes to fitting veneer patches so i'm literally using a craft knife to score a line down the veneer lots of passes make sure all the way through and now i start to warm it up nice and gently we don't want to burn the veneer it's very important not to burn the veneer otherwise the piece is then useless as we warm it through you can see it almost starts to melt the french polishes on the top and i guess at this point i can point out to you that if you've got a piece of veneer on a on a piece of furniture and it's slightly bubbling especially if it's in a piece of the furniture which isn't say for example straight in the middle of the top you can actually iron it down and i'm not suggesting you just have a go and stick your hot iron on your table it all depends on the period of the table the type of glue the type of finish that's on the table because nine times out of ten you have to refinish that top from scratch okay now i think this is hot enough now so i'm going to give it a try with my scraper what i want to do is just get the scraper under a little edge of the the veneer and see if it peels off taking it round being careful not to break it seems to be going okay we're a bit tight there oh no it's come you get a real feel for how the veneer is coming off the the piece of timber that it's glued to and there you go that easy beautiful piece of veneer right for the period right thickness i'm pretty confident this will be just the right color when it's stripped the next stage now is to take the door off and i'll give you a little demonstration about how we prepare the air it's going to be glued to how we prepare our patch and get it stuck on now what we've got is a missing corner piece here now as a rule what i suggest is if you're going to try and patch a piece of veneer into a piece of furniture you get it as close as possible but ever so slightly oversized then you hold it into position you score down the edge of your veneer patch and you almost make the hole bigger to fit your patch that's how you'll find you'll get a much more accurate fit it's the way it works for me anyway so what i'll do now is i'm going to clean up this gap cut an angle on my piece of veneer put it into place work out roughly where i'm going to cut it oversize it by a millimeter and then we'll make it fit now what i've got on here at the moment is just some shellac that's dropped onto the door frame now what i've got here at the moment is just some shellac which has ended up on the bare timber as i've been polishing this piece of furniture now usually i'll do all these veneer repairs first before we strip and polish but one what we wanted to sort of demonstrate here is the ability to match color to a finished piece because not all of you will want to completely strip a piece of furniture before you do you know if it's just got one or two little small veneer repairs that are needed right and if you're gonna glue anything the timber needs to be clean i don't know what i'm telling you if you need if you need to glue anything the timber area needs to be very clean all right nice sharp edges okay good now i'll do a gentle score now so i know what angle my veneer needs to go at and to do that i'll put it onto my piece of timber and i'll use my rule run it in line with the original pieces of veneer that are still existing on the door and just score it down very gently and like i did when i was removing it it's better to run over it 10 times than try and cut it in one go because you'll just split the veneer once i've got a deep enough groove i can bring it off put it onto my workbench and start applying just a little bit more pressure [Music] okay check the angle beautiful okay so now what i'll do remove the veneer down a touch hold it in place and then i can use this line as my guide to where we cut it down and that isn't because that's the point we cut it obviously that is the angle that we cut it do like that so you can see it oh me then okay now there is our veneer patch the angles are correct if i put it into place i can see it fits lovely but because we've still got some rough edges on our original gap that's what we're going to now take away now that i know our piece has got the right angles and it's a wedge shape it will just push into that groove sharpen up the left-hand side just get it fitting perfectly and then we're going to clean it off ready for gluing in beautiful now we've got the right angle on our wedge now it's pushing into that gap perfectly i just need to tidy up the outer edge and this is what i said at the start you make your gap fit your veneer you get it as close as you can but slightly oversized sort out that those two sides then i can cut the outer excess off and we've got a patch that then fits perfect ready for gluing in push it into place check it one last time and then just trim this outer edge and what i do as i go through this i keep refreshing the blade on my knife um i don't think you can ever do it enough you need it to be so sharp and it's the same with your chisels people sort of think with a chisel if you've got it sharp it lasts you days it doesn't if you're on a job you can sometimes in an hour have to sharpen your chisel four or five times so it's the same with a craft knife keep snapping them blades off refreshing it just so you know you've got a really sharp point and that way you don't end up with any messy edges now veneers cut to size and our gap is ready to receive the veneer i just run a blade over the back of the timber to clear any excess glue off give it one last try and that fits beautifully it fits lovely in terms of the depth in the patch and it fits well in terms of its angles what i'll now do again is score now down this outer line it's this outer line here which is the important one now i'll push that into place very gently score it again lift it off because i want some weight underneath of it here so i don't snap it just down that line there again better to do ten light strikes with the the knife and try and force it quickly and end up snapping the the back edge of the veneer off that's very easy to do and there we go beautiful now we've got a veneer patch fitting as well as i could have hoped for i'm just going to use a little bit of metal wire wool now as you've seen me use many times to clean things up just going to clean up this little piece of veneer ready to be glued in and that's really brought the grain and color out already and i've been very i don't know would you call it lucky would you call it lucky with it with the color match now that we've got a clean patch of veneer it's ready to go onto the door now you can use various types of glue never use the expanding glue because it's going to push your piece of veneer out if you've gone to all that trouble to get it fitting nice and snug you don't want to have any sort of external elements that are trying to disrupt that level you can use white pva glue you need to tape it into place leave it overnight we'll give you a super strong fix but i i like to use impact glues um they're a little bit strong smelling don't get too close and basically these work in a way where you put a coat of it on your veneer nice and thin a coat in the patch that you're patching again nice and thin and when it's become almost touch dry that's when you bond them together it's a quicker way of doing it although it sticks together fairly solid it's not properly hard for a good few hours but in terms of a repair to give you a demonstration today and what we usually do on veneers this is the glue we use and i would say the better quality you use the thicker the glue tends to be you can buy cheaper ones but they don't they don't work as well amen so i'm now going to use a small paintbrush to paint glue into the area of the patch and onto the back of the patch itself [Music] [Music] [Music] get [Music] and also as a bit of a tip in terms of getting a strong fix on these things try and get a little bit of glue on the sort of rising edge of the veneers that you're jointing into and it's the same whenever you glue in any piece of timber if you can have it glued on more than one surface it just helps the whole thing be well a lot more stronger it's quite a warm day here today and i've got quite a thin coat on the glue itself is a tin we've had in the workshop for a few weeks so it's actually become quite concentrated the solvents in there are starting to dissolve which means that this glue is already becoming touch dry at this point now i'll push this in now if you're a veneer re-veneering a large area you get things like called veneer irons they're like a wooden handle thing with a brass bit on a small piece like this we're just gonna push it into place um tends to be a rule now that a lot of antiques furniture don't justify doing full revenues on them so it's often just patchwork but i think this is at the right sort of dryness now that i can push this into place and as long as it's level and it goes right we'll be ready to polish it straight away oh i am happy with that in fact i don't think and again this is a tip really always take the time to prepare the patch before gluing it in by giving it a clean at the back choosing the right veneer a bit of a scraping with a blade on the back i made sure that we've got a good clean surface but we've also got levels that match that that means if you've got a piece of vinegar that's slightly higher than the other one you have to sand off that top surface and what you're left with is something that can become uneven and different timbers that have got different density and different hardness to them if you start sanding one next to the other on a joint the softer one will scoop up so quickly it's surprising how much you can end up with a scoop and then you need to take the whole thing down a level the less work you have to do on the surface the better so preparation again is everything to getting this right and that level well it's not bad even if i do say so myself what i'm going to do now is give it a little bit of french polish and a little bit of wax and we'll see how well it blends we'll put it back on the cabinet and have a look at it in situ just to check that with the changes of color the date changes of angles we're not left with something that sticks out like a sore thumb because that's another point especially with these rippled flame timbers like your satin woods your walnuts and mahoganies change of light in them or a change of angle can make a huge difference you can go from nice and blonde to deep and red so again put it into place check it's right if it wasn't right i'll redo it now i'll glue set enough for me to put some polish on this and i'm putting the french polish on like i did with the rubber in the previous video i'm hoping now it's going to be this first stroke that will tell me what the color's like i'm pretty confident i haven't actually done a test this isn't like a we know it's going to work and watches show off i haven't tried this yet so here we go there's the possibility this may go a little bit red or it might just be perfect now that's gone very well i'll use the technique i've used to polish the rest of the cupboard to blend this in obviously i've got probably another 30 patches to go on this um and i'll just take my time to get it right and when we finish this video you'll get to see the finished cupboard and it's full completely polished completely waxed and completely patched up with veneers taken off prepared and refinished the same way beautiful okay well i gotta say i am chuffed to bits with the color of that vinegar sometimes you get lucky and this is one of those instances uh it helps to have the right donor pieces to pull apart but i hope you've learned a bit about how we do it i'm sure other people have different ways of doing it i'd love to hear about it in the comments if you do i'm going to carry on now and then what we'll try and do is come back and when it all the veneers are done everything on this is just how we want it final finish final wax and you can have a good look at the finishing we'll get some nice close-ups of all the little repairs and finishes but thanks for watching so far and um yeah here's the finished thing so [Music] you

Channel: Alex Webster Restoration

Views: 19,653

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Id: eGw_G0N5aIE

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 18 2021