Bringing a Ruin Back to Life

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorm, Maine. Over the years I've tried every technique that you can think of to get a warp or twist out of a piece of wood. Any success I had is inevitably just temporary. In this video I restored a nice little drop leaf table and as you see I made the decision to make a new top and if you've been watching my videos you know that I'm loathe to do that. I'm always determined to save every original element of a piece no matter what condition it's in. But in this case the warping was so bad I knew that this tabletop was hopeless. But the most important thing for me is that I saved another nice little piece of furniture from going to the dump. You'll also see some very basic finishing techniques. If you enjoy this video please hit the like button, subscribe, and please feel free to share it. I'd appreciate it. Thank you. Many years ago a gentleman dropped this table off at my shop. I don't think he wanted to see it back again. I wrapped it up like this. I put it in storage. It ended up in the barn. What I always liked about this table from the first time I saw it were the legs. I thought they were exceptional. Let's take this tape off and see what we've got here. Oh geez. Wow. This thing's definitely been out in the weather. That was easy. Somebody already detached this. The bottom of the top is hand planed. It's nice. This piece goes here. Hand cut dovetails. Nice neat job too. The bottom is rough sawn solid wood. It's unusual to have the grain running long ways like that. I think we can assume that's the original knob. It sure looks like it. It's a nice turning like the legs. I really like this negative space here. And this is great pullout support for the leaves. These screws tell us a lot. You know they don't have pointed ends. Nice neat machine made threads. But note that the shafts are not tapered. Also the heads of these screws are imperfect and handmade. Just the head is handmade. There's lots of information online about old screws. This is a good chart here. And there's our screw right there. 1820 to 1850. But it's the legs I'm most interested in. Okay let's look at the book. This is the book I always start with. I'm pretty sure it's an American table. And tables. It's hard to find furniture of this era pictured in these books. All these books primarily deal with before 1830. But here you go. Here you're starting to see the legs. They call this a federal table. 1790 to 1810. Flipping through the I find a lot of these small tables which I always call work tables. But they can be called a stand or anything. But here you're seeing lots of legs similar to the legs on this table. And all these pieces of furniture are you know 1810, 1820. Somewhere in there. So then I google Sheraton furniture. I click on images. And here's all kinds of examples of Sheraton furniture. Now don't assume that everything on these pages is true and correct. Scrolling down begin to see similar images. You know here's our tables here. Looks great. I like American country stand. So as we know Sheraton designed high style formal furniture. This table must have been built by his country cousin. So it's called country Sheraton really because of the design of the legs. I still haven't decided what I'm going to do about the top exactly. First thing I'm going to do is wash this down. I want to see what it looks like. Clearly it spent a lot of time outdoors. Maybe years outdoors. And then this kind of dirt and dust is years of being in a barn or a cellar. Let's see what we got here. I'm going to use two quarts of warm water. That's a little less than two liters. And I'll add to that two ounces of crud cutter. And that's a little less than say 60 milliliters. I love the color and I love the variations. And that's why I don't like to sand things. You can't. Very difficult to recreate this. I'm going to mix up some more solution. I'll wash the drawer and the top. I haven't decided about what I'm going to do about the top yet. But I thought I'd wash it and think it over. I can see that it's birch. Of course, I just realized all I have to do is turn it over. Yeah, I think it's birch. Yeah, definitely. Beautiful color. Oh, hand planed. You know, I've never successfully gotten the warp or twist out of any piece of wood. I've tried many times. Nor have I heard of anybody, nor do I know anybody that's ever gotten a warp out of a piece of wood. So I either need to cut this up, rejoin it, flatten it. Same with these boards. Or maybe I should make a whole new top. I'm going to go to the barn, look through my wood, see what I got. I knew in the back of my mind I had some nice birch in the barn. This one particular piece is beautiful. I bought this wood years ago to do a top with. And that job never ended up not happening. This board looks perfect. I think I can get the whole top out of one board. All right, let's see what we got. All right, it's starting to look like a tabletop. So I'm belt sanding these pieces. I didn't want to have to resort to that, but this wood, the birch is so wavy. I had a lot of chip out, plus my thickness planer probably isn't what it should be. And this is the bottom of the leaf. I'll show you. You can see the chip out there. It's when the grain, the internal grain, is changing directions. The blade catches it and chips it. Yeah, so once I get most of those chip outs out, then I'm going to go at the top with a card scraper. More on that later. So after I've belt sanded as much as I dare, I'm using a card scraper. I'm going over the top. It's my intention not to do any more sanding on this top. I want to smooth the whole thing with the scraper. I'm not trying to put in texture artificially, but I'm hoping that some of it comes across from doing this by hand from this point forward. All right, I've got the top scraped down pretty well the way I like it. Now I'm going to cut what's called a rule joint in these pieces, and that's the joint where the leaves fold up. I've got the router set up with the roundover bit. This is my sample board for setup. I'll be cutting a joint just like that, and this represents the center section of the drop leaf table. There's a lot of good videos online. I referred to this one for the woodworker's journal this morning before I started this. I've got this fence set right where I want it, so notice I've added some shims because I'll do this in multiple cuts. Now I'll use a cove bit to cut the mating joint on a leaf. So I've made a, on the table saw, I made a template for the router to install the hinges. I'm going to put double stick tape on the back of this template, position it, I've got it all marked out, and route out for the hinge. And so I still have to cut, this hinge actually goes this way, and I've got to cut a slot for this knuckle so that'll sit down flush. It works. Now I never did cut the top to length because I wanted to wait until the leaves were attached. I'm anxious to fit that top on here, but first I've got some gluing to do. All the joints apparently are mortise and tenon and then pegged. The only obvious looseness is this dovetail rail. I wonder if that's the original finish of red paint. This leg is splayed out, but I think when this is glued in place that'll help keep it where it's supposed to be. Here you can see with this lower rail it's a double mortise and also pegged. I always use hide glue, old brown glue working with antiques. It's a very, very good adhesive, probably compatible with the old glue. I'm going to inject some into this glue joint. I don't want to take it apart and lose that peg. I think that either one or both of these side rails is twisted. Kind of hard to see, but these legs are kind of going in one direction, these back legs are kind of going in that direction. All right, it's dried overnight. All right, I'm ready to start the finishing process. You know, when I was washing this and it was wet, I really liked the way that it looked. Let's take a closer look. I haven't done anything to this since I've washed it. I intend to finish this with waterlox varnish, and that's what I'm applying now. I'm really liking the look of this and the color. So now I need to color this new wood to resemble the old wood. One of the problems with matching new wood to antiques is that the antique didn't get this color brown by being stained. We don't know how it got that way. Using stain on these woods, you may get a similar color, but it has a totally different effect. Pigmented oil stains, even dye stains, have pigment in them, but it's finely ground. I'm going to use chemicals to change the color of this wood. I want to apologize because I cannot tell you what those chemicals are because I don't know what they are. I think it was in the late 90s a company came out selling these products. I found they worked great. I read in the woodshop news a few years later they were going to stop selling the product. I went online to the woodworker's supply and bought quite a few bottles of this stuff. It turns out it's going to last me long past my lifetime. When using any water-based product on new wood, it's necessary to wet the wood down first. So last night, off camera, that's what I did. I washed this down, rinsed this down. After drying overnight, it feels extremely fuzzy. So we take a piece of very fine paper, 220, and sand at a 45 degree angle, just lightly, to get those fibers off. When you're preparing the wood, fibers get pushed down in the grain. When you wet it, they swell, raise up. You don't want to sand with the grain and just push the fibers back down again. You want to go at a 45 degree angle, roll those fibers off, and cut them. Following the directions, you give it a quick just a little dampening here to help the solution distribute evenly. Now we let that first part dry completely, and then we apply part two. All right, these have dried for about four hours. Now I'm going to spray them again, this time with part two, the catalyst solution. Color change doesn't happen instantaneously. I'll set them over here and we'll see what happens. Okay, I'll do a little time lapse here. It's been about 10-11 minutes. It'd be nice if stopped right here. It looks good. So anyway, we'll find out tomorrow. All right, these have dried overnight. You know, you can never look at stain when it's dried like this and tell what it's going to look like. You won't know until I put some finish on it. So I'll coat the bottom of one of the leaves and we'll see what it looks like. The color looks good. I think I'm going to go ahead and coat all this and put a coat on the table base. Yeah, it looks great. The first coat like this really soaking in quickly. It's been just about 20 hours. Everything's dried nicely. That first coat soaked in so quickly and so completely that last night after dinner I came in and just gave it a second coat. It's got enough build that I can sand it with some 220 pre-cut gold, and then I'll give it another coat. The base, I'll go over with scotch-brite pads and give it another coat. And the color is looking good. Okay, I've let this dry over two nights actually. So now I'm going to rub this down with some steel wool and polish and of course I'm going to assemble it. I think I should attach the table base before I put the leaves on. The top was originally attached with four screws going through here. Note how difficult it is to get this screw through there. I'm guessing these screws are original. They're definitely the right period, circa 1830. So even though I'm not wild about the system, I want to reuse these screws. Like I said, these screws barely can even go through the holes, which I've got to do something to correct that. So not only am I going to drill this hole to make it larger, I'm also going to go back and forth like this to elongate the hole perpendicular to the grain of the tabletop. Now the screw can move freely through the hole and also the screw can move back and forth. Hopefully that's enough to allow for wood movement at the top. I might even elongate that a little bit more. Unfortunately now I only have these Phillips head screws, but I've ordered slotted screws. When they come, I'll need to take this apart and see if I can change the color of all this galvanized steel. I wanted to have the top off the table base to rub it out. Typically I like a little bit more finish on a tabletop. This has three coats, but I like it. I'm going to rub it out with steel wool and Howard's feed and wax. I wanted to keep it looking kind of rustic. I think you can see here the texture that I wanted to achieve by just scraping even some little minor defects. I left all that. I didn't want this top to be perfectly flat. I'm going to go over it with dry steel wool. This is 4-0t and then I'm going to go over it with steel wool and polish. Now I'll take a fresh piece of steel wool and I'm going to apply to the steel wool and the tabletop this Howard's feed and wax orange oil and beeswax polish. The table base gets a similar treatment, no dry steel wool. I'll go straight to the steel wool and polish. All I did was wash this and put three coats of varnish on it. Nice little antique table, or used to be an antique, has a brand new top. Luckily we saved the base. The top was really beyond saving. I don't like doing major renovations like this. I was lucky enough to get some nice birch for the job. It's difficult to work with, but I managed. I did not sand the top. I scraped it only, trying to get a little texture. There's different defects to the top that I just left alone. Here was a big check in the wood. I mean I glued it and filled it in, but I didn't worry about it. I was calling it so tight on the width I wanted to get a whole top out of one board. I ran out over here and I left it anyway on the underside of the leaf. The top has great color because I used a chemical stain instead of a pigmented stain. It's much more varied. Plus the method of application I used, which was lousy with a spray bottle, gave it a variation also. The drawer works great. Off camera I took it apart, re-glued it. I even had to belt sand the sides. It wasn't about to go back in there. You know this is just a simple provincial table, but I'm really glad I saved this table base. It may be provincial, but whoever turned those legs really knew what they were doing. I've got about 24 hours just in making the top, maybe a total of 24 hours in the entire job. I used the thickness planer, the table saw, the jointer, and these hand tools and materials. I think it looks pretty good.