Repairing Surface Defects with Wax Sticks - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. And today I want to talk about the different methods that I use to repair surface defects when restoring furniture. In other words, I mean like nail holes, deep scratches, maybe minor defects or separations in the wood that are felt to be unsightly. There's a couple of ways to do these repairs that are not necessarily reversible, depending on the situation. On the rare occasions that I need to epoxy something together, I like using the West System Epoxy, two part epoxy. It's a marine grade epoxy and I can add these dry colors to it. So when I glue, say a defective part back together, the colored epoxy will fill the cracks and defects that remain. Usually if I'm epoxying something, it's because it's shattered or something. And so it's great to sort of pre-fill all those cracks with the epoxy. Another filler I like to use is epoxy putty sticks, or some people call it Tootsie Roll Epoxy. You cut a piece, you massage it together until it forms a uniform color. And that's a good filler. It can be extremely hard, can be tough to sand, but it can also be used when you don't want to sand because you can scrub away the excess before it dries entirely. And that can be really a good filler when you're not sanding. Now when you're doing a regular refinishing job, when you really have to strip and sand something, we use wood putty. I like Fama wood, and this is, you know, you apply to defects and it has to be sanded level. Usually I don't use these unless I really am sanding an area and need to re-stain it, spot finish it anyway. But what I want to mostly focus on in this video are the reversible techniques that I use, and I use these a lot. One of the kind you're most familiar with are these kind of wax sticks, which you can get at your local hardware store. And they're a pencil with a peel-away covering. And these you just rub in until the defect gets filled, and then you clean away the excess with a rag. And these really come in handy for a lot of different projects. I have these that you get at the hardware store, and then these are the professional grade I get from finishing supply companies. And what I also want to talk about a lot are these burnin' wax sticks. These generate a lot of questions on my videos. And so I have an oven here with knives that have heated up, and here we have wax sticks. These wax sticks remind me of ski wax if you've ever waxed your skis. If you haven't waxed your skis, you should. And these sticks are great. They're very hard. They melt in with a knife into the defect, and then as they cool, they harden again. But you can still wipe away the excess with a rag. All right, let me demonstrate a few of these techniques with the wax sticks. Here's just a sample board, and it's got kind of a wicked scratch in it. And I think I can do a pretty good job on that with the rub-in wax sticks. So as you can see, I'm rubbing, you know, across the scratch here until I can see that it's filled. And then I can rub off the excess just with a rag. So there you go. The scratch is filled. It's still visible right now, but it's filled. So although I used my darkest wax stick, this wood is so dark it still leaves a little bit of color. So I'll go back with this graining marker and touch it up a bit. Yeah, that worked really well. You know, when we're storing an antique furniture, we're trying not to make them perfect. So the scratch was unacceptable before. Now it's acceptable. So now I want to demonstrate these low-heat wax sticks. That's what they're called. This is a situation you come across a lot in some old chairs and stuff where there's a screw in the chair, and it's maybe a screw that's originally put in the chair, but it's very, very shallow, and there's not enough room to plug it. So I like to fill those kind of screw holes with the low-heat burning stick, because then in the future, if someone needs to get that screw out, it really would be pretty easy to dig that putty away and get a screwdriver in these slots. All right, so I'll let that cool for a little while and then wipe off the excess. One of the problems with wax sticks, you know, is you can't dish them out when you're wiping it off. So it's good to let that cool down completely before you wipe it off with the rag. Okay, you know, the color of the wax is good. It's not perfect on this dark piece of walnut. A lot of times in the context of an antique piece of furniture, the color doesn't need to be, you know, perfect. But if you need to, you can go over that wax either with these graining markers that I bought or even just a little bit of dye stain and an artist's brush. Yeah, so that wax worked really well. I mean, you're always limited to the colors that you have on hand. They're not always perfect. So it's great to go put a little color over the wax. It works fine. So here's a real-life example. This is a piece of furniture I'm currently working on. And here in this veneered area, there's a crack here, separation between two pieces of veneer, and then another place here on the corner where it doesn't quite meet. And these aren't big enough to put wood into. I don't want to sand these areas. And so the burn-in wax is perfect for these. And in addition, there's an area here, a little brad hole or something, which we'll do with the rub-in wax. And in fact, we'll start with that. Now, I can see right away that this color is too red, which brings up another little side note. Whenever you're doing any touch-up, any filling or anything, it can't be redder than the surrounding area. I'm just going to worry that out a little bit with my fingernail and use the next darker stick. It's okay if your putty is, or your wax, rather, is a little bit darker. All right, now I'll use the low-heat burn-in wax for these cracks here. Yeah, so you could have conceivably have done these with the rub-in type stick, but especially the one on the corner, it's too big and too deep. It would really dish out a lot on you. You can see that with the hot knife, I was able to level it off quite a bit, even prior to wiping away the excess. These look really good. So, like I said, the defect is still there, but especially in this corner and this one, just about unnoticeable. And will really be even more so when I finish the whole piece. So I hope this video was helpful today, just covering this one aspect of the restoration process. And, you know, although my videos usually cover the restoration of an entire piece, I've made other videos which cover specific tasks used in the restoration process. I've done which glue do I use, glazing and toning, staining, clamping. So thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe if you like this, and hit the bell icon so you'll be notified of future videos. And, you know, it's not always the case with these kind of surface defects, but the ones I did today look pretty good.