Restoring Midcentury Modern Chairs by Paul McCobb - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration, in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice set of six Paul McCobb dining chairs. They're number 432 from the Linear Group. Paul McCobb was a well-known designer. His work is represented in quite a few museums. He worked from the late 40s to the mid-60s. The finish, you know in the catalogs I've looked at online, they describe the finish as a warm walnut. I don't see that in these chairs at all. They look more like the typical finish from that period that was bleached and glazed. A lot of the wood, you can see it's walnut. Some of the wood, particularly the seat frames, don't look like walnut. One of the chairs has a darker color, more like a walnut, maybe even you might describe as a warm walnut. So I don't really know what's going on here. As we work on the chairs, though, we'll get more hints as to what the original finish might have been. But I'm not going to change the finish much. There's some areas that are greatly deteriorated that are going to need some work. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do to them yet. We'll figure that out as we go along. This is the only one of the six chairs that has these screws going through the seat like that into the leg. They all have these eyes with a screw. Boy, these screws don't want to come out. I'm going to apply some heat to them. That's two minutes on medium. Boy, that screw is not going to move. So I'm thinking, well, maybe these back joints don't need to come apart. They're pretty good. I thought they would just come apart. But maybe I can glue the stretchers and the back without taking it apart. The fact that three of these stretcher joints came loose really makes me want to get the fourth one here. I'll apply a little heat to it. I think maybe I'll try loosening these corner screws, the screws that go through the eye, which is common to all the chairs, and maybe I'll be able to make it a little bit easier to get to these stretchers. Man, these suckers are tight, too. Got to hope the screw isn't breaking. Yep. It's so rusted in there, it just broke. This side seems to be coming out, though. All right, so I've just got to try and drill that out. A brand new bit for the occasion. I think I'll use a larger bit. That way I can use that eye as a, you know, sort of be a guide to hold it in place. Now I'll go in with a quarter-inch bit. I think this is probably the best bet, but I'm going to replace this original one, too. I'm really seeing how badly rusted it is. It's no wonder the other one broke. This one here is completely rusted out in this area here. The metal is gone. Okay, you know, I've noticed as I've been working here, trying to scrape that, that this front leg is a little loose. I think I'm going to try to pop this stretcher out of here to facilitate that. I can do a better job on this front leg. All right, I'm going to glue it up. I'm going to use a glue that's new to me. It's a pre-mixed high glue called Old Brown Glue. And it seems really sturdy. All right, now we'll tackle an armchair. This is so interesting under here. You know, you can tell so much if you turn a piece of furniture over. This wood, which I assume is walnut, it doesn't look like walnut. It's so light in color. This chair must have been, all this furniture must have been heavily bleached at the factory. And then here's the glaze that they used. You can see evidence of it. And these chairs have never been refinished as far as anyone knows. So that must be original. Boy, this is a relief. There's something strange about that first chair. When a little chip out like this occurs when I was pulling that out, it's important to glue that back where it belongs right away. Now note, I'm marking every joint, even though it's completely obvious as to which arm goes where, you should mark a piece up as if someone else is going to put it back together. Wow, look at that. Someone had run a dowel from underneath up at an angle into that joint. And now look what you've got. If I could just do a quick little rant here. People often ask in the comment section after I've glued something back together, geez, why didn't you run a dowel through there or put a screw in there or something? And sometimes I might do that. But it is way overrated and serves more often to weaken, especially if it's in an area where there's joinery involved, more often it's superfluous or not even superfluous. It actually weakens the joint. This piece is not going to come out of there. I will leave it there. And when I glue the leg back, I'll glue that. But I can still glue up this bit right now. All right, now I just have a lot of scraping to do on all these joints. Boy, aren't we glad we marked everything. You know, it's funny. I just realized I was going to leave these dowels that someone angled in there. I was going to leave them. But then I just realized I can't put the legs back on. They broke taking them off. I've got to trim those off. Good, now it freed up that sliver so I can glue it back where it belongs. It doesn't look like walnut, does it? Well, that was quite the frantic little glue-up there. It's always tough when you're gluing an entire chair. And then to be using a sort of time-sensitive glue and be videotaping yourself all at the same time makes for an exciting glue-up. Wow, this chair is solid. So I'm going to glue up the other chairs off-camera. If something unusual comes up, I'll video that. And in the meantime, I've got two chairs glued up. We can start working on the finish. All right, now we can begin the touch-up process. And I'm going to concentrate on these two chairs, which have the worst problems. Here on this arm, the finish is really flaking a lot. The arms are very dirty, you know, from people's arms. And in this area, the finish is really deteriorated. Similar to this chair, which has some really bad deterioration. Looks like sun damage. You can see bleached out here, too. But the first step, always, is to clean these. And I'm going to use my favorite cleaner, Krud Kutter. It's a degreaser, which is really important. These arms, you especially want to get all oil and any other contaminants off the chairs. Typically, I'll mix the Krud Kutter, one part Krud Kutter, to ten parts water. And I like using hot water. You see how all that discoloration disappeared when it was wet. And that's a really good sign. Same thing on this front rail. Boy, whatever that black mark is, it doesn't seem to be coming off. It looks like something dripped on there. I'm just not sure if there's anything you can do about that. That's what came off those two chairs. Not bad. This is probably the worst area on all the chairs. I'm just going to pad a little lacquer thinner on it. Just kind of want to see what happens. Yeah, the lacquer thinner seems like it might have dissolved the finish a little bit and smoothed it out. I believe this is compatible with lacquer. Probably is a nitrocellulose lacquer finish on there. That's what I would judge by the way the finish looks and the age of it. And so I'll be able to re-spray this with my acrylic aerosols. So first I'll sand lightly with a little 320 gold. Now I know it seems like I sprayed a lot on this chair. Almost like I'm spraying the whole chair, but I'm not. You know, the crest rail is fine, a lot of it's fine. And most of the other chairs, I think, need hardly any aerosol at all. There's just a few bare spaces. I'll be able to polish those up, and I'll polish this one up when all this lacquer dries. Okay, I finished spraying all the places where there was raw wood with the lacquer aerosol. Let everything dry overnight. Now I'll go over the entire chairs with my favorite beeswax polish. And even though I cleaned these chairs, I still will just go over with a little steel wool. I guess just have it. Well, so there you go. A nice set of Paul McCobb dining chairs. Six chairs, two armchairs, which is nice. These are number 432 from the Linear Collection. And they needed, you know, as you remember, they needed a lot of re-gluing. And then the finish was pretty badly damaged in some areas. And so I spot-finished, I cleaned and spot-finished those areas, like the arms, some of the stretchers. One of them had a lot of damage on the side here. And all of them needed lacquer on the feet, you know, the very bottom of the legs. Could have made a case for refinishing them, but I decided to clean them and wax them and the polish worked really well. They look great. They're all original. I have about 15 hours in this job. And, well, I think they look pretty good. 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