A Mid-Century Modern Rescue - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. These are the tambour doors of a mid-century modern rosewood bar cabinet and you'll see the entire cabinet when I reinstall these in the customer's home. I don't know why they're called tambour doors except the word tambour always involves things that are round like think like a tambourine for instance but what's happened here is the material has deteriorated and needs to be replaced. The first thing I'm going to do is get a sheet of MDF that's medium density fiberboard. I want to cut a piece to create a flat surface to do this work on. I'm going to cover this with wax paper to keep glue off of it. I've got to get this handle off. I've got to pry this board off and actually before I pry this board off I'm going to mill up the boards to hold this in the place and I'll rab it out for those boards to accommodate the the tongues on the door. Okay I'm going to screw these down but I've got to get this end board off first. Yeah this keeper was glued down that's unusual in my experience. So I was getting a little tired of scraping it. I tried a little heat with the heat gun but that really didn't seem to do too much so what I've done here is I've laid a wet towel on the fabric just for five minutes. Yeah I don't the water didn't really seem to want to penetrate this much but as you can see some of it's ripping up anyway. I'm not sure I don't think the water had anything to do with that. I don't want to soak it down because it'll just make a big mess and the other side of these is finished and water would creep down. This is a heavy linen fabric we call mattress ticking. I had also cut a second piece of MDF covered with wax paper that will fit in here on top of the fabric. I just want to it's not absolutely necessary to do this but I want to ensure that this is flat. You can use any type of water soluble glue. Okay I'll let that dry overnight Well okay uh let's see what we got. All right this uh this went down nice and flat. Just a quick note about the gloves I've been wearing. I anticipate I'd get comments on that just like people used to comment all the time on the bandages I had on my fingers. You know it's that there's a high of 22 degrees today. For my metric fans that's minus five. Humidity is 25 30 percent and the cold shop the cold tools uh was just killing the skin on my hands so I as much as I can I'm keeping these gloves on moisturize my hands. I'll show you. Just trying to keep them that way. Okay let this dry overnight. On the second door I was I actually did a much better job of cutting the fabric and and fitting it here. This is a little bit off so I'm going to trim up these edges a bit. All right these are the boards that go on the inside of the doors you know to which the right on the inside center edge. I've got to clean them down and reattach them. Well this glue just does not want to scrape off. I tried the heat really seemed to have no effect which was my experience on the tambours themselves which ultimately didn't matter but what I've done here is soaked a little vinegar on it and that seems to be working fine. Okay let's uh let's see what we got. Oh yeah this is great. Okay I've got to reinstall these strips on the inside of the doors. They were originally glued and nailed but I'm going to screw them down. Okay now I will get my kit and go to the customer's house to install these. Okay here I am in the customer's home. Got a well stocked cabinet here. We took the doors out from the front but they were in pieces. I'm not sure if they're going to go back in or not. We're going to find out. The first thing I'm going to do is vacuum these tracks just to get any dust or anything out of there and now I'll wax these tracks as best I can. I really can't get to in the back or anything and I'll also wax the doors you know the these uh tongues if you will that are that go in the slot. So this opening of the cabinet is not a perfect square. The top and bottom are curved so there's a much larger dimension here in the center than there. We were able to pull them out through the center but they were in pieces so let's see if it'll go back now that it's all together. This is great. One down. Now I got to do the other one the same way but I don't have this space available to me. I'm not sure how this is going to work. I just realized this was kind of stuck there. Something was holding it up but obviously it opens all the way and so now I have the room to do this. All right now I'm going to go over the cabinet with my orange oil beeswax polish. So there you have it. This is a really nice mid-century modern rosewood bar cabinet made in the 1960s by Mobler and uh and it was fine except the fabric had deteriorated on the back of these tambours and now it's fine. I spent about eight hours on this job that includes pickup and delivery and these are the tools I used. I think it looks pretty good.