Rescuing a Marquetry Box - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is part two of a two-part video on the restoration of a late 19th century marquetry jewelry box. In part one I began making numerous veneer repairs. Let's pick up the action here in part two where I'm in the process of tackling a difficult patch. I think I need to take a little off this side and I might need to take a little off that end right there. Need to take some off there. I had to plane that one more time and now I can't get it out so I guess that's a good fit. All right back to the lid. Okay these clamps have been on overnight. This is my new piece of veneer but see this corner came up short. The substrate just isn't even in that corner. Now this part's flapping around. This is part of the bottom. All right let's see what we got here. Looks like I've got a loose spot here. I think I see movement. This stuff you know looks like it's loose. Oh yeah there's movement right there. This is loose and I'll have to add a little piece of veneer right there. Here you can clearly see what the problem is and this is the problem in all these veneered pieces. These are two pieces of wood, that one, that one. This is a thin piece of wood around the edge. The main panel here of the top has shrunk and now these boards, this board is higher than that board. So that's why we have all these longitudinal cracks that I've been gluing down. I'm going to glue all this down but it still doesn't fix the the real problem here which is these boards not being lined up with each other. But there's not much we can do about that. Can't seem to get in here. Maybe it's okay. Kind of hoping maybe some glue will get in there. Okay I think I've got everything down. I can start the touch-up process. It's not unusual on a job like this though to come across some more loose veneer during the touch-up process. I'll start with this new piece I put in. See as I start to touch that tape I know I'm really close. I had started sanding with 100 and now I'll switch to 150. All right I've sanded this new patch with 220. It's ready for shellac but before I do that I want to tackle this other side. I've got to do a little bit of puttying around my patch. I need a little putty there. Maybe up here in the corner too. I've been using FAMU wood for 58 years. It's never occurred to me to try any other putty. Okay I want to give this lid a good look over. I think I'm about ready to start polishing. There's an area here I glued all this down and there's a crack along here and I'm going to try to fill that in a bit with the low heat burning stick. I like to give the wax or burning stick time to cool off before I rub it off. Back to the box. I've sanded out that FAMU wood. I need to get shellac on this new wood. A little alcohol and then lubricate. Now here's an area that was heavily damaged. I glued it down. You can see here this isn't a bubble. This is the wood underneath pushing the veneer up. I'm going to try sanding it a little bit. The polishing is going so well. I wasn't going to sand anything but I'm going to try sanding this to see if I can improve it a bit. I'll try it with a little 500. Feels better. You cannot sand these areas flat because the substrate isn't flat. So I'll just get it as good as I can. We'll see how it looks. That does look a lot better. It's definitely worth it to sand it. Both pieces of veneer on the ends have a lot of wrinkled kind of wrinkly raised grain here because the grain's going against the grain of the substrate. But I will try sanding it. So the lid's going well. Now in the meantime I did spray another coat of shellac on this new wood off camera. Now I'm going to sand it with 320 and spray it again. On this new wood I really want to get the grain completely filled in. My little patch right there is looking good. If I can just get you know the grain all leveled off it should disappear. I'll come back in tonight this evening and spray it again. All right let's see what we got here. I got to sand this down and hopefully all this graininess will get filled in. I'll start up with 320 and then I'll switch to 500. I took the tape and paper off because I got to get rid of this little edge of shellac right there. I've sanded this as much as I can. I mean this side in particular is very uneven. There's not much you can do about that. I don't want to try to build up the shellac. I'm going to try polishing these sides and see if they look good. See if it'll work come up right. I'll go over this whole surface lightly with 800. These vertical pieces are so grainy. I'll sand this more but just with 800 it seems to help. As I start to pad this side the defects around my patch become a lot more apparent. Instead of those low heat burning sticks that I've used so often that are some sort of hard wax I'm going to use shellac sticks which I assume are actually made out of shellac. Boy I still got to do more there. All right I've sanded this entire side with 800 grit up to 800 and now let's polish it. Yeah this corner is looking so much better. Getting all the edges around my patch has made it virtually disappear. The last person that restored this making these beautiful big patches they were really well done except I'm thinking you might have used the wrong kind of rosewood. It's hard to tell. Sanding with 800 seems to really help these rippled areas. One of the things about sanding with 800 is you instantly find little things you missed like this glue right here. Okay I want to get some felt on the bottom of this. It looks like the last person that laid down felt kept the glue away from the writing. I think I can do one better than that. First I need to get this glue off, clean this bottom edge up and then scrape a little bit of that old felt off. Can't get this to spray very well but it'll work. So there you have it. This really nice little sewing box. We know it was built by William King in 1879 who was the master of the inn at Dowsing Light and beautiful rosewood and very good marquetry. He was a good craftsman and of course I had some some major veneer repairs. This is the area on the top that was so badly damaged. This is that piece that I had you know that came with it that I glued in. This is the left side of the sewing box. This was so badly damaged. Here's that piece was so bad they got glued back down. And same left side in the back corner though is where I made that repair. It was really torn up and that's where I put that cute little patch. I think that's what I'm seeing right there. Once this was leveled off that patch really blended in well. And then of course this corner of the back I put an entirely new piece of veneer on. I've got about 16 hours in this job and these are the tools I used. I think it looks pretty good.