Restoring Carved Stools - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. These are two nice little Asian stools. They're not particularly old, about 50 years old or so, but they're part of a set and have a lot of sentimental value to the owner. And what's happened here is one of our four-legged friends, a dog, has chewed up this leg entirely and a foot. So Ella insists that I tell you and assure you that it was not her. And so I need to reproduce this leg and then we'll clean these up and polish them. Always on a job like this, the first thing I need to do is figure out where this foot is going to end up exactly. But in this case, this chewed wood. I need to make a as steep as angle as I can in here, you know, like right about there. I bought this piece of aluminum flat stock to make some saw guides. Okay, this setup I think looks pretty good. That seems nice and flat. Now as I try to clamp this, it's going to want to slide down. So I got to do something to stop that. Now I only need to let that nail protrude just a little bit because I can't hammer it into this leg. I just realized I forgot one important step here. Now how do I know I have this in the right space? I'm just kind of hanging out, you know, in the air here. You know, it doesn't look like I am in the right space. I've got to change this angle. I think I've got to bring this down a little bit. I've got to figure out a way to make sure that that new piece of wood ends up exactly where angle down here. That's the reason I have so much excess, to give me room to screw up on this angle and get it right, but eventually get it right. Good. I feel like I'm really close now, at least good enough to be able to cut some of this excess wood. That's interesting. It won't match up with this one, but it's close enough. I'll just drill another hole. Okay, I'm ready to do the glue up. I'm going to use a west system epoxy. I'm just not real confident that my surfaces here are dead flat and I do not want to see this piece of wood come to do it at the same time because I needed that point right there. Okay, let's see what we've got. Thank goodness. wood on this foot at the end of the day. I don't want clamps to be in the way. I can get started Would have made this easier. I'm going to start removing this waste with a chisel, but I may also try this reciprocating saw too. Well, the chisel works well enough. Let's see what it's like with this saw. Now it's going to be noisy. I'll stick with the chisel for now, although that saw may come in handy. So I've been using the chisel and the saw and just taking my time trying to get these sides lined up. Okay, I feel like I've got the back of the legs pretty much the right shape. I've been using a straight edge across from the other legs, lining it up with braces in the bottom of the table like this. I think they're pretty good. Now I've got to shape the front of this. I've got to shape the the outer shape of what will become the foot. I'm lining it up with the piece of wood down there. Gets a little bit fat right here. I think I'll take a break from this foot and go ahead and set for a minute before I put the clamp on and it seems to have worked. It's not moving. I think the first thing we do is level this off. It's a good thing I didn't do both feet at the same time. It's going to be difficult to level these off. It doesn't look like I'm going to make it here although this circle is big but I'm going to go back a little bit. I think it would be helpful if I cut this bevel. All right, not too bad. Needs a little cleaning up but I think I can get started on this other one now. So, not quite there. I feel like I've got the leg and this ankle really good shape now. So, now I've got to get the overall shape of the foot. So, even though I started carving, I quickly realized I need to get it in this position. I need to get to see the overall thing and draw out the toes and everything completely before I go any further. This would be a good time to point out that this is not a video about carving and how to carve. This is a video of me trying to make this foot look like the other ones best I can. So, so I'm using a rasp and sandpaper to smooth it out, round everything over, and it gives me a chance if I see places I need to use a chisel to even it up a little bit. Now I'm doing it. Okay, I've got this sanded pretty well up to 150. So, now it's time to stain it. It's pretty easy to think brown mahogany here. I've got two types of brown mahogany stain, an oil stain and a dye stain. Oil stains are what most people are familiar with. That's the type available at hardware stores. I'll let that sit for a few minutes. Okay, that's two minutes. It's the right color, but not nearly dark enough. Dye stains are readily available from woodworking supply companies like Rockler's or Woodworking Supply. Dye stains are designed to be sprayed, but you can use them by hand, but they can be difficult because of the fast drying, and they can cause lap marks. You can let it sit for as long as little time as you like. You don't have to wipe it off at all. That's a lot better. It's the right color. It's just, once again, it's still too light. And that's the beauty of dye stains. You can put more stain on, unlike oil stains. You can put more stain on, and it'll become darker. I don't even have to wipe that off. I'll just let it dry. Dye stain flashes off very quickly, at least this alcohol or acetone base, and as you can see, it remains dark. Yeah, this is a lot better. Almost too dark, but I can play with that. The leg will stain darker anyway because it's a carving. It's not like that flat sample. Yeah, that's going to need to be darker. Here on the back of the leg are the lap marks I was warning about. Those can be deadly. Luckily, the back of this leg needs to be darker anyway, so I'll put a little of the dye stain on a rag. Here, too, the new wood needs to be darker, so once again, I'll put a little dye stain on a rag and pad that part, adding some stain to it, bringing it closer. All right, I'm going to let this dry for about an hour. The dye stain is dry. I'm going to go ahead and hit it with the oil stain also. That's the way these systems are designed. I don't like it because it gives a little bit of a muddy appearance, but that happens to be what I'm looking for on these legs. Okay, the stain is dry, so I'm going to seal these repair areas with aerosol shellac. I gave it a second coat of shellac. Let it dry overnight. Now I'm going to sand the flat areas with 320. I'll go over the carved areas with a scotch-brite pad. So you can see here where my new wood is not as dark, so I'll tape off this original part and tone this with a little medium brown walnut toner. I could see immediately that the medium brown walnut wasn't going to be nearly dark enough, so I'm going to try with van dyke brown. Okay, that's looking a lot better. Now I'll spray it with clear gloss. Okay, I've put two or three coats of gloss on here. Now I'm going to go over with a gray scotch-brite pad and give it a coat of satin. Okay, I want to clean these up and polish them. The tops of these stools could definitely need refinishing, but they're part of a set, so I'm just going to touch them up as best I can and wax them. There's a lot of scratches and scrapes and abrasions and dings. This is probably the worst one here on the second table. We have a few tools available for us like scratch cover. That could work really well, but typically it does not work well on a heavy hard finish like this where there's so much damage in the finish. It works better on things that have very little finish on them. And we have wax sticks, so maybe on some of these deeper gouges I can use a rub-in wax stick. And we have markers. They're always good. They can help some. And of course I have a dye stain and a brush. I can do that too, so I'll experiment a little bit. The first step is always to clean the surface. I like using this commercial cleaner degreaser, just not much. You can see the dirt that comes off of there, or whatever it is. I've always found these stencil brushes to be great for doing carvings. This is just dry. Let's try some scratch cover on a spot. Scratch cover must be like oil stain that has oil polish that has oil stain in it, so the idea is it would, it might stain that scratch, but the stain won't affect the finish. Just as I suspected, it doesn't really seem to be having an effect. I think it's because that whiteness that you see there is finish, not wood. That makes me realize I'm just going to go straight to the dye stain and a little artist brush and just hit all those spots. On a top like this there's a lot of those little spots. It seems daunting, but it really only takes about 15 minutes or so. Yeah, so obviously I'm not making these defects go away. I'm just trying to take the curse off of them, and when I wax it up they'll certainly look a lot better. Now here's some damage that's deep enough to use to burn in. I often call these wax sticks. They're from Mohawk Finishing. I don't think they're wax. They're called edging low heat sticks, but I actually don't know what I'm going to use Gilboy's wax and and 4-0t steel wool. Now I've just done half the top here. I'm original foot. All right, two little Asian stools. They're part of a set, like a tea set. Four stools and an elaborately carved table. This furniture has a lot of sentimental value for the owner. I had to make an entirely new foot. I think it's this one. Repair another foot. Clean them up. Touch them up. Polish them. They were kind of sad looking when they came in here, but they look pretty good now. I've got 16 hours in this job. I use the jointer, the table saw, the bandsaw, the stationary belt sander, and these hand tools.