Masterful Restoration of a Federal Card Table - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson, Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a very nice antique federal card table that means 1790 to 1820. It's a card table because it has a fly leg, swings out, and supports the top. In my book on card tables, one of the characteristics of this table, namely this very nice turned leg, seemed to indicate that it's from the north shore of Massachusetts, possibly the Salem area. And so what's happened is, in an accident, this table got pushed forward, fell down, and it broke the whole front part of this apron. You see there's parts loose here and a big crack all along here. And that's what needs to be repaired. I want to see if I can take this top off of here. It's held on by about five screws. And you can see how the apron is made up. There's a couple of big boards that were glued together, then it was sawed out. There's a lot of short grain here. Over here where the molding is missing, you can see that the entire apron is short grain. And sure enough, that's where it's breaking. And you can see that this outside layer veneer basically helps hold the whole thing together. Two screws in the back are just missing altogether. Oh well, we'll fix that later. Well, this is quite a mess here. I'm not sure exactly how to proceed here. I think I've got to glue this section up first, and then maybe do this afterwards. But I'm a little unsure. I think I'll start clamping this up dry without glue. And we have quite a few of the missing pieces. I don't think we have them all, but there's a few. And those screws that were missing from the back, they were in the envelope with the pieces. So I've been fooling around with a few different ways to clamp this. And I've got a few issues here. I've got to bring this part together this way to where it's supposed to be. And I've got to clamp downwards or this way to bring them together. But I've also got to clamp the front of this to make sure that the whole front surface is all lined up exactly where it's supposed to be. And I've also realized while I was working here that the table just can't stand here with clamps all over the front of it. I've got to move it back to my bench. Okay, off camera I clamped this all up dry without glue. And I can never understate the importance of gluing something up dry first so you know what you're going to do. And so I'm ready to go. And I've heated up some hide glue. This is a piece of regular quarter inch this came out great. Nice and level. It's all together. Now let's see if I can get this next piece in here successfully. There's a lot of glue on here. So they're fine. Now I've got two more pieces that I can glue in here. So that's next. I wish I had glued this piece in when I did this whole first glue up. I didn't realize it at the time. But it just means I need to undercut the back of it a little bit so I can fit it in there. Now before I do this next glue up, take a look at this inlay right here. so now I've got two missing pieces here, a large piece missing, and some inlay missing here. First steps wash all this glue off. It just takes water. These side panels is a flame figure. I gotta assume it's mahogany. This center field looks more like birch to me. Wood identification is always difficult, especially when it's figured wood like that. I brought down all my sleeves to any kind of figure and I'm gonna see what I can find. It's got some nice figure to it. It's got bird's eye too, but maybe I can work around that. Here's some good stuff. I wouldn't think to find any in the walnut. This is nice and light. Look at this area here. Crotch walnut. This is good stuff and I like that color and the figure. These are scraps from Joe Van Benton, furniture maker in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Here's some maple though. Look at that. That could be good. This stuff too, especially where you have these mineral spots in it. Now I don't expect to find that inlay, but at least I'll look. Maybe I have some possibilities. This is my box of inlay, which is just a cardboard box. I've been meaning to build a better one for years, but I also have this box of inlay, which I recently inherited from my dad's shop. My oldest brother ran my dad's shop for like 45 years and he passed away two years ago and so I inherit this ancient box of inlay from my dad's shop. Wow, going through all this inlay is neat. I'm putting it all together by types and I finally found a use for all these wire ties I've been hanging on to, so it's nice to get these organized. I did actually find some pieces that might work for the table. Most of the new inlay is just not that good for restoration. It's very rare to find anything that matches, but you can piece together stuff. You can make your own inlay. These are lots of examples here inlay and process that was used, and you can also have inlay made by Matt Bergenack at inlaybanding.com. This is inlay that I had Matt make. I know that after I patch this I'm going to have to sand it, so I'm going to sand it a little bit now so I can get a better look at what kind of wood this is. I think we can make this work, and I found a piece of veneer here that I'm liking even better. I'm liking this area right in here. I think if that part of the patch is right in here, that should work out fine. Well, for all that careful cutting, I still have a few gaps here and there, but that's what they make putty for. and I did find something similar that I could cut up and use, but it's not exactly right. I may see if it's feasible to piece something together, so I'm going to try to make some of that inlay. I've got a piece of ebony veneer here. I have lots of strips of holly and ebony. Let's just see if I can piece them together. Okay, I've got all my parts cut. I'm ready to go. I'm using hot hide glue, so I've got a heater here, a little radiator, heating this up. I need a lot of working time. That's why I had to take off my sweatshirt. First thing I'm going to do is take the and I think it's because these strips maybe are slightly different widths, and I don't know if I can get it going again or not. I have to double up and get back on track here. All right, this is one of those days where you wake up and can't wait to get in the shop So the next step is I want to clean out this groove where the inlay goes. I want to do that first before I slice it because I think that my inlay is a little bit too fat, maybe by a 30 second. Now I have a little piece of the original inlay that I took out of that groove over there, and I'm going to glue that in right here. All right, the glue is dried. I'm going to trim this inlay down and then sand. So I've done these two little patches off camera. They were much the same as the big patch, and I've got lots of little places here to use wood putty on, and then I'm going to sand this entire front apron from leg to leg. Now I'm sanding with 150. I just want to be as careful as possible. I don't want to sand any more than I need to. These pieces of tape have got to just be sanded off. I like the grain of the patch, and luckily it's a little browner. Luckily this molding is loose. The reason I say luckily is because I need to measure the thickness of it. I need to make a new molding for this spot over here. It looks like 9 30 seconds. I was going to remove this molding to trace the curve, but I realized it's much longer. What I really need to know is the length of this. So I started poking around, and this molding on this side is loose. So I'll remove this side, and I can trace it out exactly. Yeah, this piece fits perfectly here, so this is a good template for my new piece. I'm just going to sand the round over. I want to get some stain and finish on this before I install it. I've got some walnut dye stain here. These certainly appear to be the original nails. They've been making these nails for 200 years. That's a little bit late for this table. I was hoping it'd be the same company that made these nails, but these look more like kind of like wrought nails, whereas these nails are cut nails. Well, the stain is dried, so now I'll give it a coat of shellac, and I'm going to use garnet shellac. That's really a dark amber shellac, and a regular shellac is much lighter. I'll show you. This is regular shellac. Just what you'd expect. There's your garnet, and look at the color of the garnet next to the colors you see here. Okay, I can put this molding back on now. All right, this is dried enough so I can install it now. I'm going to pre-drill some holes in this this whole front apron really well with 220, up to 220. I sanded with 150 and 220, and now a coat First, I'm going to put some stain on this molding here. I'll smooth it a little with a gray pad. This is a thinned out perfect brown dye stain. I've let this dry overnight, so now I'm going to sand this with 320. I'm going to go over my touch-ups again, and then I'm going to adjust the color a little bit. This is a small brush tip marker. Even though I did these yesterday with a dye stain, I think I brushed on the shellac too soon and took some of the stain off. Now, back to what I said about adjusting the color. This front panel looks great, but if you look at the other panels, they're different. This panel is a little brighter and a little orangier. I think what I need to do is go over it with some raw umber aerosol toner. Well, that looks good so far. At least I haven't screwed it up yet. The maple looks perfect, the maple field. I'm going to let this dry, tape this off, and then I need to spray the mahogany part again. So, off camera, I sprayed it one more time with the raw umber, and I think it looks really good now. And so, now I'm going to spray the whole repair area. I'll remove this tape with aerosol shellac. I'm using the aerosol because I just don't want to disturb all the color work I've got here. I've let this dry overnight, and now I'm going to sand with 800. All right, I'm going to wipe it off with a little bit of solvent here, paint thinner type to let this first coat dry, and I've got work to do on the rest of the table. Okay, here's the top. The top looks great. It looks like birch to me, which I guess goes along with this being a New England piece. It's got a nice old kind of brushed-on finish. I guess that means it's probably varnish. It's been damaged some, I suppose, maybe when in the accident it's got some gouges and scratches here, but I'm not going to refinish this top. I think it looks great. The edge is banded with cross-grain banding vertically, and then more inlay, and it's got the usual kind of cracks and stuff that you would expect, that kind of construction. If I find anything that's loose, I'll glue it down. Anything that's missing, I'll fill in with some wax, but I'm not going to mess with it too much. So the top has six or seven gouges like this. This is by far the worst one, and I'm going to fill those in with the heated wax sticks. First step always is to clean it. I like using a commercial cleaner degreaser like this one. Spray it on the rag, and then use a patting motion. So as you're cleaning, and the rag keeps coming up cleaner and cleaner, also the rag starts sliding very easily, and you know that the surface is clean. And not only that, the top looks great. I think I'm only going to need to wax this after I do the repairs. Now I'll fill these defects. You know, usually after dripping the wax into the defect, I then take a larger flat blade like this and smooth it out, and then wipe away the excess with the rag. And the thing I never liked about that was it kind of dishes out the wax a little bit. So this time after dripping it in, I'm just trying to shave it off with a razor blade. It seems to be working well. Now any light scratches, or even in some of the places that were too shallow around my wax fill-ins, I'll hit with a little color. Oh, I can't forget this loose bit on the edge. And there's a place for a wax fill-in too. All right, I'm ready to begin the waxing, and I'm using Bree Wax. That's a tinted white brown. That'll help color in any scratches or minor defects, hopefully. Kind of like scratch And that's like a polish with a little bit of stain in it. You know, I just want to get rid of all these marks, mostly on the feet here and a couple of other places. Now I want to wipe off as much of that scratch cover as I can with a paper towel. A paper towel seems to be the best for getting it all off. The legs and aprons look like they don't need anything else after the scratch cover, but it'll dull after a little while. So I'll wax them. It'll make it easier to wax, and that should keep the the sheen. And I'll use a little steel wool to apply the wax to these side panels, just to help smooth them out. There you have it, a really nice federal card table. In other words, it opens up. It has a beautiful birch top, which is unusual in my experience, but you know, further indication that it was made here in New England. But it also has special meaning to the owner of this table, as it once belonged to the novelist Kenneth Roberts. If you remember, this whole apron was broken. I glued it all back together, did a small patch there, a new piece of inlay. I wish it matched better, but it's kind of neat. And I think it looks pretty good. 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