Restoring an Italian Chair - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration, in Gorm, Maine. These are four nice chairs. I don't think they're period antiques, they're most certainly early 20th century reproductions. I didn't know if they were French or Italian, but looking at the undersides of them, it's kind of crude, but every one of them is marked, Made in Italy. The problem is, is that they're very loose, but we cannot remove the seats, the seats are good, so we don't have a lot of access to these joints, we don't have any access to these joints. This one, which is the one I'm going to do on camera, also is broken straight across the leg here. They've been worked on before, I'll show you in more detail later, but someone put corner braces on, and people have drilled dowels into all these joints. It didn't do any good, well it might have worked at first, but ultimately they're still loose, and the problem still remains. So let's see what we can do. First thing I want to do is repair this crack. All the chairs have been drilled through the back joints, probably with a dowel. But on this leg, the broken one, the dowel is an oval. That tells me it was drilled at an angle, probably to run across this break, and that's probably why the break is rocking back and forth. I want to see if I can get this to open up a little bit. I'll start by taking this brace off. All the chairs also have these braces. Yeah, they're pretty loose, I think those little brackets maybe were helping a little bit. It's separating a little bit, I don't know if it'll go any further. Yeah, it's not going to come apart any further, you know, the pieces are held in place by the tenons on the seat rails. I'm going to work some epoxy in there, see if I can clamp it up. I'm going to use West System epoxy. It comes in pump bottles, but I've put the resin in hardener in these squeeze bottles, so for small jobs, I'll just count out the drops. All right, tomorrow we'll decide what we might do to help strengthen this a bit. This crack that I glued seems solid, and now you see movement in this other crack. I may have to do the same treatment there with the same epoxy and get that down where it belongs. It also didn't close up here on this corner, but that's still got movement too, so I think I need to re-glue that and then the other side. You can see that it will close up. I just need to get a much more specific clamp on that corner. Make sure I'm getting closed up here at that little corner right there, and to help pull this little area right there as close as possible, I'm going to use a band clamp across the top of the chair. All right, I've got to wait overnight to let this epoxy dry. In the meantime, let's talk about what I can do to strengthen this. I've taken one of the other chairs and I tried spreading these joints a little bit, which obviously is pretty limited because the seat's holding everything together, but I was able to pull back the rush a little bit and have a look at what kind of joinery we have here. I'm not sure how well I can get this on camera, but this is the edge of the seat rail, and in there is a tenon. You might be able to see it from the top here a little bit. It's right there. I was able to get in there with my rule just enough to make some measurements, and then made a sketch here of what I think is going on. So I drew a cross-section of the joint. A cross-section is cutting an imaginary line across here and looking straight down at it. These hash marks indicate a cross-section. Here are your tenons. Here's your leg. I don't know how deep these tenons go. I drew it like this. They could conceivably even meet here. So this part of the leg has a fair amount of wood, but of course the leg is broken all the way through. I think I'll go in from the outside corner here and cut in some new wood to go across that break. This opening is the right size, but I can see that there's a problem. I need to make a longer piece of plywood with the same size opening. Okay, this is good. Now I can do this without any clamps in the way. I'm only going to take off a little at a time. I don't know what's behind that dowel either. There you go. That's as deep as I'm going to go. I thought I'd be able to tell what kind of wood it is. I'm not sure at all. It might be walnut, but look how crazy the grain is right through this joint. No wonder it broke. There's the tenon to the side rail. I nicked that just a little bit. There's the tenon for the back rail. Didn't touch that. Cut through that dowel. There's the end of the dowel. It's so highly figured it's a little difficult to tell, but I believe it's walnut. I've got a nice piece of walnut here. It's got good straight grain. First I'll square off these corners, and then I'll mill this down closer to the sides. I always like to take a little off this inside corner to make sure that that's not hanging me up. This is the crack I glued previously, and it opened up probably while I was working on it. Maybe I should have kept a clamp on it or something, but it would have been in the way. I'm going to work more epoxy down in there, and then use yellow carpenter's glue for this glue up. When I glued this crack before with epoxy, I used unthinned epoxy because I was using it through a syringe. I wanted it to get down in there, but I think that maybe it was too thin. It might have run out. It wasn't enough. I'm going to put some unthinned epoxy in there now, and then I'm going to thicken it and put some more in. Let that alcohol flash off. Just realized there's more of that crack I can get some epoxy into. See if I can do that. All right. Let this dry overnight. This leg and joint seem solid, so that's good. This crack opened up a little bit, and I'm disappointed in that, but I was trying to bring it together the other way. Boy, I thought using a coping saw would be so great, but this wood's just too thick. It's going to take forever. I think I'm better off just hogging this out with a chisel. Okay. I think before I do any more work on this repair, I need to figure out how I'm going to glue the rest of the joints. Now, the first thing I like to do is ... I mean, there's lots of movement in these joints. I'm going to tap them a bit, see if they come apart. Looks like it has a little nail there. Boy, even though the first joint I tapped opened up a bit, the rest aren't moving at all. They're all pinned, I think, at the factory, and of course, then the seat itself holds all this together. I think I'm going to use an adhesive that I rarely use, but I got just for things like this. It's a CA glue called Wonder Wacom, and I think I can access these joints, drip some in, and clamp them up. See if I can pull back this rush a little bit and expose the joint there. So I'll give these joints 10 or 15 minutes with the clamps on it, and then I'll go back and do the side joints. There's a lot of old glue around these joints. Somebody doing the same thing that I'm trying to do here. Alright, that's the last couple of joints. I'm just going to let this sit overnight, and tomorrow we'll do the touch-up on the repair. Wow, this chair's like a rock. That CA glue worked really well. So now, the touch-up. I think my choice of walnut was a good choice. It's funny, my piece is straight grain, but the top grain here almost looks like it goes with that wild grain over here. This was tough to sand because this is right where the leg turns, and here you can clearly see this big knot that made up this joint. Got this old chamfer here. So now I'm going to sand that whole repair area again with 150 and then 220, and I'll just do that off-camera. Okay, I'm ready to stain. I've got some extra dark walnut dye stain here. I'm going to mix it 50-50 with some alcohol. Just proceeding carefully at first. The stain's not too dark. The thing with dye stain is that you can keep going back and adding more color, and with a brush you can go back and add color to very specific areas. Alright, I'll let the stain dry for an hour or so, and then we'll seal it. Okay, now I'm going to seal these repair areas with shellac. I use shellac because it builds fast, and it has the quality of being able to go over old finishes, you don't know what they are, and help seal in the contaminants. It itself is not that susceptible to contaminants, and then it lays a good foundation for top coats. Yeah, the shellac's dried just fine. I'm going to sand it with a little bit of 500 paper, and then tone it with Van Dyke Brown Toner. These toners are acrylic lacquer, and I use acrylic lacquer because that's what comes in those cans of toner. Alright, that color coat dried fine, so now I'll hit it with clear satin, one of two coats. Okay, I'm going to sand it lightly with 500, and spray it again with the satin. Okay, the repair area looks good. Now all I need to do is, I'm going to polish it up, I'm going to use 4-aught steel wool and this orange oil beeswax polish. Here's the new piece of wood, right there. There you have it, it's a nice set of reproduction Queen Anne chairs. They all needed to be re-glued, they were very loose, and of course, it didn't take them apart. Number one, that would have involved removing the seats, which we didn't want to do, and then the joints were nailed even originally at the factory, plus someone's run dowels through them, quite a few in some areas, but they're strong as can be now. This one had a pretty serious repair to do over here, and I think they look pretty good. 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