Restoring a Tall Clock Case - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice tall clock. I don't have the works but I'm just working on the case here. The works, we do have a photo of the works and they're marked J. Oram, Castle Kerry, England. So this case is about 200 years old. It's got some, a few veneer issues, but the main reason it's come in is because this board on the face of the base has, since it's been moved here to New England, has warped and cupped. I'm going to see if I can fix that. Wow, this is really interesting. Someone's repaired this, at least attempted to repair it in the past, and it's kind of interesting what they were trying to do. This appears to be the latest repair job. There's evidence of quite a few different repair attempts in here. The newest wood, you've got two boards here and here, probably glued, I can't tell, to the clock. Then there's this brace that holds it across. I suspect that these bolts don't go into the clock. Oh, they go into some older boards that are glued up back here. And then the whole thing is held kind of in a floating arrangement by this board here, which is just held with tension on these side pieces. In fact, it's just floating, it's not attached. But these boards here at the bottom and the top hold the main center board in place. So I'm kind of leaning towards removing all the old repair work and possibly gluing a piece of quarter inch plywood or something to the underside of this to make it flat. And another question is, do I want to remove this panel to do that and then reinstall it? I'm not sure yet. I've got to think about it for a while. Okay, the first thing I'm going to do is remove this door. I have to do repair on it anyway. It's funny how these screws are rusty. And I always put screws right back into the holes that they came out of. That's actually a kind of an interesting setup that they were trying to do here. You know, these were not attached. They were held firm just by tension. And I guess the idea was this was supposed to stabilize the top somehow. It didn't. So now I've got these two boards. I've got to remove those. Those appear to be glued. You can see here other marks where someone must have glued a board some time ago. These are older boards. They could have been part of an old repair, but obviously the person that put the framework in there had these off. Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe these are just screwed into there. I'm not sure. But I'm going to use the That's two minutes with the heat gun. It's had a little effect on it, but only a little. Try more heat. That's two more minutes. Well, I'm making progress, but not much. Well, I'm just going to keep doing this in two-minute increments with the heat gun and keep working away. It's really taking a long time to get loose here. Now we're getting somewhere. Yeah, not much, not much really holding this board on. So here's everything that I pulled out of there. Kind of a clever rig, but it seems to me that it was designed to keep the panel flat this way, and I don't see the problem. The problem is the waviness this way, and I don't think there's much we could do about that. But anyway, the next step is I want to try to pull this down. I want to see if this will come down, see if this will move. These have come together more than I expected, and of course it's not coming together perfectly. I've got to put some more clamps on here, but what I think I'm going to do is just glue all this back together. Clamp it up like this, and then I'll add corner blocks on the inside. There seem to be nails here and here. They must be underneath the veneer. of course it's not perfect. Will the glue hold it or not? I'm not sure. I think what I'm going to do is, before I take this out of clamps, I want to glue a corner block here. This is just from the scrap pile I kept for such an occasion, so I want to glue this in here. Now, because these boards are all cupped, we have a space here. You know, there's a space there. There's a space here. I think that I should maybe do this in three sections, and I should try to shape this a bit to match that cup so I can get a tight fit, and I'll also relieve the inside edge also so I can really get in there tight. I've never worked as a carpenter, so I'm not real familiar with the scribing process, but I'll give it a shot here. That's a lot better fit. So what I'm doing, I noticed when I was fitting it in there, I had a little bit of a rocking motion, so I'm just trying to, you know, figure out where that is and take a little off here. I might take a little bit more off this back corner. You know, I'll just keep trying until I get the best fit I can. If this thing is ever going to stay together, I really need to get these corner blocks as tight as possible. All right, I think I've got this pretty much as good as I'm going to get it. It's not bad, and you can see here how these sticks are bent. I, you know, through trial and error, I got them the exact length so that they'll give me the tension I need against that block. So I'll do these next two corner blocks off camera. It's the exact same routine. I'll shape them a bit to fit the curvature of the panels and top and glue in place using the go sticks to hold them. Now with all my blocks glued in, and this has been clamped up for a few days now, let's take it out and see what we've got. So this corner has come together really well, and it seems solid, at least for the time being. The moldings in the miter here came together as well as they could also. There's always going to be a gap there. I mean the moldings have shrunk, so that's not unusual. So I've got to deal with the buckled veneer at this edge here, but I also have some loose veneer on this crack. I'm just going to fill this crack with wax, I suppose, but there's a couple loose pieces I have to figure out how I'm going to glue down. You know, this whole crack across the front is moving, so I think I'm going to try to add a strip of wood along this crack glued on the inside, and that'll stabilize this crack enough so that I can then fill it. I want to give you a better look at what the underside of this panel looks like. Here's what you're looking at. A lot of old glue, chipped up wood. There's a ton of saw kerfs in here that must have been really tough to put in there, and this is the crack right here along here that I want to firm up a bit, and as you can see it's a convex shape. I don't know if you can see that, but it is, and that's what we got. So I'm going to use a wacky wood on the underside here because that'll conform to this curve, and I need to make a couple blocks. I need to shape those also to conform to the curve. Wacky wood is bendable plywood. Yeah, so the plan is that this block will force this piece of wacky wood to conform to the curve on the underside of that panel. That'll do it. So this piece will just be a call, and this block will help it conform. So I think I've got this board located right under the crack, and I'll mark that with some tape also. The arrow points down because this board has a slight camber to it, in here as far as I can tell. All right, I'll tighten it up some more. I think that went well. We'll find out tomorrow when I take the clamps off, and I can't overemphasize how. This is a good example of how important it is to clamp everything up dry before you do the glue up. This went really smoothly, and I practiced it quite a bit. All right, now we can get back to the I think it's just about right. It's a little bit ever so slightly big, which is good. Now this crack is definitely not moving. That was my goal. These two big pieces of veneer didn't quite get pushed down where I was hoping they would, but I didn't even put any glue in there, come to think of it. So I'm going to get some glue under these, maybe even round off my caul a little bit more to really get down in there and clamp those pieces down. There's actually quite a few places to have loose veneer along this crack, so I'm going to work glue in along there and then use the exact same clamping setup to clamp down this stuff. Okay, I'll wait till tomorrow. Okay, while we're waiting on that, I still have a piece of veneer to glue down here. Luckily, we have that piece of veneer, and there's a couple other pieces here. I haven't quite seen where they come from yet. Another tough clamping job, but I think I've got it figured out. I like to mark it, too, so I know I've got the clamp in the right spot. Okay, that ought to do it. Now back to the door. That seems nice and flat. This is just excess glue that should wash off with water. It's funny, this didn't make a different noise, but I could see it moving. Okay, back to the case, see what this looks like. Yeah, everything seems really solid. No more movement, no veneer moving around. I've got to do something with this edge. The first thing I'll do is, in the places where it's buckled, I'm going to make some cuts with an X-Acto knife and see if that can relieve the pressure this little tab off, cut it right there, and put a new piece of veneer in. Well, here's some old veneer. I think I can make it work. I think I'll flip the case over on its back because if I have veneer repairs on the other side, I might be able to do them at the same time. Yeah, just what I remembered, there's a place finish with this piece of inlay. I need to touch it up, get it the right color. A couple of frequently asked questions here. You can't stain the bare wood because the wood I'm matching was never stained, so stain wouldn't work, and I'm sealing it with shellac. People ask why shellac. You can seal this wood with any finish that you want. It really doesn't matter. I hope you can see there's a lot of raised areas in this veneer, but some of it seems solid and it's not moving. I'm going to leave those alone if they're not moving. I think I'm going to take the door off so I can get a clamp in there. There's a lot of places where the veneer is not flat, but if it taps solid, if it's not moving, I'm just going to leave it alone. I'm not looking for trouble. All right, another coat of shellac on my holly inlay. Now back to the case. It seems nice and flat. That seems good. I've got to add a I think I should put a little piece of wood in that gap. It seems nice and flat. Yeah, that's as flat as it's going to be. I forgot I need to add some little holly inlay right there. Because of this bend here, because this isn't flat, I'll need to do this in two pieces. Okay, I think I've got some more veneer on this door to glue up. It's funny, even though I've checked this door out a few times, I'm walking by it and I can see an area that's raised up. Sure enough, it's loose. Okay, back to the case. So my repair area needs a little stain, but just like I did on the door, I've got to seal on this door, so many raised up areas like this, but I'm just not detecting any movement and I'm just going to leave them alone. It worries me a little because of the spot I just glued. I know I checked that before and decided it didn't need gluing, and then later it did. So now I'll tone that new piece of inlay. This is the medium brown walnut toner. It still needs a little more color, and I thought the medium brown walnut was a little reddish, so I'm going to switch to perfect brown. Now, just like with the door, I'm going to sand this inlay with a little 500 sand to shellac, and then I'll tone it also with some perfect brown. Okay, I think I can begin the polishing process. First, I'm going to clean the surface with this product called Wax Wash Remover. You could use any type of paint thinner for the same purpose. I just want to clean any residual wax or polish off of it. So now I'll start polishing, and I like using this padding perfect brown. Jeez, this wood I put in there looks great. Now as it dries, it dries a little lighter. That's good. The thing about dye stains is that I can go back and add more stain. Okay, seal my repair area here now. I'll use aerosol shellac. Okay, while I'm waiting for that shellac to dry, I'll polish the door. It looks like my new wood needs a little more color. Okay, while that's drying, check out the color on my touch-up here. Now, so far I've stained it with dye stain and sealed it with shellac, and it looks like I need a little bit browner. I think I'll use Van Dyke brown. I'll sand the shellac with a little 500 grit. I almost forgot I got to tape off my inlay. Okay, back to the door. Oh, okay, that's better. There's a little bit of raw wood with the low heat burn-in wax, and I'm going to do the same to this big crack across the front. Now, typically you've seen me burning in, but using this to fill defects using a hot knife and a stick of wax. Now, my brother Greg gave me a great idea, which I'm going to try for doing large areas like I'm about to do. He's been heating the wax up in a spoon, and I thought, wow, that's a good idea. So I'm going to heat some up in a little container buffing out the wax in this crack here that this case is in pretty good shape. I don't think I Okay, there we have it, a really nice early 19th century tall clock case. And really the big problem here was that the base here, these three boards, had warped and cupped, and so there's a huge crack here, and this whole front was pulling away. So I just glued everything back where it went, filled it in with wax, and I think it looks pretty good.