Repairing a Round Table Top - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson, Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a really nice federal dining table, probably 1800, 1810. Each half has a single leaf. The leaves come up and the clip in the middle has swing legs to support those and forms a much larger table. It's kind of unusual in that it's made out of walnut. I've never seen a table like this made out of walnut. I'm going to repair and refinish this top. In this video, what I want to show is just how I'm going to repair it, which is both halves have cracked and separated, and I'm going to re-glue those boards. It's a difficult glue-up because of the curved shape. I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that. The first thing I want to do, of course, is I'm going to turn this upside down, take the leaf off, and remove this half-round top from the base. This is so unusual looking at the underside of this. It's remarkable the things you see when you turn a piece upside down. There used to be a hinge here and a hinge here, but I see no corresponding hinge over here. There's also no marks on the half-round top that indicate any hinge. I also see inside this has been repaired before, and someone cut in some butterflies across that joint that I'm going to glue, but the butterflies are gone. We'll never know. Now, I'm going to put these screws right back in the exact hole that each screw came out of. Now, I need to remove this leg assembly from the half-round top, and as you can see, there's just a series of screws around the perimeter, and in the back here, I see one screw. Now, these screws, I can't put them back in the holes that they belong, but I took note as I removed them. They appear to be modern screws, although they're discolored, but the important thing is that all the screws around the perimeter are the exact same length, same screw, except two in the front were shorter. I don't know why that is, and so I have marked those as to where the short screws came out of. Okay, so now I'll set this aside and take the other half off. All right, this is the second top. As you can see, these joints are really dirty. There's old glue on them and crumbs and who knows what else, so now I need to clean these surfaces as best I can. Now, I'm going to clean these surfaces as gently as I can. I don't want to take any wood away. I can't joint these to make a really good glue joint because that will change the dimensions of these tops, and they won't match up, so I'm going to scrape gently. Scraping seems to be doing a pretty good job. I've scraped it as much as I can, and then I'm going to just use some hot water with a little vinegar and scrub this, and then I'm going to let that dry. Now, this half, this piece was so loose, but it seems to be pretty solid right there. I think I'm going to have to apply some heat to it to get it apart. Now, I'm going to put a wedge under this end as a way of applying some pressure. There it goes. Most importantly, I was heating up the top. I didn't want to get any splinters or anything there when it came apart, and it came apart very clean. Now, this joint has a lot of glue on it. Before I try washing it off, though, I'm going to use a heat gun to see if that loosens it up. Scrape as much as I can before I scrub it. Now you can see that the glue is softening up and scraping off a lot easier because, once again, I don't want to damage the wood. I just want to take glue off, no wood. So these two edges on this half, the glue is so globbed up on here, I'm actually using all the techniques at the same time. I'm heating it up with the heat gun, scrubbing some with the vinegar and water, and then, when I really see that it's loose, I'm gently scraping it off. All right, I've got these joints as clean as I can get them. I think I'll put this together and clamp it, see what it looks like. It's coming together not bad. It's not great either. There's a little gaps here. You know, as I said previously, I really don't want to joint these boards. I don't want to make this table top any smaller. It's already shrunk. I think what I'm going to do is put some dowels in here to give it a little extra strength when I glue it up. So I'm going to put some tape in the areas where I want to put the dowels. Now I lay a straight edge perpendicular to the joint. Okay, I'm going to drill for the dowels. I'm going to use this dowel jig. It's going to line this up. Now I only want to drill one inch. So I'll mark my drill bit. All right, and now I'll just do the other board that's getting glued on here and I'll do the other table half. Okay, I've got all the sections drilled and now I'm ready to glue the first half together. And first thing I'll do is glue my dowel pins in one side of it. Okay, I'm ready to glue up this half of the table. But first I'm going to do it dry to get all my clamps arranged. And what I'm going to do is I have some short dowels here I'm just going to put in while I clamp it up without glue. Now, I know I can put a clamp in the middle here. Obviously. Clamping the edges though are a little bit of a problem. I'll show you what I do. What I'll do is take a small hand screw clamp like this. I've taped sandpaper to the jaws. And now I want to move these jaws until they're just about the exact same distance as the thickness of this top. And I want to clamp it here. Try to make sure the clamp is perpendicular to this glue joint. And I'm just going to give this clamp a little bit of a tighten with some pliers. Not too much. It could break the clamp but you really want it on there. Alright, now I'll put one on the other side. Now, I'll just put a block of wood across there. And then I'll also clamp just some strips of plywood here. I'm going to clamp like that just to help keep this straight. Both these pieces of wood are cupped a little bit. And I don't have a very good joint there because I didn't joint this. I just cleaned them. So I think I'm ready to glue it up. My glue up seems pretty successful. And I always like using clamps like this to get some downward pressure there. And I'm glad I put dowels in it too. I think they'll help. Looks pretty good. We'll find out tomorrow when I take the clamps off. So here's the table after it's been refinished. This top desperately needed to be refinished. I've never seen this style of table in walnut before. And this is one of the most beautiful pieces of antique walnut you're ever going to see. This is the piece. The joint, you can sort of see where the joint is here. And it came out really well. It looks pretty good.