Restoring an Antique Lady's Writing Desk - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

[Music] i'm tom johnson thomas johnson antique furniture restoration in gorham maine this is a nice ladies writing desk that's what we've always called them it's probably from the early 20th century maybe 1920 or so it's got this applied carving very much like lake victorian oak furniture but this piece is made of mahogany and it's got a few problems with it for instance this gallery is broken it has these lid supports come out automatically with the mechanism and their little step [Music] there you go some of these pieces have come off these decorative pieces but you've got them all they all came with it so they just need to be glued back the legs are loose at least this one probably another one too and then the finish it's really kind of rough looking this one particular side is really bad we'll have to see what we can do about that so first thing i want to do is take the drawer out and then i want to remove this lid you know i'm having second thoughts about taking these hinges off i've worked on these before usually there's exposed screws in this area here this one doesn't have it screws are way down there inside this thing there's a little screw down in there and i'm sure there's more along here see there's another screw way down in there i suspect that if you took these pigeon holes out of here we might get some more accessible screws underneath of that yeah i think i'm going to leave this attached for now and you know i can see that there's stuff caught up in here and obviously that's why it didn't work correctly so maybe i can clean these out lubricate them and uh and it'll work fine i'm going to try that first anyway i think i should work on these hinges first get them working correctly because that makes a difference whether or not i need to remove this litter so i better find that out first right off the bat you can see some of these papers and stuff that are pieces of paper that are stuck down in there maybe i can pull them out here's where the the hinge connects to a lever on these lid supports i'm going to take those off that'll allow me to lubricate the lid supports and maybe give a clue as to what's hanging this thing up yeah you can see that this see moves with difficulty and that's a good sign and uh because i can lubricate this up and see what's happening here right off the bat you can see there's a piece of felt here that's loose and that's hanging it up at some point here maybe even there too see it doesn't want to close so there's an extra layer of felt here and that part is coming up i think i'll just trim that off and then wax everything up and see how it works this side runs against the side of the cabinet which i'll wax also all these spots and drips are indicative that possibly this has been refinished before oh yeah that works freely now so i'll do the same thing to the other support and we'll see how things work i'm guessing that the hinges i still need to lubricate them and clean them out maybe with some compressed air all right liz sports are out oh man okay something's hanging out funny something stopped it right about there but then it now it's working free up there it goes i gotta find out what is happening right there i don't think it's a pretty good wad of paper maybe i didn't think the paper is causing this to happen but maybe it is getting that paper out seems to have really helped but i hope that was the problem [Music] boy that really helped it's moving quite freely now and i still just want to give it a speck of lubricant so uh before i put this back on the bench to reconnect the lid supports and start working on the legs i want to remove this broken piece of the gallery yeah these are connected i have to take off the entire gallery here good they're not glued or anything oh man all right now we can work on his legs so yeah these legs are really loose like all except one there's a lot of stuff going on here they've all got these big plugs or dowels i don't know what they are we're gonna have to figure that out you can see down here that we got nails these same big plugs which look like they are dowels because one of them's sticking through right there at an angle that's going to be bad i think i think what i'm seeing here i don't know if you can see it the original dowels i'll get some wedges see if these two dowels which i suspect were added are angled which they most probably are it's going to be trouble getting this thing off now you can see the original dowels my guess is there's there's three dowels going straight up in here i still haven't seen those diagonal dowels yet i don't know where they got off to it really feels like it wants to come off but it won't and that's those daggone diagonal dowels well i don't see them oh yeah i think i do ah this is interesting to me you know it appears that there's only one dowel originally here's your two diagonal dowels worked on a lot of furniture uh from this era and i would say that every one of setups like this almost always had three dowels or they'd have one large dowel with two screws going through these knee blocks this one appears to have only been dialed originally with a single dowel seems funny to me they're just not giving us much to work with here i'm what i'm thinking right now is i just glue this back the way that it was and then i'm gonna add some screws out here out on these blocks going straight into the piece to help give it some stability so everything's not in the center here i just don't think there's much else i can do i'll uh start by taking off the other leg and thinking about it this is the one that seems secure so we'll leave that alone but we'll keep an eye on it i'll try this one i'm seeing some daylight through there maybe i can get a wedge down in there boy what a mess especially this area here where this board there's a piece of it attached to the leg but not everything once again not sure the best way to go here but uh in the meantime i'll get this leg off and keep thinking about it [Music] so i think the first thing i need to do is glue this board back into place it's mortise and tenon into the frame you can see the big gap here and so what i need to do is detach this board from the back which is this board here and re-glue it into place this side and the other side looks awful tight it might be glued to the back boy i don't think i don't think these boards are going to separate you know i'm thinking that i can back these two boards out together you know the this rail is solidly attached to this back the back solid wood oddly enough that's very unusual uh and it's cracked due to shrinkage it's only got like one nail holding this in maybe i can back it out and then glue it back where it's supposed to go all right so the first thing i'll do is is glue up these splinter bits i'm using hide glue here but for breaks like these any any water soluble glue you know regular carpenter's glue would work fine okay okay as we're waiting for those to dry we can glue up this top gallery piece okay this piece has been in clamps for a couple hours uh i think we can i think i can take the clamps off and glue it back i want to be sure there's pressure on the tenon in there all right tomorrow we'll glue the legs on this seems really solid now now because these dowels were drilled at an angle i can't put it back on with the dowels there i have to drill those out or knock them out glue the leg and then put them back again now the thought just occurred to me i've got i can reuse these dowels this one's not giving it up like the others maybe i'll i'm gonna apply some heat to it i need to at least get this uh chunk of wood off intact no no it's not gonna go uh so you so [Applause] so okay good so so um so the diagonals are off by maybe 3 16 of an inch or so so the diagonal measurements are slightly off but i am the legs are all solid up against the frame here i think that the diagonals are close enough everything looks fine everything's exactly where it's supposed to be so i'm going to leave that alone so all right now i can start gluing down the little scroll pieces in here all these other pieces belong to an another piece of furniture i'll be sure to get them back so these spring clamps have adjustable tension which is fantastic for small pieces like this so i can't clamp this one i think i just have to hold it i'll hold it for a few minutes until it seems to grab yeah it's already grabbing and the third one okay gonna let all this dry overnight boy these uh these legs seem rock solid so now i'm going to reinstall these dowels oh i just realized this is the one without a number that dow broke but i the new down here to use for this you all right i'm going to wait to touch things up here until tomorrow i want to let the glue dry to find out this desk comes out looking pretty good keep an eye peeled for my next video you

Channel: Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Views: 130,066

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

Id: v0UXURfTu3U

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021