Tambour Door Gets a New Canvas Backing - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

This is a late 18th century English cabinet and it's in pretty good shape. I need to take it apart and re-glue it. All the joints are coming apart. It has this tambour door and the tambour door has problems. It seems to open okay but it gets hung up in the corner and then it won't close again. I can feel that the fabric is messed up behind it. So what I'm going to focus on in this video is when I take this apart I can get this tambour door out and I'm going to replace the fabric on the back. All right I've taken the cabinet apart. Here's the door and sure enough you can see that on the back how bad the fabric is. There have already been multiple layers of fabric on here so I can't put fabric over this. I need to remove this old fabric. I'm going to couple of pieces of wood that I can then secure to this plywood that'll hold this tambour down while I scrape off the fabric. Okay I've scraped these tambours pretty well. I'm going to do a little more scraping. Now I got to do this end piece here. Even though these pieces are probably interchangeable I still try to keep them in the exact right order. If for no other reason the the color on the outside of the piece and there's a bunch of little like upholstery tacks that must have held the fabric on originally too. I've got to get those out. These little nails that I took out of the front part of the door they look like they're original to the piece and so I may want to reuse them. So I I'll use some epoxy putty to fill in all those little nail holes. I took off one of the cleats so I can now finish scraping these and I'm being careful to keep them in the same order. I'm ready to set these tambours up in my jig and glue the fabric down. I have a nice piece of fabric, a kind of a heavy linen. I have to glue this fabric up in stages. This is the front first piece with the handle so it goes like that. The fabric actually glues to the back of this and then takes a 90 degree turn here and then gets glued onto the tambour. So I think I'm going to do this in stages. I'm going to glue this part down first. I'm going to use my jig where it makes this turn right here. I'm going to tape this off. I want to make sure I don't get any glue on this area between the tambours. The next step will be to nail this little piece of wood that they had here to help hold this fabric in place. Okay the next step is to line everything up in my jig. First thing I want to do is put down some wax paper here. Then I'll start with our first piece here with the fabric already attached. I want to make sure this first piece is square and I pull this fabric back. Technically it shouldn't make any difference but I'm more concerned about color differences that may exist on the front. Making sure this first piece is square. All the individual slats are right where I want them to be. Okay I feel like I'm all set to go here. Just using regular yellow glue. Put down the fabric. Smooth it down with a block. This is just a hard rubber sanding block and I can feel the fabric starting to grab. Now to make sure everything stays nice and flat put down a piece of wax paper. I have a piece of plywood I cut to fit in here and a couple of cans to weight it down. All right okay the tambour is glued up really well. So now I'll trim off the excess fabric. I've got to clean any glue off just with water. I can clean off the glue that came through the surface. Then the next step will be to clamp up the table dry without glue and see how the tambours work. As I reassemble this table I'm making sure that the groove that the tambour runs in is all cleaned and waxed. I'll use a piece of old candle for wax. I'm putting this together without glue so just dry. I want to see how the tambours work. I think it's going to work fine. Now I'll glue it up. All right I've glued the table back together with the new tambour doors in it and they work well. Looks pretty good.