Rescuing an Antique Butler's Chest & Bookcase - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson Thomas Johnson antique furniture restoration in Gorham Maine this is a nice chest of drawers it's nineteen early 19th century maybe eighteen thirty eighteen forty it's usually called a butler's chest because this drawer front folds down and forms the desk it appears to be a pretty good shape except for the obvious which is a lot of veneer missing all over this veneer banding this is the bookcase that sits on top of it and it's also got similar problems as far as I know just veneer missing we'll find out as I work on it I'll start by taking the drawers out now usually these these big drawers have a stop on the other side luckily these stops have screws holding them in okay oh it's back let's see what we got in the box of parts that came there's a lot of parts here which is great I don't know I'm gonna try to figure out exactly where all these go it may be impossible but we'll just start see how to come up with so here here's a nice big piece obviously from the base one end isn't finished you see it's missing here there's a nail right there there's the nail hole so yeah you can look out you can it is possible to find where some of these pieces go exactly let's see how it goes now now this is interesting because I'm it's funny I was getting ready to glue these pieces down but then I quickly realize that this surface is also veneer the same thick mahogany veneer and these are all loose I've got to glue these down first I don't even know if I can do it without maybe removing all this on the front that came off pretty easily see this this band of veneer seems tight little loosen it makes it difficult to get this stuff out but I'm inclined to leave that there if it doesn't want to come off alright I'm ready to glue down the first few pieces here I've got some hot hide glue I've heated up in the crock-pot I'm gonna put some in this little syringe to get under this piece the rest I can brush on okay now I'll uh I'll move on to the upper section there lobby set up okay which definitely seemed that most of these pieces I'm gonna give a shot that you know looking at the edges and trying to see if I can match them up and figure out where they go I don't know if I'm gonna have much luck with that but mas will give it a shot at least on these pieces you can see that one edge is not finished and one edge has finish on it so you know which way they're oriented and that helps a lot and I think I just found my first match so quite a few of these pieces the edges matched up I got a piece that long so I can tell and I can tell by the glue on the back of it that it goes right here and then I have some other pieces which I can't tell where they go I gotta mill up some new wood like this I'll use the old pieces too and start gluing this down we factor this I could get into the next section as you can see what I'm doing is I'm working back and forth between the bottom section of the chest and the top section okay back to the front edge now the top edge rather and I'm going to scrape down this surface scrape the back of my veneer and glue that down alright this went down fine now on to the next section here it's funny there's a lot of pieces that came off of this area but they're way too thin I mean they're only half the thickness of the stuff that was here I can only imagine that they were sanded down during some previous repair work or something so I won't use these here I'll save them for uses in other places and I'll go with the new mahogany I cut for the rest of this run all right now this area is all glued down I've got all the veneer on the top glued down and so now I can start on this front edge here it's amazing the the level of dried up old glue on the back of these pieces I mean it's really thick of the glue on here is thick and this is thick that the wood didn't seem to be making a lot of contact it's got like a 32nd of an inch of glue maybe a 64th of an inch of glue in there these clamps have been on for about six hours and although as a general rule I like to leave things clamped up overnight when you're doing veneer like this if really you don't need to leave the clamps on that long there's no stress on the veneer I can take these off and get started on the next section this piece looks about right this is the right width the right color so I'll look now for all the pieces similar to that now back to this this big area on top of the columns I've got about 30 inches of this cross green banding missing and you know funny of all the pieces of veneer that we have there's really not that much of this here maybe about 10 or 12 inches so I need to mill up some more of this and then figure out where these pieces go [Music] I've got more to do along this front edge but there's a big chunk missing out on the top of this leg it's actually not missing they have the chunk right here I should have glued it before I glued this piece of veneer but I think I can still clamp it pretty well well I just realized that this piece of veneer is in the way and this whole section that I glued slid over a little bit I've got to take the heat gun undo this and re clamp it maybe with a few really small Brad's to hold it where it's supposed to be [Applause] so I think that while I've got these pieces off before I redo them I will do this piece be a little bit easier to clamp I also noticed that this piece was loose so I'm gonna glue that before I do this since this since the first piece goes over that edge of this piece yeah well I'll get back to the base after that piece dries and in the meantime I can get on the drawer dividers themselves okay so have a lot of strips like this but it's interesting because the the dimension this way is slightly different for each of the three rails the thickness of the veneer is different but it's still kind of hard to determine exactly which of these pieces go to which rail so I'll just try my best to figure it out some of these pieces go on that bottom too so try to figure out what goes where okay I think I've got these pieces pretty much divided up into which rail they go on just judging by thickness width color I don't think I can I'm gonna try to match them up a little bit to the pieces that are still down see if any of them fit together I won't spend too much time doing that if nothing is readily apparent I'll just start square nice off and using them along with new veneer to make up the the entire rail [Music] all right these this has been clamped up for I don't know four hours or so I'll take these off and then re clamp these pieces actually I'm not going to glue these next I'm going to glue this piece okay now I can reglue my pieces here that slip so much out of alignment and I'll tack them to make sure they stay where I want them to stay now I can continue with the rest of the space okay this this bottom is done the face of this bottom is done so now I'll start in on - on the second rail or drawer divider okay I think this bottom edge is done now I'll get back to this second drawer divider or I call them rails okay bowing it back to this side I did the supper proportion but a lot of rust this is loose okay I'm down to my last horizontal strip here veneer this part down here below the bottom drawer difficult to clamp I don't have a lot to clamp to I've made these blocks just the right size they'll fit there and I think I can catch a clamp under here and clamp that down okay we can get started on the drawers you can see the drawers have the banding around the edge and there's a lot of loose veneer spaces here but I'll go through the veneer that we were given and see what I've got here nope yeah I don't seem to have any of this particular veneer but you know I just on all four drawers there's only these two pieces missing so it's not bad I've classified you know organized rather all the veneer bits in two different sizes and none of them fit this but I'll find some veneer that works well that's the last glue up on the case I'll go over quickly see if I missed anything and certainly when I go to sand all my new veneer patches and straighten everything out I'll probably find something that I missed but I've already started to drawers I want to get back to them one small point I'd like to make about these smaller areas you know there's it's very difficult for me to get down in there and scrape the old glue but so I just don't worry about it too much there's nothing major down there and mine the new hide glue is compatible with the old glue it'll go back down where it belongs [Music] okay well this blue is setting up I'll start on the next drawer and as you know there's three drawers that have this banding pretty much all the same so I won't show nearly as much detail on a necklace you can see these serrations on the backside of this veneer and they were more than likely done with what's called a two thing plane which was a plane with a serrated blade in it that would make these scratches I think the idea was to give the adhesive maybe a little more bite and but I'm not sure I follow that logic yeah there's some damage to the speed molding on this drawer [Music] [Music] this glue up of this broken strip didn't work out quite as well as I wanted a lot of it is okay but there's areas where the woods not lined up you know this has a rabbit cutout underneath right where it broke and so it was difficult I made shims but it was difficult to put the blocks on here to get it leveled up the glue was kind of frantic I used the high-strength type glue that has a shorter set time what I'm gonna do is try to warm up this area and with the heat gun see if I can soften the glue enough to bring it back down where I want it I think I'm starting to see some movement here and then keeping the heat on it for five minutes now Clegg doesn't seem to have moved maybe I'll try putting another clamp on back here I think it I think it helped some I don't really know till this sets up [Music] [Music] I purposely have left all the tape on during this whole job just so I can do this shot each piece of yellow tape represents a veneer repair alright now I'll start removing all this tape and cleaning and sanding these areas the old finish just needs a very light sanding but I've got to sand all my new pieces ok the sand cross-grain on pieces like this as long as you send really well up to 220 as I'm doing now [Music] as you can see I'm sanding down the entire front face of this cabinet not just because I have so many veneer repairs it'll just make the color work a lot easier but also there was so much unevenness in all this veneer and not just my patches either the the veneer itself was extremely uneven and not leveled so I'm getting everything leveled off okay i sanded all my repair areas and the surrounding wood okay I sanded all my repair areas and the surrounding wood all the way to 220 so I sanded with the hundred then a little bit a hundred then 150 and then 220 especially in these cross grain areas I stand with 220 until I can see no more cross grain lines now I'm gonna put a little alcohol on this I want to see how the new wood compares to the old and figure out my strategy for finishing the the old the old original wood looks great these are my new pieces here and so yeah the the new wood looks great with the old it's very much the same grain obviously it needs more color I'm not going to attempt to stain the bare wood is too risky and using stain to match wood that was instant who ever ever stained originally doesn't really work that well I'm gonna seal all this wood with shellac and then go back and work on my color afterwards okay I'll let that dry well off-camera I gave this a second coat of shellac and the same day that I applied the first coat it really soaked in completely and I just gave it a second coat I've let that dry for a couple of days now even though shellac is a fast drying finish I like giving it plenty of time it's been a little cool anyway but I hope you can see this but the wood is really grainy and I sanded all this it's super grainy I'm going to give it a good sanding with like 320 and give it another coat I want to seal this screen in it's got to be sealed in and be a full finish and I don't want to do my color work until I've got it sealed in I'm gonna be sanding away most of the shellac okay this will be the third coat of schlock alright I'll let this coat dry for really I let it dry for two days now I've let this third coat of shellac dry for another two days still looks pretty grainy but I'll just find out I'm gonna sand it to 320 [Music] so I'm really giving us a good sanding I decided I could use a block on these wider areas and this is one reason that I hadn't done any color work yet I really want to seal off this wood with shellac and right now I'm doing a lot of sanding I'm really getting someplace and I don't really care if I stand through a little bit because I haven't done any staining so I've sanded while all these repair areas down to the max and so I iced and until I can just start to see you know what I suspect is a sand through and that's when I stop I know I've taken off as much as I can I'm gonna give it another coat of shellac oddly enough my new wood is pretty much filled in but the old wood is still grainy er than the new wood I want to get them all even like these areas down with a little bit of the paint thinner okay fourth color shellac but remember I've sanded it down pretty close to the wood there's not really a lot of shellac on here all right I'll give this coat plenty of time to dry - well I'm waiting I can get back onto the drawer fronts okay I've sanded all these repaired areas down really level the grain is really filled in and what I'm doing here is I have a lot of new wood here that I've got to stain to match the old but the old wood was never stained I don't want to put the stain directly on my new wood the grain would come out it would never match so I've sealed it all off I've leveled off the grain I'm gonna go over first with a dye stain it's acetone based and it'll take really well onto the shellac this is perfect Brown and I've thinned it out and probably two parts to one let's see what it looks like I've chosen perfect Brown they don't want to add any red to this the color match looks pretty good I'm gonna do a little bit better job here but the color is good okay I've stained all the all the new wood with the dye stain let it dry for an hour I'm gonna sprayed this entire rail to look at it now I can't tell what my colors like because the stain is flashed off but I'm going to spray this entire rail with some raw umber I don't want all this new work to be too red that's really bringing it together this area's little lights off let's go to them so I like my color coat I'm gonna remove the tape from this field and from the base there and give all this repaired areas a coat of shellac using the airsoft [Music] so this looks really good I think I don't think this base is too light you know that's the natural color it's a little bit redder but I'm not worried about that mahogany loses its redness you know fairly quickly with time I think everything's good I put a this is an upper drawer this drawer but I put it down here to see how it looks it looks great all I need to do is I can see that I need a little more color in three places here probably some of my new work that didn't quite good enough it's amazing how different it looks when I had it in a horizontal position versus now and the vertical so it's always important to look at it in a correct position yeah I've positioned this lower now and it's amazing how much difference it look really just this one area needs more color than I realized when it was higher I'm going to spray this with perfect brown toner I definitely don't want any more red this is just plain water okay that's all the glue off now I'm going to there's a few cracks and openings in this banding I'm going to fill it in with the low heat burnin wax okay I've got all the those little cracks filled in now I'm going to French polish it or front now remember this is not a video about how to French polish this is a video about me trying to French polish I like using the padding lacquers this is a new one to me it's been around for a while I've tried it out I like it a lot it's funny it was started this company was started the same year that my father started his business alright I've let this dry overnight and I'm gonna give it another coat all right this looks great I've got three other drawer fronts to do and with this upper bookcase it's the same routine as the drawers pull all this tape off clean all the glue off clean it again and start French polishing [Music] [Music] okay I'm ready to pull the tape and paper off the front of this case and start polishing and what you can see what I'm doing here is I'm just going back and forth between the lower carcass the upper bookcase and the drawers just working my way when I'm done with the face I'll turn it on the side do the sides it's going to take a while I'll first go over these areas with a little 800 paper and then I'll Pat it okay same routine I just keep receiving here with the whole thing first off they clean it with this commercial cleaner sort of the same way as the polishing with just on the rag now back to the French polish all right I think I've taken the polishing as far as I can go it's looking good now I'm going to rub it down with a dry Faurot steel wool with the French polishing and even now rubbing out it's just really difficult to get into these corners I'm going to use a block and the steel wool let's see if I can get in there okay I've got everything smoothed out with the steel wool and now I'll wax it with some light brown free wax all right it's time to tackle the hardware here I've got some commercial brass cleaner here in Iowa [Music] there you go this is a really nice antique secretary bookcase called the secretary because this top drawer is a desk the main thing that was wrong with this is all the veneer repairs I must have repaired 80% of the veneer on the face of this cabinet the other thing that it really needed was the finish needed to be revived also interestingly not these columns were always in good shape I didn't do anything to these columns except wipe them off with this rag I think I managed to get the rest of it to match those would be the same level of finish I think it looks pretty good

Channel: Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Views: 1,038,398

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

Id: sdZg15oRUXQ

Length: 67min 10sec (4030 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020