Can a Furniture PRO Save THIS tabletop? - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration, and Gorham, Maine. This is a very nice table. It's the largest of a set of nesting tables. It's not an antique, but it's very well made. It's a good table. It's all solid mahogany, and the top is a single piece of mahogany. This top has seen a lot of use. I mean, it's got, the finish has started to kind of leather, you know, age a little bit, dry out. It's got rings, some scratches, lots of indentations. Just in general, it does not look great. Now, you could make a case for refinishing this top, but it's part of a set. The color and the variations in color are great. So, I mean, let's try to save the existing finish. The first step always is to clean it, regardless of what you're going to do. Even if you're going to refinish it, you should clean it. No doubt that this top has a lot of furniture polish and stuff like that on it. I like using this crud cutter. It's a degreaser. I'll form a rag into a pad and put the crud cutter directly on the pad, not at the table. It's getting a little cleaner, and I'm going to keep padding this one section at a time until this rag starts to come up clean, and it's getting there. Okay, this morning I cleaned it again. I'm satisfied. I've got everything off of here, and I think now I want to smooth this top up a bit. Maybe I'll try a gray Scotch-Brite pad. I couldn't sand this, but I thought it might be a little bit better. I'm going to try this Scotch-Brite pad. These are gray ultrafine pads. I can't tell if that's on the surface or... There it goes. Okay, now I'm going to wipe this off with the Mohawk wax wash remover. I like these Scotch rags in a box. The wax wash remover is a proprietary blend of solvents that's really good at removing contaminants, or in this case suspected contaminants. Fold the rag, just take one swipe, turn the rag, make one swipe. You want to remove whatever might be on the surface, but you don't want to spread it around. When it's wet with the solvent, it looks like it's trying to fisheye. I'm just going to wipe it off again, same way, but with a dry rag. Okay, I'm just about ready to polish this. There's a like a gouge or a bad scratch here I might put a little color on. It's not deep enough to fill. I have some other light spots here. All these spots disappeared when it was wet, especially these. I'm only going to put stain on two of the spots. I'm going to use the Mohawk Ultra Stain. It's a solvent-based dye stain. It works well with lacquers and any type of finish. I'm going to thin it out for this application, this little jar. I want to see if these other areas, you know, darken back up to their natural color when I polish it, and if they don't, then I'll put some stain on them. Okay, I'm going to try padding this, first coat of padding. I'm going to use this Lubricite padding lacquer. I've had really good luck with this. I really want to work these areas where the finish was a little bit on the rough side. I want to build up the finish on these edges. All right, not bad so far. I got a ways to go. It's taken a little while to build up in those spots that had a little bit more compromised finish. I'm going to let this dry. I'm going to eat lunch, run some errands, and then put another coat on it today. Okay, this has dried for three hours, and there's definitely those spots and other spots need a little stain before I pad it again. Sometimes if I'm having trouble with the brush laying down the stain, these Mohawk brush tip markers work really well also. They do have a tendency to dry out, and I have to dip them in lacquer retarder to reactivate them. Okay, I'm going to try padding it again. All right, this second coat has worked really well. A lot of those scruffy areas are now beginning to fill in and smooth out a bit, and it's just looking more consistent. I'll let this dry overnight, and tomorrow probably sand it a little and then pad it again. Okay, all right, looks good. I'm going to sand it this time and then polish on another coat. I think one of the things everybody struggles with is working on a tabletop. You've got it up on a bench. You're looking at it this way, that way. You're just seeing all the defects. It's a little bothersome. It's important to set it down on the ground and see it from a natural position and even in an area where there's not so much light. We're not trying to correct all the defects here, just trying to get a good surface, but it's tough when you're looking at them. I'm going to sand with 800 free cut paper and a block. I keep a Scotch-Brite pad in my other hand to get away those little nits that are sticking to the paper. When the paper's clogging up so easily, it's good to keep brushing it off. Like every two strokes with sandpaper, I'm brushing it off. Okay, I'm done sanding. I'll go over it now with a new piece of Scotch-Brite pad, just going after some shiny spots around the edges. Now I'll wipe the surface off with the Mohawk wax wash, same way as I did before. At this point, I'm not worried about contamination, but this stuff just really leaves the surface really right for the next coat. Okay, I'll let that dry overnight. Yeah, it looks good. Okay, the next step is I'm going to go over this with steel wool and the feed and wax polish. I'll use four knot steel wool and I'll use this Howard's feed and wax beeswax and orange oil polish. I hope that you can see that I'm keeping a very flat hand. I'm doing this slowly and deliberately, one quarter at a time, counting my strokes. I really want the top to be even, so I'll do this quarter, this quarter, and then I'll go back and go the whole length. Well, there you go. A very nice mahogany nesting table. Not an antique. This is the largest of the set. Absolutely gorgeous mahogany. Extremely sturdy table for a nesting table. I'd like to see the rest of the set, but you know the top just had a lot of wear and tear and just wanted to clean it, pat it out a little bit, get some finish on it, and wax it up. It looks great. You really don't want to refinish something like this if you can help it because you have a whole set of tables, not to mention the rest of the table. I think it looks pretty good. I've got two hours in this job and these are the materials that I used. If you like my video, please like and subscribe and feel free to post it on your other favorite platforms like Facebook, Reddit, what have you. I'd really appreciate it.