Restoring a Walnut Mid Century Cedar Chest - oxalic acid & blushing

welcome to another video everybody in today's video i'm going to be tackling this mid-century walnut and cedar chest this was made in 1958 and it is showing its age for sure there are a ton of finish issues scratches areas where the finish has gone completely we've got torn veneer thankfully the inside is still pretty good but i've got my work cut out for me on the outside so let's get into it my name is angie and i refinish furniture sometimes i paint and sometimes i don't but i always do what i can disable pieces from the trash welcome to my workroom i'm starting out first by fixing this veneer that has pulled up it's still attached at the top so a little bit of wood glue spread out with a paintbrush on the bottom here um i'm going to clamp this down and it will be good as new [Music] i have a board with some painters tape on it so that it will keep the pressure on it while it is drying and then i'm using two clamps here in kind of a funny way uh i don't have a clamp that's long enough to do this all in one go so by attaching them this way you get a lot more length out of your clamps if that makes sense [Music] just a little trick i learned along the way and it has come in so handy [Music] while that veneer is setting up i'm going to remove the legs and get started on removing both the little metal caps at the bottom of them as well as scraping off the finish it's unfortunate but as you can see here these metal caps are just too far gone to polish they're going to be sanded and given a new coat of paint and the rest of the leg which is solid walnut is going to be refinished sometimes these caps are held on by nail through the side in this case there's a nail on the top so i'm just giving some pressure to pull it out and then grabbing my little tack puller here to carefully pull this out straight i want to reuse the nail so i don't want to bend it and pulling it straight out like that really helps speaking of tack pullers you can see the one i have here is actually broken on one side there's a piece of it that broke off a long time ago one of you amazing humans actually sent me through my amazon wish list a new pair of these and i'm so excited to use them unfortunately this video was filmed before i got them in the mail so i couldn't use them in the video but i really just wanted to give a huge thank you all the way to ireland that just totally made my day as you can see here i've got a thousand grit sandpaper just trying to rough this up a little bit i don't want to leave gouges in it so that's why i'm using a very fine sandpaper a little later on i'm going to clean those up and then spray paint them i'm using my small scraper here to remove the finish from the legs these are solid wood normally i just go in and sand them but the finish on this is quite thick so this scraper is definitely going to make quick work of this thick finish [Music] [Music] moving on to 180 grit sandpaper here to remove any little bits that are left over and before i stain i will do a second sanding of 220. [Music] [Music] i'm bringing out the big scraper for the top i was considering stripping this um i have a really good chemical stripper that i use quite often but this finish is just so compromised that scraping is actually going to be a lot faster and a lot cleaner and a lot safer so i'm choosing to scrape this entire piece [Music] this yellow flaky dust here is actually shellac this is a shellac finish this is typical of aged shellac when it starts to fail and if you want to know if a piece is shellac a little bit of methyl hydrate or denatured alcohol is going to dissolve it so i'm so sorry that i keep giving everyone the finger every time i do anything with a single finger it's always the middle finger my apologies what you want to do is let that sit for a few minutes rub it into the surface and if it becomes gummy or takes the finish off you know you're dealing with shellac this information isn't all that important when you're stripping but if you're trying to make repairs on a piece or do some sort of finish over top of an existing finish it is good to know what you're dealing with [Music] our little glued piece of veneer set up pretty well so there should be no issues when it comes time to scrape and sand that part the underside and the back of this is all cedar but it's pretty rough so i'm going to be sanding it down and refreshing it as well as removing these hinges i'm going to spray paint these the same color i'm spraying the caps on the feet as well as the middle bar across the front [Music] i certainly could have done this while this piece was upright i didn't it was up on its end and it's no problem you just have to be careful when you take the hinges off that you have something supporting underneath so it doesn't go flying [Music] so when using a scraper like this you always want to go with the grain and you can see these veneer panels on the front are diagonal they're not straight across so i'm going to want to scrape on the diagonal this top piece is running horizontal so it's no problem to just go horizontal without one [Music] i'm being quite mindful of the metal trim piece in the front but the way the scraper is set up i can get right up close to it and any little extra i can just hand sand after the fact [Music] i slowed this section here down to normal real time speed to show you how lightly i'm using this on the edges it's so easy especially with veneer to gouge your edges in that clip i only had my two fingers on it pretty much [Music] i've got this whole piece scraped down getting ready to sand i thought this would be a good point to show my standard because people are always asking me about it so the particles go down the tube from the sander into this which is an oneida dust deputy and basically it's like a cyclonic action so the heavy particles of dust and wood fiber fall to the bottom and the rest go down this anti-static tube into the vacuum so i'm changing my vacuum bags a lot less because of it i have this sort of power reel here actually attached to it there's a handle so i can move this whole apparatus quite easily it's not the most effective setup it's not as good as say a super fancy dust collection system that attaches to the wall and vents to the outside but it really does cut down on sanding dust and i do a lot of sanding and have pretty bad allergies so it's important for me to try to minimize dust where i can i'm starting off using a 180 grit sand pad and i will do a final sanding of 220 before i do stain i'm not staining the cedar part the cedar will just have some hemp oil on it but i am going to be standing the walnut because you will see that there are some holes that i need to fill there's not really much else i need to say here so i'm just going to let you vibe out to this oh so satisfying sanding [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] these are those chunks of missing veneer that i mentioned i'm going to be using a walnut wood filler to fill those up and let them dry before i do my second sanding of 220 in a little while [Music] while the wood filler is drying i'm getting to work on the top i'm giving the inside of this chest a little refresh i'm not trying to be perfect here with the sanding i just want to refresh it there will still be some deeper scratches and gouges i don't really care if i get those out i'm just trying to sort of brighten this piece up refresh it and sometimes a light sanding will actually sort of reinvigorate the natural smell of the cedar [Applause] flipping the top around now i'm actually working on the top of it the solid wood pieces on the sides are actually a different type of wood than the walnut veneer so when i go to sand it i'm actually going to stain those first so that the stain has just a little bit longer to set into the wood and even though they will be two different tones hopefully they'll be a little bit closer than if i just stained it all at one time [Music] so here's the top after our first 180 grit sanding you can see there is a pretty dark watermark here i can't sand that out that is into the wood fibers themselves so i'm going to be using some oxalic acid to hopefully lighten that up this stuff works pretty well it comes in a crystal form you basically dissolve it into warm to hot water there's no set ratio exactly basically what i do is i just dump it in and keep dumping it in until it stops dissolving so you'll see i'll do that a couple times here just sort of testing it and when i see that it doesn't want to absorb anymore that's when i know that it's good to go [Music] with oxalic acid you want to make sure you apply it to the entire surface not just the stain itself the reason you apply it to the entire surface is because you want it all to be a uniform consistent color once the wood bleach does its job if you just bleach one small little area you'll have that spot be lighter than the rest of the table which kind of defeats the purpose you're basically creating the opposite problem that you just had this is different than regular household bleach this is specifically for wood i've let the oxalic completely dry you can see there's not much left here it's important to wash off any residual oxalic acid so you want to wet this down again clean it really well with just water and let it dry out so i'm sticking this in the sun i'm going to be spraying this piece of metal trim the same color gold as the legs so i want to tape right up to this and mask off some of the wood before i spray because obviously i don't want to spray all over it [Music] do [Music] and this is looking so much better it's going to look amazing against the wood once it's stained so the wood filler has had pretty much all day to set up i can finally go in with my 220 grit sanding pad and do my final sanding before staining [Music] [Music] so when putting a new finish on cedar of any sort you want to make sure especially if it's a cedar chest that you're not using anything that is going to literally seal the wood as in have some sort of barrier between it and the outside world part of the joys of having a cedar chest is that a seizure smell so i'm using hemp oil basically it's going to nourish the wood sort of refresh it but it's still going to allow it to breathe and give off that lovely cedar smell i totally wish it stayed this dark but once the hemp oil does soak in it will lighten a little bit [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so my top has been drying in the sun for hours and hours after having the oxalic acid washed off i'm giving it my final 220 grit sanding and a little hand sanding around the edges here and then i'm going to be ready to stain it but this is where things kind of start to go wrong for me technically the staining itself is fine it's going on well it's going on completely normal everything looks totally fine but it is not fine and you'll find out why in a minute [Music] the legs have all been stained and sealed and are ready to go so i'm putting the metal caps back on just tapping them in [Music] as well as starting to reassemble the piece [Music] okay here's where my problem starts i've used minwax polycrylic hundreds if not thousands of times you can see here as soon as i put this on something is not right [Music] obviously it's a little bit milky white in the can but normally when you put it on it's not supposed to do this this is called blushing [Music] and blushing happens when you have a finish that's either intact or is going on over top of moisture in the wood you can see my entire top here is white i obviously know this is happening i'm not panicked about it yet it does happen on occasion and there are a couple things you can do to deal with it it's only on the top as you can see here the sides are taking it no problem and i knew it would my problem is because of washing off the oxalic acid even though i let it dry out in the sun for several hours and then it sat in the garage overnight it was quite cool in the garage and it just probably didn't have enough heat in there to really dry it out there was no indication when i was putting the stain on that there was anything wrong with it it was obviously dry to the touch clearly somewhere in those wood fibers there was still a little bit of moisture i used my heat gun on the lowest setting to get rid of that blush and because it left a little bit of a rougher texture when it dried because it didn't dry properly i'm just going over it with some 300 grit sandpaper and i'm going to let this fully fully dry out before i do my second coat of polycrylic there's also a product that i know of that you can buy i haven't used it personally because i i honestly don't run into it all that much but it's called blush retarder and basically it's an aerosol that you spray over top of your problem and it goes away magically but the heat gun worked for me here heat gun and some time this piece was incredibly rough even with that little hiccup with the moisture being trapped in the wood fibers this was still a pleasure to redo i absolutely love taking on these older pieces that most people wouldn't look twice at or they would consider just throwing some paint on it and i have nothing against painting as you know i paint furniture all the time but sometimes you get a piece like this and it just cries out for restoration and that's exactly what i did let's have a look [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Transcend Furniture Gallery

Views: 414,389

Keywords: furniture, furniture flipping, painted furniture, furniture painting, diy, diy furniture, repurposed, refinished furniture

Id: 5iqfaaL2-oc

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021