Restoring a Turn of the Century Table - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorm, Maine. This is a nice oak table. I want to say it's a turn-of-the-century table, but I think we need a new term now that it's 2021. So what I mean is circa 1900. There were a lot of tables like this made around that time. This is a really nice one. I like these legs a lot. On these tables there was, over the years, there was all different types of legs and variations. There are some good examples in this book I have. You can see one here, heavily influenced by the Jacobean type furniture, which is very common around that period. Another table with square legs and conventional details. And this one with some very interesting legs, just what I call kind of a fantasy leg, but interesting. These beehive turnings were popular around that time too. And then these legs are different yet again. Now here's the issue. The table needs to be refinished. The finish just isn't that great on the top. It's wearing away. It's tough. The legs are particularly beat up. There's only one thing to be repaired. This apron needs to be glued back. Now this broke because the arms of a chair kept hitting it. And the owners had this table up on some square blocks. So what I need to do is raise the height of this table. I'm going to add some blocks between the feet, the leg assemblies, and underneath. But we also want to make some feet. This table originally had casters. These type casters just really don't make it on big tables like that. Typically I like to replace casters if they were there originally. In this case, I'm going to try to come up with a design to make some blocks on the bottom of the feet that might look like they belong. And the table has four leaves also. They're in really rough shape. I'm going to remove this extension set. It'll just make life easier. And then I'll also be able to really open this up and check it out and lubricate it properly. Also these dowel screws just make it really difficult to flip this table over. As you can see, I got another bench here. So I have a bench under each half. I love these old Victorian locks. These screws are in the way of my clamping board here. Now I need to figure out what I need to make some feet for this thing. Now I haven't designed these feet yet, but I'm just going to choose elements from these turnings here and translate it into about a two and a half inch version. I'm going to have to draw that up and fool around with it. I don't think I need to use quarter sawn oak for this. I think I can use plain sawn oak. So what do I mean by quarter sawn oak? Well this era of furniture, that was the predominant wood that they used. And quarter sawn oak is easily spotted because of these capillary rays that run perpendicular to the regular grain. And people call it tiger oak and things like that. Well that looks good. Okay, the table is ready to be stripped. And I know in a recent video you may have seen me strip a tabletop. I do the occasional tabletop. But in a case like this, I do it the smart way. I take it to the stripper guys. Between the two tabletop halves, four leaves, and all the leg assemblies, it's definitely, what is that, six piece, seven, nine pieces. I'm taking it to the strippers. Okay, back from the strippers. I've got a lot of sanding to do. I got a couple of joints that opened up here. Let's see if they have any movement. And this looks like a natural check in the wood, but I better see if it's moving too. I'm cranking this clamp down. I'm seeing no movement here. Yeah, no movement in this check either. But I'll still glue that little sliver down. This crack is too narrow even for a piece of veneer. I'm just going to use a regular wood putty. And I'm going to put tape on either side of the crack just to keep the putty from going into the grain. This is open grain wood and it doesn't have any finish on it. All right, now I'll go over each section looking for anything else that needs to be puttied up. The other half of the top has a just a small crack here. The first leaf I grabbed has one similar to the table. And of course, I'll check that for any movement. And I'll go over the other leaves too. I noticed on this leaf for the first time, all this darkness looks like water damage and water rings. I also noticed blackness in the other half of this tabletop. So what I'll end up doing is using oxalic acid on this whole top. But I want to fill all these cracks first. I don't want water going down in them. How do you know when to putty or to patch? It can be tough sometimes. This defect doesn't seem too big at first until you start thinking about puttying it and how much putty that would be. It's really like just a half inch long, three-eighths wide. Maybe that should be the rule. If you can measure it, patch it. I grabbed a few pieces of scrap oak, quarter sawn oak. Any of it would probably work. I kind of like this piece. This has the tighter grain that I see in this area here. So I'll use this one. Darn, this chip just came up. I'll have to make my patch a little bit bigger. Yeah, I think this area in here will do it. When fitting the patch, you want to take into consideration grain direction. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is the direction of the face grain. You don't want it going that way. You want it going this way. But what I'm talking about is the side grain. Look at the side grain. It's not running parallel with the face grain. It's going up in this direction ever so slightly. Here's the side grain of the table. This quarter sawn wood is fairly straight, but you can see it's going up at an angle. These pieces are definitely going at an angle. This is what caused this defect. But the grain is going, in general, in that direction. So with my patch, this grain's going down. There you go. Now it's headed up in the same direction as this grain. It seems like a minor thing, and with this wood it shouldn't be much of a problem. But the chatoyance of the wood needs to be the same, or it may make this impossible to touch up. Yeah, here's one. This one's got a real split in it. Let's put a clamp on and see if it moves. Oh yeah, that's moving. So I decided I'll glue this crack, but I'm going to put a piece of veneer in there. I don't want to try to force it back together. Oddly enough, I put a tape measure on it, and this end of this leaf is not as wide as the rest of the leaf. It's a 12-inch leaf. It measures 12 inches until we get to this end, and it's 11 7 8. So it seems foolish to try to force it back together. It might not stay there anyway. It probably wouldn't stay there. So I'm going to taper a piece of veneer as much as I can and get it in there. Maybe use some epoxy and clamp it up. This is west system epoxy, but for doing small quantities, I just count drops to get the proportions right. This is my brother Greg's idea. I'm going to try using some sawdust as a thickening agent. I'm thinking it might help with the color. Yeah, I'm seeing a little movement in these cracks too. I'll give them the same treatment. Same routine, the two-part epoxy, this time unthinned. I want it to soak into these cracks. I even put a tape underneath to keep it from going through. I'm not going to apply too much pressure. There's a lot of forces keeping this wood split apart, and the reason I used epoxy was to fill any space that didn't come together. This leaf has small splits too, and it's funny, I didn't think they were moving, but I wasn't sure, so I slipped a piece of paper into the joint. It went in fairly easily, then clamped it, and yeah, it's not moving. So there is movement there. I'll give it the same routine. Oh, I forgot about this patch I got to do. I mean, I wrote a note earlier when I was puttying. I wasn't going to forget it. Yeah, this piece should provide a good patch. The wood looks great. Check your grain direction. Now remember that grain direction. It's going slightly like that, so I want to plane in that direction. So I'm going to continue just knocking back the putty, pulling this tape, and looking for any other places that might need a little putty or the patch that I found there, and then we'll discuss the next step. Okay, all this has been in preparation for sanding. You know, a frequently asked question is, why don't I use power sanders on these antiques? And it's because, generally speaking, you don't want to flatten the top of an antique. You want to minimize the sanding. In this particular case, I have 32 square feet of tabletop. It's flat as a pancake, this good old quarter sawn oak, and I've got a lot of color differences. I've got a lot of problems with blackness and stuff. I want to exalt it. So I'm going to sand this, and I am going to use a power sander. I'm going to use my Sturro straight line sander. These sanders are standard for the industry. They're good for big tabletops. We used to do a lot of conference tables and things like that. Bear in mind, this is a straight line sander. I never use an orbital on tabletops. I actually very rarely use an orbital. Most people don't have that option, so if you do have to sand the top of the orbital, you better be sure then go back by hand and sand all those squiggly marks out. The inside of this apron is a little bit of a mess. It's kind of dirty. It's got tacks in it. This part here needs to be cleaned up, too. Here's that cracked apron I glued here. This is all hide glue. It didn't come off in the stripping process because they didn't use any water. I think I'll mix up some crud cutter and clean the inside. We'll clean the bottom of the apron and the inside of the apron. At the same time, that'll help take off some of this hide glue. Oh, I almost forgot about the hide glue over here. I've wetted this towel down with hot water. Let that sit there. This is clean water on a fresh scrubby pad. Here I see the apron is cracked. I better get that glued up. I'm going to loosen these screws. I just want to lift this up a little bit and get some wax paper under it. You know, thinking about how both these aprons were cracked, I think I'm going to add some support blocks to these. Okay, I'm going to continue sanding with 100 grit this half and all the leaves. As you can see, there's a lot to this job. We'll pick it up in my next video.