An 18th Century Chair, Restored

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson antique furniture restoration in Gorm, Maine. As you can see, I'm back to work on the shop working on this table. In fact, this will be a new video. But I have been doing some furniture. I repaired a chair for some friends of mine. Let's take a quick look. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. bang. Heat. Heat. And this is where I'd love to show you some footage of me finishing the doing all the color work on this foot using mohawk toners, but that video footage has been lost. So, we'll just have to settle for these uh beauty shots of the finished foot. And on the subject of chair repairs, this video you're about to see, I really like a lot. It shows me repairing the leg of a 235y old federal period side chair. And I do it without really altering the chair and without affecting the finish. And it's important to save the fabric on this chair because it's one of a set. And note how I devised a clever method for locating the position of the leg during a glue up. You know, both these videos show all the difficulties you can encounter repairing chairs and especially considering the stresses that they're going to be put under when they go back into service. Hey, if you enjoyed this video, hit subscribe, hit like, share it. I'd really appreciate it. This is a very nice antique side chair. Uh, one of a set of eight. It's federal style, which means it's from 1790, 1800, that time period there. There's a lot of very nice carving all over it, probably out of New York. And uh what's happened here is this leg has snapped off. This whole part of the leg goes up in there and joins to the rails has snapped off. And not only that, it's been repaired before. So, I have to figure out exactly what I'm going to do. And I don't really know that until I start pulling back the fabric somewhat. I need to see what's going on in there. Now, the first steps uh always going to be to protect this seat. I'm going to cover it with plastic. Typically, I'll reuse plastic many, many times over, but in a case like this, this is time for a new piece. So, what are we looking at here? This is the broken piece that you know we see on the leg itself. This is a tenon going to the front rail. There should be a tenon for the side rail here. I don't see it. And I don't know what this substance is right here. I'm going to sketch this out. So, what I'm doing here is I'm drawing a cross-section of this leg and specifically the joint. Cross-section means you slice an object this way and then look straight down on it. And that's what I'm trying to draw here. So really, I'm just kind of working out what I'm going to do. This is the outside perimeter of the leg. This is the part that we see right here, the broken part. This part of the leg, we don't know. I assume, I haven't seen yet. This is a tenon from the rails. This is the tenon. Originally, there should have been this much leg there. Depends on how far they brought these tenons out. I did a video called too many tenins, which discusses this very issue, which, you know, it's tough to get around. So, I'm going to start scraping away. So, I want to start scraping away this part here. I assume that this wood is the original leg. Here's a tenon. We don't know how far that tenon goes. I want to see what we've got here. Well, as I thought it might be, this looks like end grain. This too, I guess. And so this is the part of the original leg um represented in my drawing drawing. It's this area here. So of course we still don't know how long the tenants are, but I'm wondering if I should use this area here. And so back to the leg again. In other words, I'm kind of thinking of redoing this repair the way it was done before. But I'm wondering if I should try also to put a tenon in here. And of course, the big problem with that is that that could cut out some of this carving. Do I really want to cut in here on like the other side and have to redo that carving? Um, and I don't think so. I don't want to I want to preserve all that original carving. So, right now, my thinking is I'm just going to redo the previous repair. I think it was a good job. I don't know why this broke. It looks like it met with force. That's a problem with any chair that doesn't have stretchers. Uh, all these chairs have been repaired before. I can see this leg has been badly broken and repaired. Before I start working on this leg, while I still have this piece that fits in there, I want to uh locate this leg so that when I go to glue it up, I know where it's supposed to end up. I want to drive a small brad into the center of each leg. Now I want this dimension. And now I'll cut uh three strips of quarterinch plywood. Now I want to dimension front to back. All right. Now, I just need to I need to get this dimension. All right. Well, this is why I'm doing this now because I've got my diagonals dead on. Yet this leg is crooked. Now, how can that be? Well, it's because this is an antique chair. I need to figure out where I want to put this leg. Uh, I cut an extra strip just for this reason. I need to come up with its own dimension. You can't put a uh square on it. You can't put a level on it. All you can do is eyeball it. And that's why I'm working out these problems right now. I kind of like where it is right now. So, I think that this diagonal needs to be about 7/8 of an inch longer. All right. I'm liking that. This looks like it's right where it's supposed to be. I don't think I need another one here. Fire. You can see that as I get down, you know, between my saw cuts here, I'm using a narrower and then a narrower chisel. Okay, I'm going to cut a piece of mahogany to glue in here. Um, just going through my scraps. Uh this piece is uh I really there's a lot of different woods that can be called mahogany. And uh this piece is very heavy and dense and I just it just feels like it's going to be a good strong piece to fit in there. My block is square but this uh cutout is not. So, I want to go in the big sander and angle this. That fits good. Okay, I'm uh I'm not going to do anything else with this until I chisel out the rest of that broken piece and see exactly what we've got here. Now, I'm thinking I better pull this camber back some and uh and maybe I should try drilling it out as much as I can. I'm going to pull back a little bit more of this fabric. I want to see exactly uh what we got here. So, I'm still not sure everything we're looking at. I mean, this piece and this piece I assume are the original leg, although I don't understand that little crack there. That's a tenon. I don't see the other tenon, but it might be under here. Anyway, I think I'll try to drill that out. I'll I'll chisel a little away here to create a better spot to drill. I can see a glint of uh metal down in there. Must be another screw. I don't see any screws from the inside here. The screw may be coming in from the outside underneath the fabric. Well, I'm just going to keep drilling. You can see all the bits of metal coming up. Well, I got to be getting pretty close to the top of this leg. I'll start chiseling now. Well, I think I've got this uh chiseled out pretty well. There's a piece of wood floating down in the bottom. It's kind of strange. I drilled out a screw and I thought for sure that and that I would have to deal with that screw when I chiseled this out, but I never saw any more evidence of it. You can see where somebody's run a couple dowels through here. But anyway, now I can start to shape this tenon to fit that. Leave it a little long. Heat. Heat. Yeah, it looks like I need to take some off this face here. Hey, hey, hey. I'm getting really close here. I think though before I do anything else with this tenon, I'm going to square this up a little bit. It doesn't look quite as clean on this side. Okay, I think I've got this as clean and as square as it's going to be. So, and I'm really close. Uh, I think now I'm going to take off a little bit on the sides of uh this new piece. So, I've been taking a little off of here. I go back and take a little bit more off here and there wherever I can determine what I think is, you know, holding up. But it it seems really good now. So now I need to do some work on uh the outside of the leg itself here before I do the glue up. Yeah, I'm thinking why not uh get the touch-ups done before I glue it up or at least most of the way done. Off camera, I sprayed a second coat of shellac. And now I'll sand with the 320. And then I'm going to tone it. And I'm using a perfect brown toner. Okay, let's take a peek. Nope. Needs more color. Okay, that dried overnight. Uh, off camera, I did hit it once more with some brown mahogany toner, and I think that brought it in pretty well. And, uh, now I'm going to spray it with some gloss. Once this gloss dries, I think we can do the glue up. I'm going to use hide glue. I mixed up a fresh batch of the high strength granular high glue. The legs look straight. It looks like it's where it's supposed to be. This leg is so tight that uh I don't need a clamp or anything. Well, all right. Let it dry overnight. Overnight. Okay. This has dried overnight. That feels like a rock. Now, I've already done a touchup, so I just need to tack this camric back where it belongs. You know, when I started in my working in my dad's shop, which was 56 years ago, there was a guy there that had worked in an upholstery shop. So, he would do the small upholstery jobs like this. And how they would do the tacks is he take a handful of tacks, pop them in his mouth, grab a tack, tack it down. Now we'll uh check for level on the table saw. The legs. The legs look good. I like it like this as opposed to that. I like it this. And so I need to take a little off this uh back leg here. I think I just need to use my polish rag on this one. I don't even need to add any polish to it. It's funny. When I took the upholstery tax out of the cup, I was wondering why there was an discussion pin in there. Goes right here. So, there you go. A really nice federal side chair. It's one of a set of eight that makes it kind of special. And uh it had been repaired previously and I don't think that repair itself failed. I think this leg must have met with great force the way it was kind of snapped off. The piece of wood put in as a repair seemed fine. The person that put screws into their repair, but uh and usually a repair will fail around the screws. Uh, but I just thought the only thing I could do was to redo it and uh hope that it doesn't meet with great force again. But I think it uh it looks pretty good. I hope you like the video and if you did, please subscribe and like and be sure to hit the bell icon so that you'll be notified when I put out a new