What's Really Going on Here? - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration, in Gorham, Maine. I hope you've enjoyed the restoration of this piece so far. If you haven't seen it, click on the link in the description. In that video, I removed the top with great difficulty, re-glued it, and I did a lot of veneer patching on the apron on the bottom of the piece. Now, I've got to get it all back together and get some finish on it. Let's get back to work. I already used wood putty the other day all along that joint. Now, I want to trim the dowels. Now, I'm going to use wood putty in the areas surrounding these plugs. I'm going to sand this long line of putty, smooth it out a bit. I'm going to scrub this down with alcohol and see what it looks like. All right, let this dry overnight and I can get back on the case. Let's hope this sticks better this time. I think I better use the saw. I'm way too big, which is what I thought, and that's great. I'm terrified of taking too much off. See, as you flip the gauge over, this kind of informs you as to how much larger that is. Well, that's as close as I'm going to get. Maybe I'll refine it a little more. Let's get some veneer on it. I can see the pattern now. This has got pretty wild grain, but given how little this piece is and its location, I'm not going to worry about that. I'm going to get something here that's got the grain going in the same general direction, maybe somewhere in this area here. Anything will be fine. Okay, now it's time to shave and sand all these patches. Now the same routine for all these other patches. Now I'm just sanding with 150. I've got to level these off. Okay, I'm going to sand this entire front apron, you know, just from here to here and stop there, and that way all my patches will be completely smoothed in and anywhere I need putty, I can putty. Okay, I've got some, at the top of these two top drawers, there's little, real little chips of veneer. I'm going to just use wood putty for those. There's also a couple little chips from when I had to work that top off that was glued down. This putty dries pretty quickly, about 15 minutes or so. Okay, I believe I've got all the veneer repairs done. There's just two veneered pieces in this cabinet, the bottom apron and the top. So now we can start on the finish. When I was doing the veneer repairs to the base, I used a little alcohol to see what the grain looked like, and I really liked what I saw the alcohol doing. I'd really like to get these knobs off, especially so I can repair this one, but I suspect that they're threaded dowels. I think I can see inside here they're threaded and they've been glued. I like doing the heat in two minute increments, so I'm going to give it two more minutes on the back and then I'll give it two minutes on the front. Now I'm holding the gun about six inches from here, about 15, a little over 15 centimeters. You want to hold the gun as close as you can but without scorching the wood or the finish. I'm going to do the front also, and there I'll have to be really careful. You can see the glue there reacting to the heat. There it goes. Oh, that was glued on. Now I was hoping the stem would come out of there, but I don't think it is. Well, I was hoping the entire knob would come out. It'll just make it easier to do this surface, but I'll leave that there. I'll have to glue these back. I'll clean off all that excess glue, but I'm really hoping at least that I can get this one out, the one that needs repair. That's the most important one. Same thing, this has been broken and was re-glued. Since these have been, you know, well I'm going to say broken and glued, although these look like they were always glued on, they were never a part of the top. I might have to replace these two knobs and I'll see what the other ones are like. Frequently have to do that kind of trick on these threaded rods. Okay, so now I'm going to go over the case and the drawer fronts with alcohol and alt-steel wool. Here's that big patch I did. Okay, I'm gonna let this sit overnight. Okay, I've got a lot of things to do here, but I think I'm going to start with this broken knob. I'm going to sand the top a little bit, see if I can determine what kind of wood it is. I'm going to smooth the bottom of it a little bit too, because I'm going to tape it down to this piece of MDF. Really hard to tell. All the other wood in this piece looks like cherry. This is difficult to tell. Maybe I'll just use cherry. It should work fine. This is a nice piece of cherry with a little bit of color to it, and this area of grain looks good too. I'm thinking I better put tape under the whole thing. I'm going to redo this and move the tape over so I could clamp it better. I'm just going to use a regular yellow carpenter's glue for this little repair. It's the only thing I'm doing today. I'm not going to heat up the hide glue. So I still need to attach the top to the case, but first, before I do that, I want to get a first coat of finish on it, sealer on it, and mainly what I want to do before I attach it is I want to get some finish on the bottom of this, because we know it's had problems with seasonal wood movement. So I'm going to sand it just lightly by hand with some 220, just to kind of prep the surface for the first coat. I've got to put some stain on these plugs and sand the bottom a little bit also. Note that I'm not trying to sand out any marks or defects. I'm just going over it, kick up a little bit of sawdust. I want to make sure that the first coat of finish can adhere to the surface. I forgot to stain my plugs ahead of time. I'll just have to do it afterwards. Let this dry overnight and tomorrow we'll get back on the case also. All right, this is dried overnight and the first coat soaked in pretty well. I'm going to sand this top and bottom and give it another coat. I'm going to sand using 220 gold and a Ultrafine Scotch-Brite pad. These pads work great on surfaces that aren't flat like this top and also on the curved edges. I'm going to wipe this off with Mohawk Wax Wash Reducer, which just to get the dust off of it, and this is a product that can help remove any possible contaminants on the surface, although we've seen no evidence of that. This time I won't forget to get some stain on my plugs. This is some thinned out medium brown walnut dye stain. I let that dry for a few minutes and then I'll put a little more on. And just as I did with the top, I'm going to sand the case with 220 and then give it a coat of varnish. There's a crack in the side here. It's got movement. I think I better glue it up so I can work on the drawers while I'm waiting for that to set up. I'm not filling in defects and things like that. I mean, there might be some I might fill in, but most I'm leaving. Now here's the defect I will fill in. This is the bottom edge of the drawer prone to chipping. I want to fill that in to prevent further chipping and then I'll make sure this edge is rounded over well. And I've just noticed that the side has a split in it. Now I'm ready to reinstall the top. If you remember, the top originally was glued down around this entire perimeter, not allowing for seasonal wood movement, and consequently the top cracked. So I'm going to reinstall it. I'm going to use the same board here that has been glued to the bottom and has nicely dovetailed into the case. But in the front, I'm going to screw it down. Now I've cut slotted screw holes in these existing glue blocks, and I also made some new blocks also with slotted holes. I also added some drawer stop swallows at it. I had dry fitted the top and marked off and pre-drilled the screw holes for these slotted holes. You know, the whole idea behind the slotted screw hole is this. So a slotted screw, slotted screw hole rather, will allow this screw to move, will allow the entire top to move, the screw with it. And the clamps on the back have to stay on overnight. Okay, I am anxious to get the first coat of varnish on the case and the drawer front. I still have to finish the knobs, but I'm anxious to get a coat on this so it can be dry. Now my veneer patches, I'm not going to stain those ahead of time. I'm going to put this first coat on, then I'll go back and stain them. They've got pretty good color. I'm going to see what it is before I try staining. Yeah, that's my largest patch right there. Okay, it's dried overnight. I have purposefully gotten the finishing a little bit ahead of the program. I still need to do the knobs. I still need to finish the repair on that one knob. Usually you do all the repairs first, but we have humid weather now and I want to let this finish dry an extra day before I proceed with touch-ups and more coats. So I've got to shape my new piece of wood here to conform to the knob. Just about as I'm getting ready to glue this knob in place, I noticed a big bubble here. It was not obvious before. Sometimes that happens when you put on a coat of finish and it has a little gloss. Suddenly you can see things. As you can see, I found another bubble after I glued that one on camera. So now I'm going to sand. I'm going to sand the case and the drawer fronts. I'm going to use 320 pre-cut gold paper and a gray ultrafine scotch-brite pad. Okay, all sanded. I need to do touch-ups now. Quite often, but not always, I seal the wood before I do the touch-ups. A couple of reasons. Number one, you just don't know what it's going to look like until you get some sealer on, so you don't know how to stain it. And number two, by the wood being sealed, it gives you a little more control over what's going down. This is a good example right here. This is my largest veneer patch, and obviously it looks like it needs a lot of color. But watch what happens when we put it in the upright position. And you can see it looks really good. Looks much better. Just a little light areas here and here, really. This patch clearly needs more color. This is Van Dyke brown dye stain, which I thinned with alcohol. This is that patch, of course, that I did two pieces of veneer to sort of go with the two pieces of veneer that meet here. I noticed when it was in the upright position that this piece didn't show at all. This piece was a little more visible. Now these are wood putty, and they really looked light. Often with putty, the markers work better than dye stain, but here it seems to be working okay. Here's an example where I will stain the bare wood. This is perfect brown dye stain, thinned out. So now I want to give everything a coat of satin tung oil varnish. This might be the last coat. I just won't know until it dries, so I'm going to go with the satin. Okay, I still have to work on these knobs. So I'm just wiping them down with a little bit of alcohol. They seem to have an old kind of crusty finish on them, probably oil from people's hands. And the only way it comes off is with some solvent. Now this is the knob that's already attached to the drawer, and I think my new piece needs a little more stain. Let's see. I'll put some paint thinner on it. Definitely needs more. I think I'll put some full strength perfect brown on there. I had sealed this knob with one coat of varnish, so I'll go over with an ultra fine scotch brite pad. Okay, I've let everything dry here for an hour or so. I'm going to put on a coat of satin tung oil varnish. I'm fitting the drawers, and there's a problem with the top two drawers. They never had pulls or knobs. The way to open them is you had to pull them with the key, and that's always a problem. Just like we have here, there's no keys. And also, in addition, one of the locks is missing. I'm going to take the lock from the bottom drawer and install it where that lock's missing in the purpose of that lock. Drawers are nothing but trouble. I have a new key blank here. I filed it a little bit, so it fits in there. It fits in fine, and you can use it to pull the drawers open, but the locks do not work. And if this key is ever misplaced, well, you can just reach under here and open the drawer. Now we need to install the knobs. Okay, let's try it without the string first. Well, okay, we need something. Maybe I'll try the string. Well, it seems silly, but the string worked. Well, this one works as intended. This one, too. That's unusual. Now I need to install the back. These are the original nails. If I run short, I have these nails. I didn't have to add any nails. I had all the old ones. I haven't done anything to the finish yet. That final coat came out so well. I have very little to do. It's pretty smooth, but you can just feel very minute pieces of dust. So I'm going to go over it with a piece of craft paper. This is a piece of heavy-duty paper from a sturdy paper bag. It feels really smooth now. I'm going to eventually wax this with the beeswax polish I always use, but it's so humid. It's like 83% humidity the past few days. I'm just going to let this varnish dry before I wax it. Wow, so there you have it. This nice little American Empire Chester drawers. In the introduction, I thought it was poplar, but it turned out to be cherry. But this top had a big split in it, so we re-glued the top. I also had to reattach the top in such a manner to allow it to move in the future. A lot of veneer repairs, especially along the base here and then in a few places on the drawers. I repaired one of these knobs, and then I basically refinished it. I didn't use stripper, and I barely sanded it. I just took off the old finish with solvent and then put on a new finish of tung oil varnish. I think this top will hold up pretty well now. I think it looks pretty good.