Who DID This!? - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. These are two antique chairs. They're called Sussex chairs from probably turn of the century around 1900 or so. Really nice chairs. The first thing that struck me about this chair were the arms. I absolutely love the arms. Also there's a very nice detail on the top of these posts. And these chairs basically need new rush seats. But of course they have to be re-glued before the seats get rushed. The information on these chairs I got from this book 1000 Chairs by Charlotte and Peter. Feel. Doesn't want to move. You can see there's a big pile of glue right here. Same thing on the other side. I'll chip that away and see if I can put a more big blobs right here. It should be obvious that this is the left arm facing, but I'm going to mark it. It's loose. I see movement, but there may be a nail right there. Not seeing anything. I'll put a little vinegar in there to see if that helps. Might as well do these while I'm at it. Okay let's see if that helped. I think what I need to do is get the arm loose from this arm support so I can manipulate it a little bit better. Okay I'm hoping I can wiggle this thing out of here. There must be a nail in there, but it's coming. I want to put a piece of tape here in case there's any splitting. No nail. And note that I am putting these pieces of tape in a very specific position, always on the top face, so when I re-glue it I can reposition all these stretchers exactly in the right orientation. Especially important on things like the front stretchers. This is a tough one. I think I'll drip some vinegar in there. Okay I'm going to re-glue this back, but note that I'm not going to mark these joints. It could be a mistake, but I'm just going to take this apart right here, keep everything in order, put it back together again. Everything is loose, but a quick check here. I can see there's four random nails here, and the crest rail has two. One each. Although this has looseness, I think I'm not going to take it apart because of those nails. But what I will do is try to spread these joints and inject a little hide glue in each one. Yeah, everything kind of just popped apart here except where the nails are, so that's good. This joint seems solid. This one I can see some movement. These joints are as clean as the day this thing was made. This must be the first time I've ever re-glued. Funny enough, over here you can see someone's attempt at working some glue into the joint and how much good that did. You know, there's one thing I forgot during the introduction, and there's a repair to be made. I think it'd be a good time to do it before I continue gluing up, but someone apparently had installed probably cup casters on these chairs, and I need to repair that area. I'm sorry, this was a really harebrained idea. What could they have been thinking of? Let me show you what a cup caster is. See, so it went something like this. This is a little big. I feel like a caster like this wouldn't last through the first sitting. In fact, this old caster is a good example of what happens to these things. They're just for looks. This is a good example of the kind of damage. Screws ripped out, and then over here the whole leg is split. First thought was to possibly cut these off, maybe dowel on a piece of wood. That doesn't sound like too much fun, and I think instead of inflicting any more damage to these chairs, I'll make sort of a conical sleeve that goes over this. I think these chairs are European beech, which I don't have any, but I found a nice piece of maple. I think it'll work just fine. It actually feels like a decent fit. You could definitely make a case for using epoxy here because you know it's not a great fit joint, but I've got gravity working for me. I'm going to live dangerously here. I'm going to use hide glue. I think I'll put a little sawdust in it just to body it up a little bit. It might fill any gaps. This crack seems fine. It seems solid. After all, it does have a screw going right through it. I don't need to do anything there. I think I can make three more of these pretty quickly. Great, so this dried overnight. Off camera, I did the other three, so now we can carve them down. Okay, I'll do the others off camera. Actually, I'm finding that just using a hand plane is fine. I don't even need to chisel. It just takes about maybe five minutes per foot. Okay, I think I'm ready to glue these up. I know I need to trim these feet a little bit. Each one of my blocks is maybe an eighth of an inch too long, but everything seems even. I'm going to glue it up and then trim the feet. Now, I'm not going to glue the arms, but I need to put them on and make sure everything lines up. I can see this is going to be tough to do when I glue these on, but everything looks like it lines up. I'm about a half an inch out here. I'm going to put a diagonal in here just to see if it wants to come in a little bit. I'm not going to worry about it too much. It seems to be sitting fine and it looks fine. Now, I realize what I should really be worried about is if the seat is square. That is really good. It's only an eighth inch out, which is close enough. I'm just going to leave this alone. All right, let's see what we got here. Now, yesterday when I was gluing this up, this piece, which I previously glued on, broke off again when this upright piece put some pressure on it. I'm going to epoxy it back and then I got to figure out what the problem is here or I don't know if there's anything I can fix or not. I'm going to use West System Epoxy for this repair and rather than use the pump bottles for small jobs like this, I just count out the drops. Okay, I've let this epoxy set up and I think I'm going to put a screw in there. I really don't want it to break again when I reassemble these arms after the brush seat is in there. Got a nail right there. Okay, now I'm going to clean the chair and then resume on the feet. So, for cleaner, I'm going to use 12 ounces of water, that's about 350 milliliters, a teaspoon of borax, five milliliters, two tablespoons of vinegar, 30 milliliters, a quarter cup of some Murphy's Oil soap, that's about 60 milliliters. Sometimes I'll clean a piece with a more aggressive cleaner. I wanted to be really gentle on this one because there's areas where there's like almost no finish where the finish is worn away and I don't want to change that or scrub away any more finish in some of the areas where it's, you know, on its way to losing the finish. And don't forget I'm doing this, I'm doing the side chair along with this. I've done, I've re-glued this off camera. Wow, this fits great. I know these feet are about maybe one-eighth of an inch longer, but I don't think I'm going to trim them. I'm going to leave it where it is. Okay, I had sanded these areas with 100. Now I'm going to bevel the bottom edge a little bit and sand them with 150 and then 220. Oh, by the way, I had said the chair was made out of what I thought was like European beech because I started off working on the front legs. When I got to the back legs I could see they were oak and I suddenly realized that the legs and stretchers are all made of a wood like the European beech. The back assembly and the seat frame are made of oak. Okay, I'll sand it up to 220. I'm going to try some perfect brown dye stain. This is a piece of wood I cut those blocks from. Not bad. I'm going to rag some on before the brush. I want to see how it blends in with the old wood. Yeah, I just didn't want to darken. I didn't want this to darken too much. I'll let this dry and then brush on a little bit more. You see places that need a little bit more color, just add some dye stain to it. That's the advantage of dye stains. Okay, I'll let the stain dry. That's the other advantage of dye stains. It only really needs to dry for about 45 minutes or so. Okay, I'm going to tone these areas. I'm going to use this perfect brown a toner. This is an acrylic lacquer and I'm just going to mist on a little bit. This chair doesn't have a lot of finish on it and so I've got to go real light on my repair area here. So I'm going to give both chairs a coat of Watco Danish Oil just to kind of seal it in before waxing, which I'll do after the seats go in. And also I'm just hoping it will help with these sort of scratched up raw areas. I'll apply it with a piece of borat steel wool. I feel like with this coat of oil on here, which I'm going to, you know, wipe off as much as I can now, will really set this up for a nice waxing job after the seat is done. Well, that coat of oil worked great. The chairs look good. Now, off camera, I'm going to take them to the seat weaving people and have the seats done. Okay, the chairs are back from the seat weavers. They look good. Now I've got to glue these arms on and it's going to be problematic. The problem stems from the fact that I couldn't glue the arms on before the seat was woven because some of the rush has to go down in the same hole as the arm support. And so when this support is put in place, these stretchers, you know, how will I get them in those holes right there? So the first thing I'm going to do is scrape all the old glue off the joints. Okay, so I'm going to apply glue to the joints. I'm going to use a spreader clamp to try to spread this apart enough so I can pop those in there. Boy, this is so tight. It doesn't need any clamps. It's not going anywhere. All right, that worked out well. Now for the other one. This side too is pretty solid. I don't think clamping it's any good. We'll just, we'll let these dry overnight. Man, these are solid. Okay, I just got to stick on these side strips though that go around the edge of the seat. These slats are in relatively good shape. They're usually pretty messed up. I took a couple of the nails out of this front one just so I could figure out where to place it. Yeah, I guess they go more or less even with the top of these blocks. I'm going to leave the old nails except for those two. I'm going to drill for new nails. I'm going to leave the old nails in there. I've flushed them off on the back. I'm going to use, I'm going to drill new holes for my nails. I have these cute little cut nail, little brads. There's the new nail that you can barely see that. The smaller defects like this, where the old nail is, I'll just fill in with the with a rub in wax. For larger defects like that, I'll use a low heat burning stick. These are like wax too, but very hard, hard enough to require heat to apply. All right, now I'm going to wax the chair. I'm going to use a Bre-Wax, the light brown. Well, there you go. A couple of really nice antique chairs called Sussex chairs. They're from the mid-19th century. They were kind of sorry looking when they came in. They needed repair work. They needed new seats to be re-glued. And of course, the worst part was this chair had had casters installed, and I had to remove those casters and replace it with wood. And I've got about 16 hours in both chairs. These are the tools I used. I think they look pretty good.