Restoring an Antique Federal Secretary - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson Thomas Johnson antique furniture restoration in Gore Maine this is the upper section of an antique desk with a bookcase on top I don't have the lower part here just the upper part but it looks a lot like this picture in this book while I was being moved the top fell forward fell on the floor pediment just completely got cracked off and destroyed the doors also got completely bashed in luckily they saved all the parts I'm going to start with the bookcase itself with this pediment up here we're gonna remove this this is rotted wood so I've got to replace some wood here and then start putting it back in there so before I can deal with this rotted wood I'm gonna glue this big crack back together [Music] so what I'm gonna try to do here is clamp this baseboard to this piece of plywood so that I can then cut off this rotten wood okay so I'm ready to glue my new board on to the pediment there's a piece of veneer on this pediment here mahogany veneer and my new board has to be below that it has to be even with this baseboard of the pediment here in other words there's a little space there luckily my rule is exactly the proper thickness so when I'm clamping this if I line up the wall so that is flush with the mahogany veneer then I know I've got this board in the right place okay this this board looks like it came out really well so now I've got to clean all the glue and rotted wood here where where it attaches I realized I was scraping this static there's a piece of wood missing here normally I sort of cut things at an angle but this something's going to square off so I don't disturb the dovetail [Music] [Music] I might as well blew up this big crack in the case while I'm at it [Music] so now before gluing on this main piece here I've got a determined exactly where it goes more or less I know that the bottom of my new board lines up with the bottom of this piece of molding here's the next piece of molding that seems to be exactly right so I'll mark this with a piece of tape you know I'm very concerned about locating this piece absolutely correctly you know lining it up with the molding over here and where I can see the other molding was here but I'm getting a different dimension here and here about a sixteenth of an inch off but I'm concerned about how the doors will fit I'm gonna nail this here where where I've had the clamps clean all the glue off these other pieces of moldings and and put them on here without glue to see how they fit and there's something going on down there I've got to figure out why there's a different mention different measurement of course bearing in mind that an antique piece everything doesn't have to be perfect but my concern is that the doors fit correctly all right on to the moldings [Applause] in piecing all this together I've discovered two things number one I'm missing a piece of molding here and a piece of molding matches this one over here and also there was this mystery piece in my pile of parts I didn't know where went and I figured out that it actually is part of this board I've got to trim this board and glue this in its place so now it's time to start on the doors and when they have a lot of problems you know they the worst problem being that a tenant is completely severed here but then obviously the inner dividers that hold the glass the mullions and the dividers they've all come loose I believe I've got most of the pieces here it certainly seems that way at first we'll be finding out I think the first thing I'm going to do is address this tenant and get this back together and I think that to do that there's a lot of pieces of glass missing I've got to remove the putty I think I'm going to start by removing the putty in the areas where I know I need to remove it and well you don't want to think about whether or not all this comes apart or not I just realized I'm going to be taking some of these pieces of glasses out of course some are some are broken some I have but I better number these panes [Applause] okay I cleaned out a lot of the bust of the honey and some of the broken glass some of the good glass I've left about five pieces of glass in here cut a piece of MDF really flat for now I'm gonna lay the door flap on that board you can see the the mullions sit proud of the face so I've got to put some shims under here so that everything is flat on my MDF and then I want to see if I can bring this joint together and get at the same time I've got to get all these glass dividers back where they belong also [Music] but I'm so close to bringing that joint back together I'm not sure what's holding it up that last sixteenth of an inch and I just keep chucking everything here I don't want to put any tension on these other pieces they seem fine so I'm just gonna keep applying pressure just a little bit at a time until I see if I could bring that together this seems like there's so much pressure I keep thinking that these the Raggedy parts of the break maybe aren't coming together exactly where they should and maybe that's what's holding it up so I think I'll think I'll just try it again to see if I can get those parts lined up all right I think I've got it together as close as it's gonna be it's pretty good I think it may be tight on the front too I'll need when I glue this I need to put a board across here to make sure that this stays flat so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to glue this joint at the same time on glue all the little dividers for the glass and then tomorrow when I take it out of clamps I'm gonna cut in through the top here and put a tent in there all right I'll uh I'll let this dry overnight and see what it looks like tomorrow all right this is drying overnight I'm not gonna take this clamp off that was a lousy glue joint and was unjoined at all and there's a lot of tension there so what I'm gonna do is I've got a mortise in across this joint and get a tenant in there set up my doweling jig drill it and then just a little bell [Applause] [Music] now you may have noticed how I beveled all these inside edges and that's because as I tried very hard to get everything clean and true but if this gets hung up going in there it's most likely to get hung up on one of the corners or at the bottom right and get it cleaned out well enough so I just felt all those back with that hopefully minimize any obstructions as I hammer this in okay so I can set this aside now and start to work on the other door all right on this door there's a you know one two three four five six panes of glass which look okay but everything else you know these pieces which came out of here the first thing I got to do is remove all this putty while I'm doing that I'll be thinking about exactly how this is gonna go back together boy this some glazing doesn't act like putty at all it's real hard as son it's more like plaster but maybe it's just an ancient putty this luckily they don't seem that much effect on it but chisel and get them started it does kind of flake off and then scrapes really well with the scraper okay I think I've got all these dividers all scraped so now I got a piece this thing back together and I think I got to start with the dividers a lot of the dividers don't have the molding attached to the front and since they're since they're flush with the back of the door I'll turn the door over and then start piecing this back together see that I'll need to take off these catches so I could lay it flat piece of MDF here interesting I hadn't noticed until I was recording this that that piece is cracked there I'm gonna have to work some glue in there and clamp that up and I'll check the other ones too well these are the pieces of God they seem like they're sort of piecing back together although some of these pieces on me I'm not sure if it's the exact location for that piece but I'm definitely missing a bunch of this molding these would be called mo Lian's first thing I want to do is call the owner and make sure they don't have any more pieces but after the accident they were very careful about picking everything up but it looks like I'm gonna have to make some of this molding and makes me pieces [Music] [Music] [Music] okay I've let the dye stain drive for about 45 minutes in now sealing with shellac and then once they're sealed on the side if I need to do some more color work yesterday evening I sprayed these with another coat of shellac let it dry overnight you'll see that my samples here my new pieces rather are much redder even though I stained with Van Dyck Brown the stain that's to be expected all wood especially mahogany loses its redness as it ages so anyway I'm gonna cut back this shellac with a scotch brite pad and then I'm going to glaze it with the raw umber glaze so after using the abrasive pad I just went over real lightly with a little 500 to really cut the fibers make it really smooth you're always worried about cutting through the color you know down the raw wood but I managed to do that get it really smooth so the glaze coat glaze is just some medium some oil-based medium and then it's got oil colors in it and in this case raw umber which has no red so the nice thing about glazing it's just very versatile it it you know does add a little colour and this in this case adds color and I hope decreases the red and also darkens up the corners and shows little defects and stuff to help make this look older and you can you know you can control it because it's on top of the finish you can wipe it off complete you know almost completely if you like just leaving it in the corners or in this case wiping it lightly very lightly to get off some of the excess and then taking a dry brush and just sort of evening it out but I'm leaving a fair amount of glaze on here it looks good it helps it look like the old piece that I'm sampling too and then when I'm done I'll let these dry for an hour or two and I'll spray on another coat of shellac fix this place you can see already that colors a lot better so I gave the moldings another good coat of shellac there's still a little too reddish they're not bad but they're rather and what I have here is green toner it's actually green and missed some on these molded see if I killed red a little better that definitely just that little misting took the red way I'll let that dry for a few minutes then I'm going to give these a couple coats of satin lacquer okay now I think the next step a bunch of the dividers are loose this is the one set that came completely out so I'm going to glue these back first and you'll see I'll put a little piece of wax paper under this joint and then a little high blue there and pop it into place there's a few other places that are loose also and I'll go around find those and just inject a little high group all right now I'm close to the point of being to being able to glue down the mullions there's five or six places and they're all short ones where the part of the divider is missing I expect them to find some short pieces that had those pieces attached to and they're not here I'm missing quite a few pieces in order to replace this piece I'd have to take this door apart and cause a lot more damage then it's worth it to replace this piece what I've done is I've cut some little blocks of window to the exact right size I'm going to clamp them here over this divider and then I'm going to fill it in with a little bit of see buddy chisel along right level and then I'll be able to glue down the short piece of pony oh and I think my little plan seems to be working here I'll know for sure when I let this dry for a few minutes and which is a lot better XS and move these blocks to the next one little plan of adding that epoxy putty to these dividers I think worked out really well now I can start locating where these Mulligan's go where I want to put them some of them you can identify where they came from a lot of them you can't but first I've got to scrape all the putty and glue off the back of these volumes and then there's at least a couple places one place here where they're still of the original putty stuck here so I've got to scrape all that off and then start placing my emollients down where I want to glue them okay everything is all scraped I'm ready to start gluing these down I'm going to start with these longer pieces on the outside okay because I because I moved this off the edge of this board to do this I can't do the other side I'll set this one aside bring the other one over and see where I can glue on it so these are dried for a few hours now now I just realized I i can't glue down these pieces until these clamps come off so I'll have to do that tomorrow well I can glue down this piece this might be the last piece on this door [Music] okay I'm I'm pretty sure that's all the existing original moldings are glued down now okay now I can start cutting the short pieces that are missing so cutting these new pieces has one little tricky element to it where they connect to the side it's a 45 degree angle where it connects in the middle you have odd angles here one side is 45 the other side is a different angle and also each one is slightly different so I cut a piece of clear inch plywood the same with this my new pieces I'll use that to experiment with and get the angle on each individual piece when I have the angle right you can transfer it to my new piece of wood and hopefully it'll fit pretty good alright so I've got this inner joint looks it looks really good now the the outer joint here is a straight 45 so it's a little bit easier but it's tough it's gonna be tough to locate it but I think I can I'll cut it a little long and then you know work up to it all right it looks long which is good but it looks like a good fit so I just need to bring this back all right that's uh that's one down if it's alright so now I'm gonna go do the rest of those I think I have six or seven more to go but you got the idea I'm gonna do each one the same way as I did this one [Applause] I don't I've let these dried overnight now I'm gonna look over all my new joints here where I've added two new pieces see if I need any filling in or trimming or touching up or anything okay so now I'm going to fill in any gaps in these joints with a low heat garden stick which is just a hard wax that requires a heat to melt it into the defect okay I finished doing all the touch-up work on the mullions now I can turn this over this is where my little blocks come in handy and install the existing glass that I have the glass that didn't break I've got to scrape any glue on the inside here when we glued all these mullions and I still have to clean the old putty off the old glass before I repaired these I put all the glass in where I thought it would go and numbered at all but it could be different now we'll find out I'm going to start refitting them where I think they belong now I've got them all fitted I can start installing them with glazing putty so you just keep kneading the putty until it's a consistent color it takes a while I'm just about there feels a little dry to me I'm just gonna add literally just drops of paint dinner all right I'm going to take a little bit of this putty I'm not gonna use gloves for this because I won't be able to get it into the back of the boy in there with gloves on I need to roll out the thinnest possible little snake okay so I got the thin little pieces down now I'll take the piece of glass and squish it down as much as I dare and just realized I can pick just something to take a look and see if I've got the right amount out you know it looks like there's just a very very thin layer between the glass and the moist looks good I can't really sell for sure till I scrape the excess away but it looks good now I put down the larger amount of honey on the out this side okay that's good I'll let this dry for a couple days before I take a razor blade and clean it up a little bit but it's not bad anyway I just got about I think thirteen or fourteen to go [Music] on the second tour I've already installed the existing glass but on this store now we have three pieces that I have to cut a new glass alright I've got three pieces of antique glass here this is glass salvaged out of other furniture that's come in with broken glass okay the next step now funny I I never have to cut this tenon off that I put into this joint so I've got to trim that lieutenant and then this is the door that had broken hinges so I need to put new hinges on the store there's only one hinge broke I have the original hinge that goes here and in my collection of old hinges I have a an older hinge that is exactly the same size so that was luck [Music] now the doors are hung if you remember I was working on this case and I was trying to locate the this main piece of the pediment here when I realized that I really needed to hang the doors to make sure that I can locate this exactly where it was supposed to go and at the same time it was then that I realized that this piece of wood that it's the bottom of this piece of wood in other words I need to solve off about 5/16 of an inch of this new pine board and glue this boy to it this is mahogany and then this piece of wood is the stop for the doors and there's a little slot there awesome that the key and this floor goes into so I began to realize that that it was there but it looks like it is a pretty good job of locating this it looks really good so I think I'm good I need to remove this it's just nailed on and attach this piece the very top 3/4 of an inch of my new board is where the glue will go to glue to the case so I'm going to tape that off and then this new part below it lightly sand it and stain it before I glue this on so now I'm just about to the point where I will start gluing these moldings on and on this side though I noticed even from the beginning that this was missing this short return right here that may not even be due to the accident that damaged this piece I might be missing all along in fact on this side this piece of molding does appear to be a replacement moly really good job but they've never really finished it so I will put more finish on that the this shows the pieces that I need to make [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] up to now working on the machines I've been using longer pieces you need pieces to be at least 12 inches long to work on the machine at this point I'm switching the hand tools so I'm gonna cut off a six-inch piece to carve this out by hand ultimately how many about three inches this piece maybe that's good I'm not gonna worry about it the details too much because when I cut this and you know I eventually cut this and join it to this I'll have to do a little bit of sanding to match up the details exactly [Music] [Music] all right that is pretty close I'm not gonna worry about it too much because I've got a kind of compound miter here and then when this gets glued on I'll be able to sand it match it up perfectly with this piece there's no sense to it much more to like get that done okay so you know gluing back all the moldings piece by piece in the center here there's this little block which actually looks like it came comes from another piece of furniture but it was there with the eagle on top and apparently there was some little moldings I only have this one piece it also has a different finish than the rest of this I'm not sure it's original but apparently it was there so I'm gonna make some noise I'm just gonna go with this design so now I'm back on the doors again I've got to clean the gap glass again and do any touch-up work there's not much to do on the backs a little more on the fronts I'm going to reinstall the hardware if you remember there's these catches I took out I saved the original nails see if I can get back the wrong [Music] so in the meantime I'm still letting glue dry on the case cleaning up and then French polishing the doorframes first I'm sanding with lightly with just some 5-hundred paper and then French polishing it with my French wine okay it's time for me to get back to these new moldings I'm going to turn it up on its side so I can get this is more of a horizontal position to work on it I've got some thinned out extra dark walnut dye stain that I'm going to use I'd like to thin it out you can always add another color to make a darker if you need to okay well waiting for a stain to dry stuff like glue these glue blocks back where they belong I'm number done it's also kind of weird how some of these blocks have appear to be from some other piece of furniture now I'm going to build up some finish with some aerosol swag but to get it to the point where I can French polish it alright I've got three good coats of shellac on here that looks good I'm gonna sand it with five hundred and didn't see if I can polish it out so what I'm sanding something like this a mold and actually you can see I've got a low point there so you take a great pad and go over it never a bad idea with molding she get into these irregularities without sanding through I don't want to stand through the stain there we go the okay section of a secretary bookcase it fell face forward from the book from the desk the doors were all smashed the pediment was all smashed it's all back together now this this I put in about a hundred and fifteen hours on this project over a period of three months and I think it looks pretty good so now let's deliver it and get it back together with the base unit where it belongs you

Channel: Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Views: 412,329

Keywords: Thomas, Johnson, Antique, Furniture, Restoration, Gorham, Maine, Southern, ME, Greater, Portland, Boston, MA, Newton, Mass, secretary bookcase, 18th century, Federal bookcase, Federal secretary, glass door, mullions, repairing antique furniture, antique furniture repair, restoring a bookcase, restoring glass doors, repairing a bookcase, repairing glass doors, glass door repair, eighteenth century furniture, eighteenth century furniture in america

Id: nAt1FHxB9Eg

Length: 54min 27sec (3267 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018