Wood That It Were So Simple: Conserving A Split Panel Painting Part 1

this video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business [Music] every once in a while a project comes into the studio that upon first glance appears straightforward yet as more time is spent understanding the subtleties and nuances of the work involved things get interesting and as a conservator that can be really frustrating because who doesn't like easy but it's also really exciting because that's when we get to flex all of our skill all of our craft all of our ingenuity to come up with solutions to an otherwise complicated problem and that's exactly where we are with this piece that arrived in the studio not too long ago now as you can see this is an oil painting on wood panel and obviously it's quite dirty there's a lot of surface grime and old varnish and this painting will be really beautiful once cleaned but the real big issue is that the wood panel has split in several places there's a complete detachment here there is a massive set of checks here and it was previously split along this edge here and so the front of the painting actually isn't that bad there's no major paint loss there's no catastrophic damage to the image yes it's filthy and it needs a good cleaning but by large it's okay now the same can't be said for the back of the panel and if we take a look that's where things get really interesting we can see a whole bunch of previous interventions on the back of this painting we can see where the panel had split or fully separated the joints have been flooded with some sort of synthetic adhesive we have these little pieces of wood that have been glued on to the back to hold it in place we can see these pieces of wood that have been glued and nailed in an attempt to hold this split together and we can see the last of what was three battens that have been glued and screwed to the painting in an attempt to hold it together and hold it flat and remnants of three channels that were carved into this piece to receive the battens but among all of these interventions the worst is what was done to the panel in an attempt to flatten it and keep it stable you see at some point somebody decided that the best way to alleviate the warping and distortion in the panel was to thin it down and that is to take it from a thickness of perhaps an inch down to about a half an inch and they thought that by removing the mass of the panel it would make the wood more pliable and that they could then flatten it and hold it in place with these battens and the reason that I'm fairly confident that that was done is because if we look at areas where there are joints between two pieces of wood because of course this isn't one massive panel it's a series of small pieces of wood that have been joined together in those areas where there are joints we can see butterflies and dowels now these dowels and these butterflies add structural support to a glue joint and these dowels are usually in the center of the wood and so the fact that we can see them tells me that a mass of the wood has been removed and if we look at this butterfly in particular the wood is only a veneer the majority of this butterfly has been removed and so what why does it matter that half the panel's been removed what's the big deal glue it back together put it back in the frame well unfortunately that's not going to work not only do we not have enough surface area to form a strong glue bond this panel is of varying thicknesses and wood reacts to moisture changes humidity changes depending on how thick it is that is a thick piece of wood is going to react and move differently than a thin piece of wood and that's not really a problem if the entire panel is of one thickness but when we have varying degrees of thickness we are going to have different movement rates and those different movement rates are going to wreak havoc on this painting and could potentially be its undoing well so what glue the painting back together sticking to a climate-controlled environment eliminate humidity changes problem-solve right well if it were only that simple you see this piece isn't going into a museum it's going into a home along the North Shore of Chicago along Lake Michigan a home without an HVAC system no climate control and along Lake Michigan we can see humidity changes that are pretty wild from season to season week to week even hour to hour we can see changes of 5060 percent and all of those changes are going to wreak havoc on this panel particularly because it's so thin and has such a varying degree of thickness so simply slapping it back in the frame after gluing it together and sticking it in the house that's not an acceptable solution because as a conservator it's not only my responsibility to deal with the problems that we see right now it's also my responsibility to think about the paintings future and to think about the problems that it will encounter and so if I don't take those into account well I'm culpable for any failures in the future and so I know what you're thinking what am I going to do well I have a plan and you're just gonna have to stay tuned to see it before I can do any work putting this painting back together well I have to take it apart because all of the material that was added to the painting is going to be an impediment to the work that I want to do going forward and so it all needs to be removed the battens the blocks of wood the screws the nails it's all got to go and there's no easy or specific way of doing this it's just a little bit of labor and a little bit of elbow grease now luckily some pieces like this batten can be removed with a few screws and a couple of tugs will pop it right off of the panel and that's really just an indication of how poor and sloppy that work was other pieces like these wood blocks are a little bit more difficult I suspect that they were bonded down with an epoxy and I can't soften that with solvent or heat so I have to use chisels and screwdrivers and pretty much anything else I have at my disposal to remove them from the wood but even though that epoxy joint is pretty strong you can see that it's not so strong that I can't pry it up now I do want to take care not to damage the panel but I'm not so concerned about the surface and you'll see why later on now I am working on this piece on top of a felt blanket because I want to make sure that if I put pressure down on the panel there's a little bit of padding and if the panel slides while I'm working on it the surface isn't scratched now you might think that I would face the painting with washi kozo before doing any of this work and that's a pretty good assumption but I've chosen not to because that facing will actually get in the way of several of the steps that I want to take later on now once I've removed all of the built-up material I have to break the joints now some of these joints are really perilous like the one that I just separated others are tougher but I need to gain access to all of those joints the face of that wood so that I can clean it off and prepare it beery bonded with the other pieces because if I leave any residue it's gonna complicate the matter so I have the panel split into six distinct pieces and I'm ready to start cleaning out that glue now I've created a jig which is going to hold the pieces of wood vertical while I get access to the joints I could certainly clamp each piece of wood to the table and work from the side but it's just a little bit easier for me to do it this way I have a better line of sight and I'm not hunched over so much now when I take the piece of wood and I place it into the jig I'm going to use a piece of half-inch felts in between the wood and the panel I'm also going to use a piece of wood blocking on the back for the clamps to hold on to and all of this is going to make sure that there's enough padding and support so that the panel isn't unnecessarily stressed and in case it moves the paint layer won't be scratched so once this panel is secured in the jig I can begin to remove all of that excess adhesive now unfortunately this is not a conservation grade adhesive it's not removable in any way by heat or solvent so the only way to get it off is through mechanical means and that's a relatively scientific way of just saying chisel and scraping and so I'm taking my relatively sharp chisel I actually don't want a razor sharp chisel because I don't want to go into the wood and gouge it and I'm using it to chip off and scrape off all of this epoxy the good news is that it's a low-quality epoxy and it was poorly applied so the bond to the wood is relatively weak and it gives fairly easily sometimes low-quality work is actually to the benefit of the conservator now chipping off this adhesive is not terribly difficult it's just time consuming and a little bit frustrating I also have to make sure that I don't scratch the surface or chip the paint layer off so I'm working mostly on the back of the painting and towards the face of the painting now in addition to the epoxy which again was poorly bonded there's a layer of wax on the wood and I suspect the wax was originally used to fill in a crack and filled the pores of the wood causing the epoxy bond to be relatively poor again successive rounds of lousy work have actually worked to be in my benefit so thank you to all of the people who previously worked on this painting and did a crummy job you've made my day a little bit easier now once I've used the chisel to the degree that I'm satisfied I'll take a card scraper and I'll just go across the surface to remove any residue and to open up a new layer of clean pores for the wood and that is I want to make sure that I've got wood layer that doesn't have any wax or epoxy residue in it otherwise the glue that I'm going to be using won't have a good bond with this wood and it won't create a strong joint now I mentioned earlier that there were screws and nails in this panel and I found one right here when I ran over it with my chisel and put a nice old nick in the blade so I'm gonna pull this little nail out because again it's interfering with my ability to clean off the adhesive and it's going to interfere with the glue joint and also it really has no business being on this panel this tiny little Brad nail is not going to provide any structural support it's not original it's probably rusty and it's just got to go so I'll dig it out using a pair of pliers as delicately as I can but again this is fairly well embedded in the wood and it's rusted so it makes it that much more difficult to remove now luckily I don't have to worry about saving this nail so if push comes to shove and the nail needs to be destroyed well so be it luckily though I think I will be able to get this nail out spoiler I do get the nail out and there we have it little rusted nail now with all of the adhesive gone and the joint cleaned up and clear I can check to see how it's going to fit with its adjoining panel and this is really important because I need to make sure it's perfectly straight smooth and there's a good bond and you can see when I press it together that joint almost completely disappears and with a little bit of retouching it will and so that's how I know that I've got a good joint ready for glue but simply gluing this panel back together isn't gonna be so easy because I've got different thicknesses of wood and I don't have straight splits and so thinking about how to keep the registration all aligned the clamping pressure even and doing it in a way that's controlled well that was a little complicated and took a little thinking outside the box and that all began with my computer and some 3d modeling software where I planned and designed a clamping table that I would use for this project now in the past I've clamped panels together using bar clamps and hand clamps and they've been successful but they've been smaller with smaller joints but for this painting with six different joints and uneven wood that's bowed and cupped and all the distortions and complications that this panel has I felt that a dedicated discreet system would be advantageous and so I designed this table to afford clamping pressure on three axes XY and Z and that will enable me to apply pressure on two axes to bond the panel together and pressure on the third axis to make sure that the registration or the seams are properly aligned so with the table designed I could get started on building it now after my experience building the hot table base with aluminum extrusion I decided that it too was the perfect material for this table and one of the reasons it's a great material to wear with is because it's very easily machined as compared to something like tube steel or angle iron working with aluminum and hand tools is really not all that difficult and as you can see here I'm using hand tools to drill a couple of holes into the aluminum that are going to receive a series of bolts they're going to be necessary in the installation of a hydraulic lift system that I decided to install on this table and you'll see that later but one thing that I learned about using this aluminum extrusion is that the planning stage is really really important making sure that all of your dimensions are accurate and all your cut lists are double-checked that all the parts you've ordered fit that they you have enough of them that you've got the right bolts the right gussets the right brackets that all makes a big difference because a couple of extra hours spent in the planning stage makes the assembly stage much much easier and the assembly stage is a pretty linear process that is part a must go on before Part B you have to know what needs to come first before you put the next thing together because if you miss something or think you can do it later on you might find yourself in a predicament or at least you might find that you have to take the whole thing apart and that may seem like a bug and trust me it feels frustrating when you realize you have to take half your work apart because you missed something but it's actually a feature you see this is a modular system and so if you need to add things or take things apart it's really easy because even in the planning stages sometimes we miss things and so knowing that we have the freedom to go back in and change things without consequence is really liberating and this isn't true just with this table built it's true with a lot of things like your website because even the best laid plans can sometimes miss things maybe your first website was just a simple about page but then you decided to add an online gallery and then you found the need for an online e-commerce solution and then you needed an integrated shipping platform and maybe you wanted to start booking appointments through your website and don't forget about search engine optimization and email marketing and the list goes on and on and on and the thing is with Squarespace adding all of those components is really as simple as one click so if you miss something in the beginning you're not left stranded and having to take apart the whole website and rebuild it Squarespace has you covered so head on over to Squarespace comm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to Squarespace calm baumgartner for 10% off your first website or domain so a minute ago when I talked about missing something and then having to undo your work well that wasn't hypothetical you see I forgot to put that little slider on when I put the table together and well I had to take it apart to get that little slider on but again because it was a modular system it wasn't that complicated kind of payment but but not the end of the world now I also mentioned that I wanted to have hydraulic lift on this table because while I'm fairly young now and I don't mind crawling on my hands and knees to gain access to the underside of the panel at some point in the future I'm not gonna be so young and I probably won't want to be crawling on the floor on my hands and knees and so raising the table up will be of great benefit now the hydraulic lifter that I purchased was an overstock item and the manufacturer no longer makes the mounting brackets or equipment for this particular model so I had to come up with my own solution and that's where having those two bolts and the legs comes into play you see I can slide the piston all the way down and then put these two bolts in and these bolts will carry the entire weight of the table on the top of the piston and so when the piston is actuated and extends down through the bottom of the leg it will press on these bolts and lift the entire table up and again that's going to be very very helpful to future me who doesn't want to be on his hands and knees crawling around on a dirty floor so a little bit of foresight it's gonna make all the difference later on now at this point the table kind of looks like a hot mess there are hydraulic wires going everywhere it's upside-down it's missing a lot of pieces there bolts on the ground kind of doesn't look like anything but that's okay because I'm still have a lot of work to do and this is just one step of the process now here I'm going to be tapping the legs so that I can install the base plate and that base plate is going to be the bottom of the hydraulic lift system and that's absolutely critical so that piston doesn't flop around and so that it is secured in place now I'm just using a hand drill a tap and some cutting oil to tap these holes and I'm sure that machinists will look at this technique and think that it is absolutely sloppy and crazy but look we're not dealing with aerospace tolerances here and this is a case where I didn't want to let perfect be the enemy of the good so that post that I've now installed is the leg that's going to extend out of the larger leg and once I get this base plate all bolted on I'll be ready to install the casters and I decided to put this whole thing on wheels because it's going to take up some space and I will probably want to move it and again I figured putting it on wheels now will be a lot easier than if I put it on wheels later now I chose to use some simple casters ultimately however I did change them out with more robust casters that had a better locking mechanism because I found these to be a little bit wanting so a little bit of oversight on my part but you know again modular I can make these changes in the future and it's not the end of the world now flipping the table over was a big moment of truth I definitely could have used an extra set of hands but I didn't have them and my brother was busy so I had to do it myself and even though this is aluminum it's actually still pretty heavy and it took all of my hundred fifty pounds to get it up and over come on there you go there you there you go good job Julian so with the table upright and on casters it's pretty easy to maneuver and I'm just going to go through and make sure I've tightened all those bolts because they were only tightened to about 90% and I did that deliberately so that I could come back and make sure that everything was where it should be on its final pass for tightening tightening bolts is tiring tell ya there's a lot of them now this is the part of the table that is going to slide on the x-axis and is going to facilitate clamping pressure on the y-axis sounds pretty complicated but it all makes sense when you see it in action now here I'm just installing the control box for the hydraulic lift it's a simple switch that allows me to raise and lower the table and it goes in with just a couple of screws nothing complicated but putting it in an easily accessible location it's pretty important because I need it easily accessible and here I'm just tidying up some of these hydraulic tubes with a filler piece and I should note that at this point I should have checked to make sure the entire system worked before doing this I didn't and I got very very lucky that everything worked out in the end again working with this aluminum is really easy and you can see with a circular saw I can cut it down to size if this were steel it would have been exponentially more difficult and this is a stage at which I'm building the trellises that are going to slide along the table that are going to facilitate clamping pressure on the z-axis that is up and down and that's absolutely critical I mentioned the other part being the heart of the system well I guess this is really the heart of the system because this piece is going to make sure that I can put clamping pressure on the face and the back of the painting and ensure that the seams are going to align without any lips or ridges because if I can't do that and what good is this whole table because that's really the whole point of the table I can use bar clamps and hand clamps to to bond two pieces of wood together but making sure that they're bonded together in a way where there is no lift well that's the big difference and that was the whole thrust of this table so this trellis is really really important I know that's not aluminum well you're right that's oak and I needed something for the painting to rest on while the planting table was doing its job and I could have used aluminum but I decided that I wanted something a little bit more organic and infinitely more workable than the aluminum I'm working with now and so I settled on oak and I'm using my router table to plunge cut several channels into these oak battens and these channels are gonna allow me to fix this batten to the table I'm going to add a little chamfer to the edge just to make it a little bit more user friendly and just a little bit nicer a little bit more polished of a look and once I've sanded all of these battens I'm going to coat them with standard shellac and I'm using standard Lac here because it does a pretty good job of penetrating into this wood and it also does a good job of resisting glue that is any drip outs from when I'm gluing the panel back together are going to fall on these battens and I'd rather they not stick and make a mess so shellac is my best friend here now just to give the shellac a fighting chance I'm using some paste wax and rubbed into the surface of the shellac this should make sure that it is nice and slippery and these battens are going to be held in place with a series of bolts that get slid into the channel of the aluminum extrusion and this is going to allow me to reposition these battens placed on the distance of these two beams now once I have them in place I can secure them with a couple of knobs and that will provide a stable and level platform onto which the painting can be placed now I mentioned clamping on the z-axis and that all starts with some threaded rod and there's nothing exciting here I just have to cut this down to size and that's an angle grinder and just a bit of patience but I need 5 10 15 20 25 30 rods cut to size so it's gonna take a little bit time now once I get all of these rods cut I'm gonna clean up the edges with another little tool just to make sure that I can thread them through some nuts because if I don't do this step it's gonna be really difficult to get them in now perhaps the most important part of this whole table are the clamps that are going to facilitate the pressure onto the panel and I knew I wanted something that would slide onto the aluminum extrusion and be removable so the first prototype I came up with was made of steel and it slid on to the aluminum he used an Acme threaded screw to provide downward pressure and a little bolt to hold the assembly in place used in a key on top of the screw to tighten everything the only problem with this was that it was a lot of play and that made getting discrete and even clamping pressure almost impossible so the next prototype I came up with was a 3d printed nylon body now instead of the little bolt we used a thumb screw for indexing and holding it in place and we still use the same Acme threaded screw and the same key now this was better but it still had a lot of play and so this wasn't going to cut it so the final prototype was made up of carbon reinforced 3d printed nylon it slides onto the aluminum extrusion but instead of a bolt or a thumb screw there's a little knob that tightens everything down in place and instead of the Acme screw we used a standard threaded rod I also added a nifty little knurled handle so it's easier to tighten and this is the final piece that we're going to be building now while assembling these clamps wasn't particularly difficult it did take a little time to source all of the individual parts because most of them weren't available at the hardware store now this epoxy that I'm using is fairly common but it's going to be used inside of this recess or this negative space which will receive a union nut and a union nut is most oftenly used to join two threaded rods together and unlike a regular nut it is long in this case it's an inch and a half long and it has fairly tight tolerances so it's going to hold on to that threaded rod fairly well and it's going to resist some of the flopping around that was a problem with the Acme threaded nut so after putting thirty of these nuts in I was ready for the next step now the next step was cleaning off the threaded rod of the grease and oils during the machining process and applying a thread Locker so that I could install the handles and the feet now I don't know what voodoo the thread Locker does but it does it's voodoo really well and once it's cured that handle is not going anywhere and that's important because even though I'm not going to be twisting it with extreme pressure I certainly don't want it to pop off of the threaded rod when I'm using the table so I made 30 of these clamps which means I had 30 handles to install and 30 feet to install on top of that I have 30 threaded rods that needed to be inserted into the bodies not exactly fun but you know it is what it is I sped it up because you guys didn't need to see me thread that rod for four minutes but once I have the rod in the body I can put the feet on and I chose to use two different feet as I also chose to use two different handles and these feet the small ones coupled with the large black handles are going to be what provides the downward pressure on the z-axis and these are going to hold the indexing of the split panels in place the smaller aluminum handles with the wider feet will be on the X or Y axis and those will provide laughing force that's gonna be used to bond the panel pieces back together I just chose two different sets of handles and feet because I felt that each one would be uniquely suited to its purpose so with one down I've got 29 left now once I have all of the clamp bodies installed I can put the indexing or fastening bolts and handles into place and these are just going to make sure that once I've slid the clamp bodies to the location I want on the aluminum extrusion I can tighten them down and keep them in place again one of the benefits of a modular system is that if I need to add more of these clamps I can do it I can just take it apart and slide them on with all of the building work complete wouldn't you know it this thing actually kind of looks like the 3d mock-up from the design process so congratulations to me for not messing it up now here I'm going to lock it in place using those new casters which have a better locking mechanism and I'm gonna test out the motion of the table these trellises slide on the external frame along the x-axis and they facilitate the downward clamping pressure that holds the split panels registration in place I can remove these thumb screws and lift up and realign these wooden battens that hold the panel on the z-axis I can then loosen up this main beam that slides along that center Channel and I can reposition it again along the x-axis the small clamps slide up and down along the y-axis that can be tightened in place and then side pressure that's going to be used to bond the panel back together can be applied with these screws again on the y-axis I can slide these clamps that provide the downward pressure for the registration system and that's important because I need to be able to position them precisely under their mate so that when I am applying downward or upward pressure there's something to press against and that I'm not just deforming the panel now I can use the hydraulic lift to raise and lower the table which seems like a nifty party trick but it's actually really helpful because it allows me to get under the panel to make these adjustments to inject adhesive without having to be on my back or sliding around on the floor which will pay dividends later on when I'm old and gray and I don't want to be on my hands and knees so we've now seen the panel we've seen the equipment that's going to be used to bond it back together we've seen the build process and next time you're gonna see me actually use this table you

Channel: Baumgartner Restoration

Views: 920,681

Rating: 4.9548011 out of 5

Keywords: Baumgartner, Julian, restoration, ASMR, paintings, cleaning, scraping, repair, Art, fine art, conservation, painting restoration, old art, painting, painting conservation, oil painting, new again, restore

Id: OLxDD1xsjHw

Length: 33min 16sec (1996 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ducation]

... It's complicated.

[u/finallyprettyhappy]

I just love watching him!

[u/NorthernSparrow]

Good god, that table.

[u/Hodaka]

"Next week, I'll be in San Francisco restoring the Golden Gate Bridge."

This said, if Julian invented this restoration table, he should patent it. It's amazing.