Is This Table Too Old to Refinish? - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

i'm tom johnson thomas johnson antique furniture restoration in gorham made this is a nice oat drop leaf table it's made out of quarter-sawn oak i don't know how old it is i can't tell they've been making tables like this for three four hundred years so it gets kind of hard to tell sometimes you can see it's a good sized table like six feet by five feet long it's got nice pad feet it's got this nice bead detail on the tops of the legs one of the main things that was wrong with it is that these hinges on this leaf the hinges have come loose so we've got to repair that and also the the top just doesn't look good it's got lots of marks and rings there's a lighter area in the top probably from damage i've probably got to refinish this top too [Music] [Music] maybe we'll find some clues on the underside of the table here you can see right away that the hinges have been replaced so that doesn't really tell us too much there's a number of these pieces of metal across the cracks on both leaves certainly those pieces of metal look very old there's lots of glue blocks around the inside of the apron some of them look old some newer lots of other repairs this is the piece of wood going across this crack in the top this hinge arrangement on the swing leg you know it's a wooden hinge i don't know if that provides any information on age or not i've certainly seen wooden hinges like this on late uh 18th century tables but i don't know the history of that yeah here's the hinge that was loose the other one's down there you can see that the it was plugged the new screws were put in but those plugs pulled out so i've got to do a better job i just realized the hinges on this leaf these hinges appear to be the same hinges that are on the other side but they look original this has not been cut out for a bigger hinge also there's no screws from underneath connecting the top to the base possibly it's nailed from the top and that would be another indication of being an old table the legs are mortise and tenon you can see these scribe marks from when they cut the tenon this brace in the middle is also mortise and tenon it looks like it has two tenons that are wedged and none of that really tells us much about the age of the table but it does tell us that it's handmade so i want to check for any repair work that needs to be done yeah i had noticed this one before these tops have a lot of cracks in them joints coming apart but most have been repaired before yeah this center section's got to crack down the middle but i am not going to take this apart it's got uh it's this top is nailed down to the frame it's got two nails right here uh it's got a brace underneath in the middle doesn't seem to be moving at this end i'll just work some glue in here clamp it and then maybe put an additional piece of wood across the bottom yeah you could see it there's a dowel in there i think maybe you can see that dowel in there here are the pencil lines the marks that the person used for their dowling jig there's a dowel in there here's the another mark so you know a dowel is there this end is tight now i see movement i'm going to wedge this open starting at this end i may not take it all the way off i'll start with some wedges at this end and just kind of see what happens it's uh i don't know i think maybe i should try to force this more open a [Music] [Applause] so so so so so that looks uh tight i got squeezed out and uh you know it's fairly level so so so so um okay we'll uh we'll leave these clamps on overnight so okay i'm going to strip these tops using a conventional varnish remover this is the kind has methylene chloride in it and this is what i do to prepare it's only in the 30s outside today so earlier i turned up the heat to 70 put it on hold turned on all my electric heaters i put one heater aiming directly at the stripper cans here to heat it up to 70 degrees if i can or at least as much as possible stripper fumes are heavier than air so crack the big door down here at the bottom [Applause] and turn on the fan okay i'm going to let these set for 20 or 30 minutes okay let's try uh scraping it yeah this looks like it's coming up pretty clean let me try a piece of steel wool yeah that's coming nice and clean so so so and so now i'll do the two leaves the same way okay i've let these dry overnight and they look really good except for these spots which i hope are water marks this is a burn so it's not coming out of there so i want to treat these with oxalic acid see if that will take care of these marks and you can't just treat that area i have to treat the whole tabletop i'm going to sand it lightly with 220 first just to help prepare the surface a little bit for the treatment just cleaning off the surface a little bit here i'm going to mix four tablespoons of oxalic acid in a quart of hot water that black square mark is gone this mark is already lightened up considerably i hope it keeps going so just for a little while you know 15 or 20 minutes or so i'll go back and hit these areas that are dry and especially i'll put a little bit more where that mark is now i want to show you something this is the water laying on the surface you see how it's not flowing out that's going to be a problem we'll talk about that later okay you can see that the xolic is dried you can see all the exotic crystals that one black mark went away completely this round mark really improved a lot but it's still there this is the point at which this exotic crystals can become dangerous if they become airborne so it's important to thoroughly rinse all this away [Applause] so i'm also mopping the floor up in here because exolic spilled on the floor i know someone's going to walk in here with no shoes on and then lick their feet and i'm not mentioning any names but okay they've dried for a few hours i'm going to sand them again with 220 again and give them another treatment maybe a little stronger i'd like to see this ring go out this sandpaper is really gumming up a lot more than yesterday i'm going to wipe this down with some lacquer thinner see if we can pull some of this oil out of here [Music] so the lock is gonna dried i switched to free cut paper and uh it's standing up a lot better [Music] okay another coat of oxalic acid just like the last one okay i've let that dry overnight um you know this coat was twice as strong as the last coat of oxalic acid and you can see that you know all the dried crystals on top so now i'll take this outside and rinse it off just like last time okay i've let these dry actually for a couple of days and so i'm ready to take the next step which will be staining the second coat of oxalic acid although it was stronger i mean it helped more with this circle it's not gone completely but to do anything else would involve a lot of sanding and i'm just not gonna sand this top with anything other than a 220. but i remember uh i still have to fix the screw holes in these leaves for the hinges i'll do that before i do anything else yeah it's easy to see that these need to be repaired this wood in here almost appears to be rotted uh it's already gone through the top i may need to go with the patch all the way through to the top i'm going to add a little support under here with some clamps because i'm probably going to go through to the top there so i want this well supported i seem to be getting down to some white wood before going through that's what i want to see white wood all this blackness seems so strange it seems like this table was just soaked down in oil top and bottom everywhere i don't know if it was raw linseed oil it seems like almost like motor oil although i don't detect any smell this so okay identical routine for this repair just like the last one before i ever could get that bottom flat i'd be through the top so that's why i mixed hide glue with the sawdust layered the bottom and then used you know unthickened tied glue for everything else i'm relying on the side joints here okay there's a few screw holes like these that need to be plugged people use a lot of things to fill screw holes they'll use just glue toothpicks matchsticks glue and toothpicks dowels and plugs and we all know what uh dowels are but in this case we're asking these three quarter inch screws to hold a lot of weight on these leaves which are even moving at times and so i want to use plugs and i want to sort of demonstrate the difference between a dowel and a plug what happens when you screw into a dowel now let's have a look so you can see it looks good the threads of the screw cut into the wood really well but remember with a dowel the grain runs lengthwise so the screw threads are cutting away the very thing that gives the wood the strength [Music] the wood doesn't seem very strong does it so practically speaking dowels can work well for doing most screw holes but i want maximum strength on these leaves so i want to use a plug what's a plug well the plug is cut from a piece of wood and it's cut this way in other words the grain is running across the plug i think it'll be helpful if i show how plugs are made you select the proper size plug cutter for the job you're doing let's try a half inch just for a demonstration [Music] so a plug is you know fundamentally different than a dow that the grain runs perpendicular to the grain in a dowel let's see what happens instead of drilling into the plug though i'll drill into this board remember this is where the plug came from right there so here you go it looks a lot like the dowel the threads cut really well into the wood but there's a big difference between this and the dowel remember that the strength of wood runs with its grain these threads have cut you know with the grain in the dowel the threads have sheared off the end grain which is just cannot be as strong as this [Music] you so so [Music] a couple of nails in there so [Music] at first i thought these hinges had been replaced now i think that the hinges were moved because the hinges on the other side have not been moved and they look like the same hinges i've kept the screws in order so each screw will go back into the hole i took it out of as i tighten these i'm constantly aware of the top here i don't want anything poking through the top that needs to be drilled [Music] drilling into tops is never fun [Music] do and this is one of our plugs oh interesting there's a couple of dowels that somebody used i think a lot of the problem here was that the screws they used were too short these are half inch i'll go with three quarters these are old three-quarter tins here's one that's already sawed off a bit this is mine compared to the one that came out of there [Music] this top is just three-quarter of an inch thick yet uh i'm putting three-quarter inch screws in it we need maximum holding power for these big leaves so how does that work i've set my tape at 5 8. my screw is a full three-quarter inch long i'm constantly checking underneath i don't want anything poking through now i stopped short just by a little bit there and then back it out well the leaves uh work great in this position i really need to get it on its feet and make sure they work correctly uh before i do that uh looks like a little mildew in here i'm gonna clean with some vinegar and then i'm going to clean these legs and i think i'm going to use murphy's oil soap this finish is so oily i want to stick with that and use the murphys [Music] boy the wood looks great when it's wet it's brighter and redder didn't really take much off of these now i want to wax one see what that looks like i'm doing just that area for now i'm just trying to see what the color is all right i've let this dry for about a half an hour or so i need to take a mental snapshot of this color [Music] so so [Music] foreign so foreign well the leaves work great they're nice and sturdy line up the seam between the leaf and the top is as good as it can be on an antique table it's not bad at all so now i'll take these leaves off and don't worry i'm going to flip it over on the floor here like i did in the beginning and then we'll see if we can come up with a stain it's interesting looking at the colors here on the base with the table upside down how light it is here and how it fades into the darker leg and that's what i'm going to remember when i'm doing the stain on the top all right here's the leg that i waxed up and of course looking at this table it was very very red is also very brown and i have a can of stain called red brown mahogany let's um i think i'll try that all right i'll try try a little bit larger area okay that looks that looks really good well i left out with this one because a can of stain right off the shelf looks really good so i'll stain everything with that and then we'll seal it and then if we need to adjust the color we'll address that issue then so i'm just going over all the surfaces one more time before staining just with the 150 checking for anything and uh the oil just keeps coming up no matter despite all my efforts to draw the oil out and get rid of it i can only guess that this finish was like raw linseed oil even though it seems more like motor oil somebody must have dumped a boatload of it on this tabletop and it never dries never comes up and that brings up the subject of a lot of people may think maybe thinking geez i you shouldn't refinish antiques and generally speaking that's true it's a good rule of thumb but here we have a dining room table it's clearly not the original finish this table's been worked over numerous times many many repairs but the bottom line is this table is being used as a dining room table and the finish that was on here did not work didn't look well it didn't function well and so my goal is to get a durable finish on this i'm not you know belt sanding the top or anything in fact i'm not even sanding it hardly at all and that will cause problems later and i'm going to have to deal with those problems but i want to keep all these marks all the scars everything [Applause] so [Applause] okay the stain has dried overnight i'm going to put down the first coat of finish i'm using this tung oil varnish i'm putting on as thin a coat as i can i'm really going to spread it out i'm worried about contamination of this wood so i don't want to a film thickness thick enough that it can distort we'll see what happens [Music] well these have dried overnight really well i've had to have the heat cranking and so now today i'm just going to flip these leaves over and put a coat on the other side [Applause] i put another coat on the bottoms of the leaves off-camera and so now another coat for the top of the top and of course i put on that one really thin coat it's soaked in a lot i'm going to put on another coat now hopefully it'll go down a little bit heavier without any reaction a few drips from what i was doing the other side i can't sand them because there's hardly any finish on here i'd sand through the stain but i can kind of slice them off here that's one of those plugs from the other side i need to put a little dye stain on it [Music] so i've let the finish dry for a couple days it's been cold weather i've kept the heat up but still extra day doesn't hurt i've got a great color here good red background but if you look at my leg sample here i need more brown so i think i'm going to glaze it but first i've got to sand it i'm using 320 here and even though the finish seems really dry to the touch it feels a little bit gummy as i sand it even with the extra day of drying so i'm sanding as well as i can until the sandpaper just absolutely gives it up i'm trying to smooth off all the knits and and then when i've done as much as i can with the sandpaper i'm taking a 3m pad and just kind of finishing it off taking the gloss off [Music] those are the tips of screws the screws uh some of the screws holding those big crude metal plates on underneath well i've done the whole tabletop it took about two and a half hours to do that because of the softness of the finish so i think i'm going to let it dry keep the heat up let it dry overnight all right i've let it dry in an additional 24 hours it seems great and i'm going to glaze the top glaze is a medium you can get at any art store think of it as like a stain but with no color in it so you get your glaze coat and i'm going to use asphaltum as a coloring and asphaltum is exactly what it sounds like i'll use two brushes one to apply the glaze and one to sort of feather it out if i need it i think you could use a little more color okay this has a little bit more of the asphaltum color in it yeah that's uh that's getting there so so i've got my glaze smoothed out pretty evenly here now i'm going to go back and put a little on the outside edges a little bit more glaze all right i'm gonna do the leaves the same process and let everything dry overnight well i've let this dry for two days or over two nights actually now the glaze especially the asphalt on glaze kind of never wants to dry it's still tacky so i'm going to lay on a another coat of gloss and i've got to move quickly i don't want the varnish to pull the glaze up so i won't be you know what i'm putting on coach before you see me constantly tipping off the finish trying to make it all even this time i put it on quickly and try not to pull any glaze oh these tops are nice and dry i let this dry over the weekend i kept the heat up i think the top only needs one more coat so uh the first thing i'm going to do though is put a final coat on the bottom of the leaves i'm just going to sand them quickly with 220 just looking for any major knits or or drips along the edges or anything like that [Music] i take special care along the rule joint though i don't want a buildup of finish or anything else in this joint this is the same finish it's just satin version well the bottoms of these leaves have dried really well they look good and uh so now i can sand the top and uh put another coat on it i don't know if it's going to be the final coat or not depends on how this stamps up the finish has got a lot of crap in it it's going to be a tough sanding job the asphaltum glaze i put on top never really dry so i had this sitting around for three days so it picked up a lot of dust and debris and stuff and then of course the finish itself is a slow drying finish so there's areas where there's a lot of stuff here and it's just going to take careful sanding i'm going to start sanding with a 320 and then follow up with a ultra ultrafine scotch-brite pad you can see right away it's picking up oily residue from that glaze so once i've uh sanded it as much as i can there's not not too bad but then i'll go over it with a gray pad and that should really smooth it out and get rid of the very final little bumps and stuff basically i want all these you know shiny areas to go away dull down all right looks like i got a good procedure here now i just have to do the whole top like this it'll take a little while [Music] [Music] so so it took about two hours to smooth these down you know because of the uh the late hour and because of all the stuff i was getting off the top it still wasn't completely dry i'm going to wipe this down with paint thinner and let it dry overnight keep the heat up all right top's dried overnight but before i apply another coat i want to fill in some of these big nail holes and i also want to touch up uh some high points that were sanded through i didn't fill in these nail holes previously when the table was stripped because i didn't want to sand these areas and make them lighter so i'll fill them in now with the low heat burning sticks so all right i didn't do like every defect i just did the worst offending nail holes i want to keep the defects now next i need to touch up any sand throughs because i didn't sand the table flat uh there's high points and i knew this would happen as i sanded i've i've sanded through a few of those high points so i need to stain those areas and those have to be really careful every step of the way i'm using a van dyke brown dye stain you know most of the sand throughs occur around these big uh old breaks and stuff so it'll be easy for me to hopefully remember where they are because i have to be really careful of these spots going forward okay now i'm ready to put on another coat this next coat will be satin i'm not sure if it's going to be the final coat it might be so i want to use satin the top has a beautiful red background in the color that stain worked out well i'm worried that it's a little too red i'm going to add some green dye stain to this coat and try to knock the red down just a little bit this dye stain is soluble and lacquer thinner and alcohol acetone things like that but i'm going to see if i can mix it up a little bit with some paint thinner because that's what i can pour into the varnish it's funny how the stain looks blue in here instead of the green i don't know what that's about now it looks green oh yeah that that's very very light maybe that's all i want foreign this is great i've left this dry for a couple days it's dried really well no more of that little stickiness i was finding here and there from the glaze but it still needs another coat i hope you can see this i'll try to get a shot of it the coat looks good it's nice and smooth but it's not even it definitely needs more another coat of finish at least one more coat of finish so i'm going over it just really lightly with some 500 grit gold paper and then i'll go over it once again just lightly though with the scotch brite pad i don't i don't want to be cutting through any of the high spots like i did in the previous sanding these scotch brite pads are saving the day here because it doesn't really want to sand well at all it's funny it feels dry to the touch but the sandpaper wants to clog up these are doing a great job all right i've got the top all smoothed out ready for another coat uh but because of the way it clogged up so much on the sandpaper i'm gonna let it dry overnight all right i've let it dry overnight kept the heat up it's all ready i'm gonna just go over the edges i mean i'm gonna look over the edges to see if there's anything i want to hit with a marker any light spots so [Music] [Music] [Music] okay i'll uh keep the heat cranking all day we'll see what it looks like tomorrow [Music] well the table is looking really good this coat went down great hardly has any stuff in the surface i kept the shop really quiet while it was drying but it does need one more coat and i don't know if i can i'm going to try to show this to the camera i don't know if i can see but from a distance at an angle i can see the finish just looks a little bit starved in places i think it just needs one more coat so i've let this dry another day and so now i'll put another coat on it which i think will be the final coat you don't need to sand between coats for this finish which is nice but i will go over this just with the scotch bite gray pad just a there's it's not completely smooth there's little mitts in it here and there very little but i'll go over it with this just to smooth it out what's nice about the gray patch the scotch brite pads you know this top is not flat i didn't sand it flat it's got high spots low spots it's uneven and this pad much more than sandpaper sandpaper has sensitive cut through those high spots this will kind of ride over them a little bit better you could cut through with this but it's much easier to avoid cutting through those high spots boy after going over this surface i mean it looks so good i could wax it and call it a day but i know that it needs i know that has areas that need more finish so you just can't see them after i go over it with the pad all right i'm going to wipe these down with some a rag with some paint thinner on it and then apply the final coat [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah i've let this table dry for two days and uh it's really dried nice this this last coat went down great the table's got a nice kind of texture to it i hope you can see that i'll try to show you and so now i'm just going to give it a kind of an easy rub out so by light rub out i mean i'm not going to sand it or anything uh i'm going to take four out steel wool this liberon steel wool comes like this is what you want to use on table tops and then with a very flat hand in other words i'm not going to go with my fingers keeping my hand flat i'm going to start going over this trying to even it out a little bit i mean there's it's really hard to see but there's differences little variances and sheen and whatnot and i think that this will help even it out and help bring out the texture i'm not pressing down with much force just just lightly now you come across something like this a little piece of something in the finish take my trusty razor blade and i don't go with one finger at that spot you gotta do the top evenly you can still see it a little bit because it has some dust in it a finish but it'll go it feels perfectly smooth and and when i wax it will go away it might be hard to see but throughout this top there's little dull spots little circular dull spots almost like the finish was trying to fish eye but couldn't do it luckily though just by going evenly slowly evenly not much pressure the shine comes up a bit and the spots seem to be gone i do one section at a time typically like one-fourth of the object and then uh i do this half i'll do that half and i'll go long ways over them counting how many times i go back and forth making sure i do everything the same and making sure i overlap the section so it all comes out as even as possible all right this looks good and it feels good too i'm going to try putting these two halves side by side and see if i can get a shot that shows the difference yeah i'm hoping that you can see that this side has more clarity now and plus uh also all that work by hand brings out the texture it's not so it has more of a sheen at the same token this is this looks too uniform and too even now it looks the way they want to look so what i'm doing is looking at the raking light coming in and how it reflects on the top the steel wool is changing that reflection and here i'm looking and i'm just going until i make sure it's even all the there's no more shiny spots or no more of these little defects around here and it's a nice even shine the razor blade gets rid of little knits but what you're really looking for are these you can see there's a little bit of dust trapped in that crater but the wax will take care of that too [Music] i forgot i want to i want to wax the legs at this point i'll clean them with this commercial cleaner and i'm using this uh brown brie wax really to use as a sort of a scratch cover so it might cover little uh scars like that this leaf goes on the other side that's more like it now i'm going to go over the top just gently and easily with some four out steel wool and my favorite beeswax and orange oil polish the dry steel wool leaves a little bit of a haze and this waxing takes that off and really improves the clarity there you go this is a nice queen and dining table probably over 300 years old if you remember when it came in here the screws had pulled out so the leaves were hanging off the leaves one of the leaves was cracked and also the finish was no good it was a kind of a black oily sticky mess so we refinished the top now what about the people who say that if you refinish an antique you lose its value i believe they're referring to the current market value and i know nothing about that that's an another business entirely has nothing to do with furniture repair and doesn't really matter unless you're actively selling your antique furniture most of us find value in the practicality of our furniture and then it's used as a decorative object otherwise how it looks this table when it was built over 300 years ago was built as a dining room table and it was used as a dining room table in fact it looks like it's been in continuous use and it was in rough shape when it came in here it's been repaired and refinished many times i'm not the first person nor the last that's going to refinish this tabletop and now it's it can be used as a table and what i did was you know remove the old finish chemically i sanded the top very little just enough to sort of prepare it for the ensuing finish i've never sanded it with machine i love how it's all still textured this is a good old-fashioned finish they've been making this finish the same way since 1912 so i like it and it really seriously mellows out over time and looks great all of uh life's mile markers all the war wounds everything still here i think it looks pretty good you

Channel: Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Views: 469,584

Rating: 4.9361825 out of 5

Keywords: Thomas, Johnson, Antique, Furniture, Restoration, Gorham, Maine, Southern, ME, Greater, Portland, Boston, MA, Newton, Mass

Id: nDVEokmvcZY

Length: 81min 31sec (4891 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LegoMan1234512345]

Funny thing is that I did an internship at a single worker restoration company much like his, and the similairities are spectacular. They work with much of the same techniques and go about the thought process very similairily. Love watching his videos because it reminds me of the good times I had there

[u/Rondor-tiddeR]

I just joined this sub, but wow. This guy is amazing. I learned so much from this one video. Sorry if this has been shared before.

[u/T7898]

I have been watching his YouTube channel for a long time, he is amazing and anyone can learn so much