Restoring an Elaborately Carved Table - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Hi, I'm Tom Johnson of Thomas Johnson Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a fun little occasional table. It has a marble top. It doesn't need too much work. One of the pieces of molding has come off. I'll re-glue it. I have another piece of molding which goes down here. I'll glue that. A little bit of gluing here. And then I'm just going to clean it up and polish it. I can see space in all these joints here. I'll see if I can take this apart. I figured I might as well glue these moldings on the top while I've got the top separated from the table base. And it's interesting because they don't fit. This top is not a solid wood top. It's veneered. But you can see it must have shrunk. I put one molding there and the other molding. It won't meet the top. I think what I'm going to do is glue this one on first and then I need to re-cut this one until it fits. Okay, so now I glue on the next piece but I've got to trim it first to make it fit. I feel like there's no way I can really measure this. I've just got to trim a little bit at a time until it fits. The table has six sides. So six into 360 is 60. So this must be a 60-degree angle. So now I want to take the rest of it apart. I'm going to glue these sides up to the bases initially before I glue anything else together. Now the next issue to address is that some moldings had come off the bottom of these frames. And the thought was, instead of trying to make new moldings, is that we would remove them from the top where they don't show and put those on the bottom. This one seems loose already. It just popped right off. Let's see if it fits in the bottom. Yeah, it seems to fit right in there. So I'll glue it and clamp it. Okay, I'm just about ready to glue the entire table back together. But first, while these are apart, I'll take the time to stain these areas where I removed those moldings. Okay, I'm going to glue the table up now. First step will be to glue these sides to this base, and then I'll put the top on. First thing I'm going to do is test all these dowels to make sure they're not loose. I just use a pair of pliers to very gently test. See, none of these seem loose. All right, it's good and sturdy now. The carved panels on this table will just need the final polishing with the beeswax polish and a brush. But the base here, the base and the edge surrounding the top need a little more work. I'm going to clean these bases and this edge. I'm going to tape off the panels. Now I'm going to go over these areas with a little bit of dark walnut dye stain. I'm just going to pad over them with a little stain. Put a little finish on them with some aerosols. Okay, now I've got two coats of shellac. I'm going to sand really lightly with some 320 and then spray it with a very low luster lacquer. Okay, so now I can take my paper off and polish it. So this turned out to be a pretty nice little occasional table, or it could be a pedestal. And it's got all this great carving. Looks pretty good.