Repairing a Victorian Drawer Runner - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

So if you've got the bandwidth, click the gear icon in the corner of the video player, select your preferred quality, and enjoy the video in HD. Hi, I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorm, Maine. This is a drawer from an antique built-in cabinet from a Victorian house. And like a lot of drawers from antique cabinets, the drawer sides are destroyed. They must have gotten worn down to nothing until they became splintery. It looks like maybe at some point someone added on a piece of wood. And what I need to do is take this drawer part, trim off the broken part, glue on new wood, cut a dado for the drawer bottom, and reassemble the drawer. Okay, so now I took the clamps off. Now I've got to plane down my new wood to match the thickness of the old. Then we'll trim the ends. Next I'll use an intact drawer side that didn't need repair to set the width. And now, once again, I'll use the intact drawer side to set the depth of the saw blade and also to locate the dado. Make sure this is the inside. Alright, now I've just got to cut this mortise, this slot, down through my new wood to accommodate the tenon that's in the drawer front and the drawer back. And then once the clamps are on, it's good to check for squareness. Actually, this is really square. These old drawers aren't necessarily perfectly square, but it's good to check and make them as square as you can. Okay, so the drawer's all glued up. My piece I've glued onto the drawer side here is pretty good, but I'm going to clean it up a little bit, and then we'll see if the drawer works in the cabinet. That drawer works great. I've got one more drawer to fine-tune, and then we tackle the rest of the restoration. Go to Beadaholique.com for all of your beading supply needs!