Repairing an Empire Style Secretary - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Here we have a really nice secretary bookcase. It's called that because it has a writing surface here as you can see covered with felt velvet and a bookcase. This piece is an Empire piece probably from 1830s 1840s. It's all mahogany veneer, figured mahogany veneers. Overall it's not in terrible shape at all. We have a piece of the cornice here which we need to re-glue. However over here on this side the cornice for some unknown reason has been chopped off and sawn off so we need to rebuild this cornice over here. We need to make a new we need to recreate an astrical. That's the strip of wood that goes between the doors that's missing all together. There's only one shelf so we're going to make another shelf identical to this one. Other than that it just has a lot of minor repairs, a lot of little veneer chipping, veneer repairs all over, some issues with the drawer guides. We'll address that and when we're all done with the repairs we'll just sort of give it a gentle cleaning and a waxing. Where this cornice molding has been sawn off I need to add on some woods. I think the first thing I'm going to do is remove this piece and work on it off the cabinet. So I've got a nice piece of pine here this this wood seems to be pine veneered and so I've got to glue this on. What I've got to do is here where they sawed off this cornice molding I've got to square this off so I can glue to it. I'm taking a lot of slow gradual cuts here. This is way out of square and you can see I'm just going to take off a little at a time. I want to lose as little of the original wood as I can. Now I've got a nice clean square edge I can glue to. I can also more clearly now see the thickness of the veneer. Okay so here's my new piece of wood I'm going to glue on here but first I've got to first I want to cut it and you can see right here I've got to cut this piece at the same angle right there so that's what I think the next step is to get my veneer and veneer this piece and then I'll glue them together. Here I've got my sleeve of crotch and figured mahogany. This is the cornice molding from the other side. I kind of want to get a better look at the figure here. It's figured mahogany but it's a pretty broad pattern there. You know the piece I'm repairing has a similar kind of a big broad curve curve pattern there. This looks like an interesting piece. This piece has that big big curves to it big cathedral type curves that I saw on those other pieces. I think this might be the piece I'm going to use. I've looked over this piece of veneer and I'm matching up this area here. The grain seems to be going in the same big swoop as what I see here so I'm going to take my veneer out of this section here. I'm going to have to add some on to this end. veneer to the face of this piece. I'm going to use my cut off from that piece got to take this cleat off and trim this down. Okay now I'll sand the face of this and then start getting ready to glue it to the old piece. This looks really good next to my piece I'm going to attach it to. My grain looks good. I'm a little bit thicker so I'm going to pass this across the jointer a couple times to take away some of that thickness. I'm going to run it across the jointer here which is a machine with this big cutter head with three blades in it. The blades rotate towards me so I look at the grain of the piece. I'm looking at the side grain and the grain is kind of running out of the slope like that. The pretty close. I think I want to go with that. I can sand it down or plane it a looks great but the first thing I want to do before I go any further I'm going to sand this my new piece level with the old piece. It's close to being level but I need to sand it well. Okay good now I'm gonna I've got to rip it to the proper width. Okay I'm ready to dry fit my repaired cornice. It looks like it fits fits pretty well but before I glue it now I've got to cut a piece of mahogany to fit into this corner that was missing when they sawed this off. So I took a solid piece of mahogany and cut it with the same angle as I did that and luckily the grain now is running very similar to the the grain in the veneer. So now I've got a okay I think that looks like it's gonna fit pretty well. I might have to put a slip of veneer in there to take up that space and I think I'll glue it in like this. I think I'll glue this cornice first then I'll glue this in and I'll trim it after I've glued it in. Okay so now I'm gonna glue my corner piece in here. I've got a little bit of a space here it's not a great joint but I'm just gonna fill this space with a little veneer. I've got space here too I just couldn't bring it together it met down here in the corner but this is typical of a antique piece of furniture and I'll fill that space with some wax. This while I'll seal it with some shellac. Okay here's the finished secretary bookcase. I repaired the cornice up here there's a big piece missing that had been sawn off. I did a lot of veneer repairs all over the pieces you saw. We re-glued the feet did a lot of veneer repairs to these rails between the drawers and re-glued two drawers and and redid the runners. The drawers work really well now. The secret drawer in the bottom didn't work at all. Works great now and then we just polished it up with the beeswax polish and I think it looks pretty good.