Someone Already Repaired This Antique Chair

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. Well, we're past peak color. There's a little frost on the pumpkin. It's chilly. That's nice. Oh, that's better. Got sweatshirts. Check out my website for ordering information. This video shows a real-world situation in a professional furniture repair shop. You know, in business, Most jobs are not what we call trash-to-treasure jobs, total transformations. In fact, just the opposite. Most repair jobs are supposed to be invisible, if at all possible. Many years ago, early in my business, a woman had me repair a badly damaged Chippendale-style dining room chair. The back, the crest rail was shattered, and the back splat, all elaborately carved, was also shattered. I worked hard on that chair and the result was that it looked like it had never been broken. I delivered it in the evening and her husband was home. She gave her husband the bill asking him to write a check and as he looked at the bill you could see his blood pressure visibly start to rise. He came out of his office with the bill, looked at the chair and said, this is outrageous. There's nothing wrong with this chair. The wife calmed him down. I got my check. And I was very pleased that the job had worked out so well. In this video, I repair a chair. It's one of a set of period Chippendale chairs. This chair had a beautiful old finish. And to complicate matters, it also was upholstered in very expensive, nice fabric. So every care had to be taken. If you like this video, please hit like, subscribe, and share. I'd really appreciate it. This is a very nice antique side chair, 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. What's happened here, this leg, this whole part of the leg, points 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 step is always going to be to protect the 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, specifically the joint. Cross section means 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 Tenons, 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 the 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 This... looks like end grain. This too, I guess. So this is the part of the original leg represented in my drawing. It's this area here. So, of course, we still don't know how long the tenons 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? 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. 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 locate this leg so that when I Go to glue it up. I know where it's supposed to. I want to drive a small brad into the center of each leg, and I want this dimension. And now I'll cut three strips of quarter inch plywood. I want the 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? Because this is an antique chair. I need to figure out where I want to put this leg. I cut an extra strip just for this reason. I need to come up with its own dimension. You can't put a 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 eighths of an inch longer. 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. 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. Just going through my scraps. This piece is, I really, there's a lot of different woods that can be called mahogany. And this piece is very heavy and dense. It just feels like it's going to be a good strong piece to fit in there. My block is square but this cutout is not. So I want to go on the big sander and angle this. That fits good. 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. I'm thinking I'd better pull this cam brick back some 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 what we got here. So I'm still not sure everything we're looking at. I mean, this piece and this piece, I assume were 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 chisel a little away here to create a better spot to drill. I can see a glint of... 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. I'm going to be getting pretty close to the top of this leg. I'll start chiseling now. Well, I think I've got this chiseled out pretty well. There's a piece of wood floating down the bottom. It's kind of strange. I drilled out a screw and I thought for sure that I would I have to deal with that screw. When I chiseled this up, I never saw any more evidence of it. You can see where somebody's run a couple of dowels through here. But anyway, now I can start to shape this tenon to fit that. Leave it a little long. Yeah, it looks like I need to take some off this face here. This up a little. It's going to be so close. I'm going to take off a little bit on the sides. 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 holding up, but it seems really good now. So now I need to do some work on the outside of the leg itself here before I do the glue up. I'm thinking why not 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 320 and then I'm going And I'm using Perfect Brown Toner. Okay, let's take a peek. Nope, needs more color. Okay, that dried overnight. Off camera I did hit it once more with some Brown Mahogany Toner. I think that brought it in pretty well. And 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 Hide Glue. Straight. It looks like it's where it's supposed to be. This leg is so tight that I don't need a clamp or anything. All right, let it dry overnight. Okay, this is dried overnight. It feels like a rock. Now, I've already done the touch-up, so I just need to tack this cambric 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'd take a handful of tacks, pop them in his mouth, grab a tack, tack it down. Now we'll level on the table saw. 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 back leg here. 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 tacks out of the cup, I was wondering why there was an escutcheon pin in there. It 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 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, and usually a repair will fail around the screws, but I just thought the only thing I could do was to redo it. And I hope that it doesn't meet with great force again. But I think it looks pretty good. If you liked 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 video.