Repairing a Split Tabletop - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson Thomas Johnson antique furniture restoration in Gorham me this is a nice little table it's could be a plant stand sculpture pedestal it's kind of in a Victorian style but I don't think it's 19th century it's probably early 20th century this kind of furniture they combined a lot of style so it has a lot of Victorian elements with the incised carving but then it has Chippendale legs on it it's black but I think that's the original finish it doesn't appear to have been refinished so but it's a nice table very common problem a lot of furniture that comes in here there's a crack top with a very wide gap and indicates typically that the top is solid wood and if you look underneath here it's glued down all the way around they did not allow for it to expanding the track so what I've got to do is take the top off glue it back together and then we attach it in a manner that can allow for expansion and contraction so you get the idea I'm just going to keep going around the inside here there's 12 blocks so I'm finding these blocks to be pretty tough so keeping the heat gun on each block for two minutes using the timer and then I'm finding I can slip the knife I keep the putty knife near the block - so it's heating up and now they will go in through here okay I think I'm uh I'm gonna get the rest these blue blocks off of here scraped us down a little bit before I go to glue the top back together again [Music] might as well use the heat gun on some of this stuff well there was a lot of glue scraping I can't believe how much they glued everything on this table so during the process only one side panel was loose I'm going to glue that back where it belongs now [Music] this joint on you know where the top was separated that joint have been glued previously - it's filled with gloom so I'll apply a little heat and hopefully it'll come off it's a really one I don't want to lose any wood if I can or if I can help it I should say now I want to add my own blocks to the base to which we will attach the top [Music] [Applause] so when I mount this top on the pedestal the shelf grain I can see us going this way so I'm going to do the top the same way the grains running this way so it's going to expand and contract across its width so I will glue my blocks here and here so now I'm going to place the top and I'm going to clamp it with the grain running perpendicular to these two blocks I just put on that so now I'll attach the top with round head screws and washers and I trust you've sort of figured out what I'm doing here glued these blocks to the frame the holes are slotted the round head and the washer now will allow this top to move these screws can actually move in those slots yeah I want to make that screw just just snug hold it tight but not I'm not cranking it down all right so now I'm going to just clean the top real quickly with a little bit of commercial cleaner there's a little bit of glue here but since this is water-based it'll take the hide glue right off now the joints of course it's not it's not perfect it's good it's got a few there were few little chips of paint and maybe some wood here I'm gonna fill those in with the low heat burning stick which is basically a really hard wax that you melt into the defect with a hot knife and then rub it off I'm just gonna run this wax really it was gonna go along the whole joint there's lots of little openings even in the end here I'm just gonna do the whole thing so after getting off as much wax as you can with the flat knife then you just take a rag and buff off the excess now I'm going to go over there's places where there's some raw we're showing and I'm going to go over those with the black magic marker I'm gonna use a paste wax on this top because it's a you know kind of a hard shiny surface and this wax is a dark brown wax goodbye black wax I use that but I'll use the dark wax anyway so there you go this is a nice little Victorian style pedestal table plant stand or what have you the point that didn't need a lot of work at the point of this video is really to show because it's happened so often this is a solid top it was attached in such a manner as to not allow it to expand and contract so it cracked it reattached it you know with the screws allowing it to be able to move there's a lot of furniture that comes in here where the tops are not attached correctly and to tell you the truth probably more than half of them are not cracked they don't crack who knows why you can just leave those alone but when one is cracked like this that's really the only way to repair it crack is still there you know we didn't refinish the top but it's serviceable now and it looks pretty good

Channel: Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Views: 140,191

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

Id: uz95SG71lBc

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019