Stripping and painting side table

hey guys let's turn out john's furniture repair in the shop today starting a new project so it's a little table that i've got here and uh it's quite a nice little side table that i've got here for a customer and the problems are that it's super wobbly and uh they're actually wanting it painted black so the finish is in pretty bad condition it's all crazed and uh in pretty rough shape so we're gonna have to strip it down anyways first so the plan is to get it apart strip it down glue it back together do some sealer coats and paint it black so let's get to it so i'll just show you the finish up close here this is what i mean by crazed uh some people call it alligator skin when the finish has dried out it starts to kind of separate you can really see it there and have this really textured uh look it's kind of pulling away from each other and no longer a nice even finish it's kind of pooling up so it's actually kind of a cool look if you like that or if that's what you're going for but what they want for this piece is a nice smooth black finish all right so this is being up here on the workbench i'm gonna take out the drawer looks like the drawer could use a little bit of work uh the runner is kind of riding on some nails so whenever i see um damage on the bottom of the drawer like this with these grooves dug into the bottom what i know right away is that there's nails on the inside of the runner and if you take a look right here you can see three nails sticking out one two three and they're just cutting away the bottom of that drawer so i just simply punch these down with a nail punch and cover them with some wax and that'll solve that problem and it'll be a lot smoother i'll give it a little bit of a hit well that was easy so they've got a dowel going in the tub that's nice good so there's the top and there's a shelf and then i'll get my primer under here and just gently lift that up so i'm on this side [Music] all right great so you can set that aside you can kind of more clearly see where the nails are here now that we're digging into the bottom of the drawer and we'll just need to tap those down i'm actually going to take it apart probably uh flip this over so this doesn't have all these grooves in it and re-glue because it's loose here this should be glued down so it'll be a nice new surface for the drawer to slide on sometimes it's better if you don't have any nails and something like this because the wood will eventually wear down and happen again but i'll sink them fairly deep so it won't matter i'm just gonna tap these apart they're very loose so it's not going to be very hard [Music] okay so i've got my stripper here i'm just gonna soak down a few pieces so the key to stripping a finish off is keeping the stripper wet on the finish if your stripper is drying too quickly on your surface it could be the temperature in your room or sometimes some finishes do soak up quite a bit but as long as your stripper stays wet on the surface it can keep working but as soon as it's dry it's not doing anything anymore and sometimes the finish just dries back onto your piece so that's annoying so let those sit for a little bit maybe get some of these working i like to put these right in the the can and just work half of them at one time and i just wash the finish off this is an old shellac so it'll wash off pretty good although it will be sticky just get those guys soaking on half of them and we'll just take our scraper and get some of that shark right off of there and you may need to do this a couple of times so i'm just going to soak it right away again and put it aside get into these legs now so i just used my stripper brush actually and i just start washing the finish down and off the wig rinse your brush in your stripper you don't have to get too particular about this first round you're just starting to work into that finish and then sometimes you gotta take out and that's good just give it another little bit of soaking keep it wet and go onto the next one then we're back to these guys you'll notice it'll come out a lot cleaner this time but i can still feel a few nibs of that alligator finish so this will be the last soak now there's two methods to removing the stripper when you're finished taking the finish off one is steel wool so on flat areas like these ones i'll show you that method so you just get the piece of number one steel wool which is the coarsest and you're going to scrub your piece dry so this is good for flat surfaces because you don't have to go around anything and you can kind of work off any little last bits with scrubbing but with this method you're still left with the residue of the stripper so even if you are using this method you still need to use a methyl hydrate which is what i'm putting on right now to neutralize the stripper and then you just wipe that off with a clean cloth and there's your piece it's pretty beautiful wood so i'll set that aside and do that to these other ones i'll show you the other method actually so if you're just going to use the methyl hydrate instead of the steel you just simply wash the rest of whatever's on there and the stripper residue right off your piece this works if you know you've got a fairly complicated area to clean off that's what i'll be using on the legs of course steel wool um will remove a little bit more if you have like pieces left but these stripped up pretty good so either way it works for these pieces so same same results for the legs i'm going to wash them down again with a get stripper better view i'm just working all the finish out of the grooves with my brush sometimes it builds up the bottom of legs over the years it seems like it starts to kind of droop off of the piece so make sure you work the bottom just kind of take a look and see if there's any more chunks when that's good you just take the methyl hydrate again and you'll scrub it pretty good from the top down working quick enough that it's not drying too much before you've been able to get it all off of there which is why it's important to work in smaller areas i can see the old finish here and the nice clean leg here so i'll do that for the rest of the legs and the other half of the legs and then we'll get to the tops okay so we've got the shelf and the top to deal with we're just going to strip these guys down the same way [Music] [Music] and then i'm just going to pour a little bit of the methyl hydrate and i'm going to scrub the whole top and the edges at the same time okay so i've got the top stripped so onto the drawer it's pretty loose it's got a lot of side to side motions so the joints here and down here need to be re-glued so let's get this apart we've got a couple nails here and here they're already popping out by themselves i kind of hate drawers that are put together this way it's not a very sophisticated method but it's not a very large bulky piece and it's not a very large drawer so it probably worked for a good hundred years before it had any issues so it comes apart pretty easily just be careful not to crack any of this very delicate wood i'm going to give it a tap on the inside here so i'll just show you guys here what i'm looking for when i go around something so most of these legs have big chunks missing from the carving at the bottom here so i'm just adding that back in and i'll have to sand that out later and they have quite a bit of damage on some of the areas of the legs that were i find that when pieces are loose like this one was oftentimes they kind of go through a little bit harder of a life because they fall over and get kicked around and aren't super stable so just do some careful putty work even though these are getting this is getting painted i don't skimp on repairs and i use you know the same putty i would if i was to refinish it in a wood color like i've said before i seal all of my painted pieces especially i mean most of my painted pieces some of them it doesn't really matter but if it's you know a solid walnut piece if someone ever wants to take it back to the wood tone they're not i'm going to have a hard time because it's going to be sealed and the paint will just be on top of the sealer coat if you don't seal your your pieces before you paint them all that paint kind of gets into the the grooves and the grain and such an opaque color is hard to remove if you ever wanted to so i'm just doing the next generation of refinishers a favor like so many have done for me i mean oftentimes a piece is painted and i'm returning it and it's just because they didn't want to remove the finish first when they painted it there was just painting was the easy option so that works for me too but oftentimes those paint jobs aren't very good when i paint something i like to have my finish as nice as if it was a wood finish refinished from bare wood i'm just going to rub that right into those little i always find that these open up on the end grain here and these are the parts of the leg that catch the light and you want them to be smooth and luxurious looking you don't want them to be full of little nicks and dents this is the the time in a project to take your time and to find all these little details that will make your end product really awesome great so i'll set that leg aside okay so let's glue this drawer together i'm just going to get a little bit of glue on these sides here and i'm going to start with my drawer bottom which has to be in before everything and then we'll get glue on to here and right in this groove as well just to hold it together for a second while i pop these nails in i've got 25 and three quarters and almost 26. so i think we need a clamp going this way okay so it's a little off so i'm just going to bring it over so slightly that way we've got 25 and 7 8. 25 and 7 8. perfect [Music] nominated williams this year's juneau awards coming up later in the show is oshawa ontario based dizzy their second album the sun and her scorch is up for alternative album of the year but right now it's vancouver okay so this is the bottom of the drawer where these uh tear outs were from the nails you remember this piece had nails sticking out and they dug into this slide so we're actually going to be installing this the other way so this is going to run against this so it'll be nice flat surface but we also need to repair this surface so to do that i'm just going to use epoxy putty just to fill these grooves because it's harder than the wood around it and it'll be a great surface for the slide to run up against so the other uh little issue this drawer had was there's a big chunk broken out of this top or bottom corner here so i last night i put in some putty uh in that corner so i just need to shape that now [Music] okay so i've got all the pieces sanded and all the joints drilled out everything we're ready to go back together so i've got my epoxy mix here and i'm just gonna fill the joints all right i'm so going to figure out which one goes where that's the front so just kind of go back there [Applause] okay so this piece here runs across and sits on these braces then it's nailed it on each side so i'm going to put that back on uh and i'm going to glue it down so i get a bit of epoxy on each side so try to get these nails back in the same spot so once that dries that'll be solid so i can now i'm going to flip this over so this is on the on this side instead and the drawer can ride on this smooth side so i'll just glue this and i've marked it with a pencil on the back here and two little marks here so i know exactly where it needs to go there we go that's better and then the same thing here hey guys it's next morning in the shop let's get these clamps off [Music] all right so no longer has the wobbles really nice and sturdy everything came together really well i'm really happy with that and see how the drawer fits in let me get you guys a little bit more on the same plane here so we fixed the bottom of the drawer and sanded that all nice and flat so it can just ride nice and smoothly on this part and let's see if it still fits after we took it all apart [Music] yeah it looks good looks like it's a little bit more of a gap on this side than this side but also it needs to be lifted a little bit that's not bad though not too not too shabby so everything's back together with this we'll give it a little bit of stand just to clean up the clamp marks and stuff like that and then clear coat and paint it black [Music] all right so we've got two coats of black paint on this guy i just did it with a gloss uh because that's what i had in the gut at the moment so i'm going to finish it with a satin black so it won't be this shiny but right now what i want to do is sand everything down with a 320 paper and smooth it all out for the next round of paint so let's get to it the top is pretty grainy so i kind of want to sand out all of this grainy stuff here get it to just quiet enough a little bit i'm not doing a filled finish but uh it's a little bit too loud so i'm just going to stand this down pretty good on this first sand down to leave a lot more lacquer in the grain than on the surface to start flattening out that [Music] finish on the top because we did do so much sanding there the grain is really open so i'm just going to stand until i can see there aren't a whole lot of shiny low spots down i'll show you guys what that looks like so that if you're standing something like this and you want to get a little bit more of a smooth surface on your woods tops you can see what level you need to go to and i'm okay if i stand through on this coat so there you can see it's got a few shiny spots still but it's mostly flattened out on that surface so that's what i'm going to be working towards on the whole piece and sometimes i use a little bit of water mixed with dish soap or a soap of any choice just for a lubricant on my sandpaper if i'm cutting something down pretty heavy um and i might do that on this top just to get it done quickly helps if you have a little stiff brush just to clean your sandpaper off once a while and i'm going in a circular motion on this finish [Music] just to really cut it down quickly across grain all right so i got the whole thing sanded with 320 and i went through quite a bit on the top and some edges and areas and i'm totally fine with that because i'm more concerned with getting the uh surface flat than i am with keeping color on right now because we're going to be doing more coats of blocker anyways so i did a few little wax fills and areas that popped out more when i had the paint and i didn't see it before uh these mohawk sticks that you can get are compatible with lacquer so i like to keep a whole bunch of these on hand and it doesn't really matter what color i use under paint but for other colors it works so i've got the drawer prepped as well so now we can get it back in the booth and start hitting it with the satin lacquer everything is super nice and smooth and feeling really good and the top should fill up with lacquer pretty good after a sand like this [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so the satin lacquer black lacquer is on this thing you can see the top is a lot more filled than the first time we did it but also it's a flatter lacquer so you're going to see less but that's about what i'm going for so that looks good i'm going to sand everything down a lot lighter this time than i did on the first round and uh give it another coat and then it should be done all right so i believe this is the final coat it looks pretty good still got some drying to do and the grain's showing nicely and the drawer back in there it's got a really nice soft sheen so just got to put the handle back on the drawer and we are done all right i've got the little handle here definitely needs a little bit of a polish so i'm going to take my little scotch brit with some brasso and just hit all these high points and clean this up good and then just wash that off with some metal hydrate and dry it put that side now you can see those little points of the flower quite nicely then we'll do a little such in the same way so as they dry they're going to get a little bit dull in the recesses where the brasso kind of dries and has a bit of a whitish mist they just need to reseal everything just to give it a nice clarity i'm just using some lacquer for that so we'll let that dry then we'll put it on the drawer the jewelry of the piece so pretty okay so we got it on the drawer there it is looking really good with the black and the inside of the or the recesses of the brass mold and the black on the cabinet looks really nice together traditional but somehow kind of funky too so we've got a beautiful smooth finish remember how we fixed these legs and did all that putty work and sanding they look really beautiful now they've got a nice little tulip shape and everything is working properly the drawers nicely sliding in and out [Music] and i really like this finish so we're gonna let it cure sit here overnight and let the customer know it's ready to go home so thanks for joining me on this one guys please like and subscribe if you enjoyed this video and check out our other ones to see some more stuff just like it that we do in the shop [Music] you

Channel: John's Furniture Repair

Views: 36,832

Rating: 4.9589419 out of 5

Keywords: furniture, john's furniture repair, thomas johnson, antique restoration, refinishing, strip, stain, paint, sand, project, shop, workshop, woodshop, trena, woodworking, spraybooth, spray

Id: GSGrNlFWpQM

Length: 33min 49sec (2029 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021