Restoring a Bench - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Here we have a 12 foot long bench, sometimes called a deacon's bench. It's black with gold decoration and decals with the Harvard seal. And the center leg and the stretcher are broken. You can see better now how the leg is broken and the end of the stretcher is broken also. You can see that someone glued this break before, but clearly it just wasn't going to last. And so I think we're going to need to turn a whole new leg. And I may turn a new stretcher as well. So now we need to take this apart, disassemble this somewhat. I've marked the joints. This joint is really tight, so I heat it up with a heat gun. Okay, now I'm going to glue this together just with 5 minute epoxy, just to use as a sample for making a new turning. We've glued the broken leg together just to use as a model. And I've got a nice piece of maple on the lathe, so now we'll start turning a new leg. Okay, I used the broken leg to set up this angle in a drill press. Now I'm going to drill my new leg. I think the stretcher is good. Now I've got to drill these holes for this stretcher. Okay, I put a dowel in our broken leg here and just used it to, as best I can, line up the angle on this new leg. One important thing about this job is all the legs on this piece for these stretchers, they drilled, as you can see, all the way through the leg. And that, in effect, left just a little tiny, I think about a 3 eighths piece of the leg here. In other words, you think that this leg is 1 1⁄2 inches thick, it's not. It's only 3 eighths of an inch thick. For the stretchers I'm drilling here, I am not going to drill all the way through this leg. I'm going to leave 3 quarters of an inch of wood in the middle of this leg and the tenons on these stretchers will cut shorter. I'll show you. Okay, everything looks pretty good. I won't know for sure. I can't put this whole thing together without taking this apart. So now I'm going to finish my new pieces and while I'm doing that I'm going to mark and take apart this whole base. Now I've got to take the entire base of this bench apart. And so the first step is I'm marking each piece with tape. And I'm orienting the tape so that when I put it back together I have each piece back exactly the way it was when it came apart. Dry fitting the parts I made that some parts of this were loose. Especially like this joint and some of the others I've gotten loose. But I can see now that not all the joints are loose. I need to get at least one more loose on the end so that I can put this together. So I'm going to work on the end one here and see if I can get it loose. Okay, now I think that this is going to give me the flexibility that I need to put this together. I'm going to try it dry one time. This joint was still a little tight and I think it was keeping me from getting it together. I've got everything together dry just about right. I discovered though that I cut these tenons in here a little bit but I still need to cut this shoulder. It's preventing this from going in far enough. Remember I had to shorten these tenons because I didn't drill all the way through my leg. And also because my leg is a little bit heavier that's why I had to cut back these shoulders a little bit also. And now it fits properly. Good, so now it seems to work. Okay, I think that's a pretty successful glue up. We did not have to take the entire base apart, just part of it. And all the joints are so tight it doesn't even need clamps. So now the bench is all glued up, it seems really strong. Now I need to cut my new leg to length. And it has to be the same height as these other legs. So this is how I'm going to do it. I have a board I'll put here, I'll put here. I have a five foot straight edge. Now I can mark it. Now I'll mark the other side. It's a little tricky because it's not a straight cut, it's got to be level with the floor. Which is why I made a mark in the front and in the back. Before I cut I just want to check it one more time. I'm going to follow my line with the saw blade. When making a cut like this I don't cut all the way across. I go around and around. Checking my level here. And it's pretty good, I have to do a little bit of filing to get it down just a little bit. And then I'll bevel these edges and stain everything with black and polish it up. So here we go. The bench is sitting level on the ground, thank goodness. So if you remember we have the broken front leg that was broken and a stretcher behind it. And it looks great. And we've put about 12 hours of labor into this job.