1870 s Victorian Chair Restoration Part 3

I've had this chair project set back for a few months, but I'm really anxious to get inside of the heart of this upholstery. There's still more framework to be done, so it's time to get the old cover off and see what's inside. I'll snip these spring cords and places where the springs have been stitched into the burlap. I'm going to set these springs out on the side and we'll clean them up later. It looks like the outside here is filled with a mixture of horse hair and toe. Pull it out and set it aside. This outside back looks to be filled mostly with Spanish moss, typically what we call floor sweepings. There's just some scraps of wool-like fiber in there. This even looks like some human hair in that corner over there. The stitching and detailing in this chair is really getting interesting. All of these seams have been hand sewn and the pleats stitched in place. Interesting padded edge here. Looks like it's maybe even done with a sugar sack. There's some print on it. Horse hair and overstuffed work inside. Very nice. I found this on both sides of the chair. There's some blue pillow ticking that appears to have been used as temporarily. There's some stitching that runs down here and it extends the whole length of the arm and on both sides it's been torn away. So I assume maybe this was used to hold this in shape on a temporary basis. Not really sure. I pulled away all the padding materials, tried to leave everything intact as much as I could. The spring work inside I've left tied and it's all in its envelope. Now it's just a matter of cleaning up this edge roll and I can get back to work on the frame. I've stripped and sanded all the original finish off. I ended up having to make a new hind leg here but I kind of expected that from the beginning. I've taken and cleaned all the joints, all the excess glue, cleaned the dowel holes out. Had to cut basically all new dowels for the legs here. My joints are cut here and it's a matter of lining up the dowel holes. I'll start by inserting these little dowel center pins they call them. We'll use those to line up these joints here and keep them all in accuracy. I'm going to start my finish by putting a sealer coat of shellac on this burled veneer. I'll be using an aniline dye to even up the colors on the new wood versus the original wood and this I want to highlight. After I got the frame glued together I realized that it was still very delicate and I felt it best to add some reinforcement blocks to the leg joints. There was warping and stuff to deal with on this top rail and I went ahead and put some reinforcement in there. So after my sealer coat of shellac I've sprayed probably a half a dozen coats of lacquer and rubbed down with a scot-brite pad a couple times in between coats. I'm going to buff it down one more time and we'll put the finish coat on. I'm going to be polishing this burled veneer out to a glass surface with a product called black wax. So I'm using a hardwood block and some 400 grit paper. We're going to sand this down and even the surface out. I'm using a product called black wax. It's basically a furniture polish but it's got a jeweler's grade abrasive in it. Works beautiful at putting a glassy luster on. Put it on a wool pad and we'll use the hard block again and polish this out. All right this chair is ready for upholstery.