Restoring a Queen Anne Looking Glass - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a really nice antique mirror frame, Queen Anne style. It's probably from before 1750. It's a period antique. It fell from the wall and sort of broke apart, but not bad. It broke at the joints. They must have been loose already. We have the moldings that came off. We have the back, which is the original back, and a nice piece of old glass. It's made of walnut and it's actually, except for the obvious things that have happened to it, it's in really good shape. So I need to re-glue the frame and glue the moldings back on again. So one of the first things I need to do here is take this apart. This is coming apart. You can see these old nails here. I'm going to try to keep those nails. I also see evidence of what appears to be a spline. So I've got to work these other joints apart and figure out exactly what I've got. The next step will be to remove the new nails that are here. I think there's just a few in these top joints. Now I'm going to scrape as much as I can. I'm going to scrape around I can. Did pretty good. Now I'm going to glue it back together. I've left the original nails in place and I'm going to use those to guide these back together. I'm going to start the assembly when I get them close. Then I'll put the glue in there and I'll clamp it together. If you remember, there's these little splines here just in the bottom of the frame. I'm not going to attempt to replace those. They're really small. They did the spline, then veneered over the edge, so that would be a problem. I don't think they do much good. After the glue up, I'm going to add of each other. I also had to make sure this is square. It's really square. It's good. All the joints are together, so I think I'm good. Okay, I've let this set up overnight. All right, this seems nice and strong and it's nice and flat, so it's great. I think the next thing I'm going to do, I'm going to glue some very thin braces on the exterior of these corners just to give it a little strength because the back, when I go to put the back on, that sits inside the frame. The back doesn't really help this frame, so I feel the need to put something across here. It'll just be some superficial thin pieces of wood in the corners, so I've got some eighth-inch maple scrap I'll use to cut these little corner pieces. So the theory is that these little triangles will give some support to this frame, but they're just superficial. If anybody ever wanted to take them off in the future, they could. Before I start gluing on these moldings on the other side, I should have done this when I had it apart, but I want to remove... There's little blocks of wood that held in the glass and nails that held in the wooden back, and I'm going to remove those right now. All right, now I can start. I have all these pieces which came off. I've got to figure out where they go, and then I can scrape the old glue off and glue them down. Now, you may have noticed on the molding on the frame that there's a lot of sections with spaces between the sections, sections like these, and that's because the grain of the molding runs perpendicular to the grain of the frame. The molding has shrunk up, leaving all these spaces, so as I glue these pieces back, Now I'm going to take a damp rag and just go over the frame looking for any hide glue that needs to be cleaned off. Okay, before I go any further on the frame, I'm going to turn it over and install the glass and the back. As I turn this over, I realize there are some support pieces glued to the back of this upper section that were missing when it came in, but I need to find some thin strips of wood that can bend a little bit with this cupped top section and glue those on. I realized too when I turned this over that I had this little piece of wood taped to the back, and it came from this corner right here. You know, when the wood, this edge is veneered, and when the wood, when the frame itself shrunks on it, push this area out, and that came off, but I think I can, I think I can get it right back there where it came from. All right, I found some nice pieces of an eighth inch pine in the scrap wood box, and I cut them to fit in these three spaces, so I'll just scrape the old glue and glue them down. So, I've still got to put some stain on my new pieces, but first I've talked it over with the owner of the mirror, and all these cracks between these sections of molding, I'm going to fill those with a little wax that's called low heat burning stick. It's just a hard wax that you melt into and I hold this up and kind of look at it, though I see some places where the wax looks a little light, so I'll use a fine grain marker like this one to touch them up a bit, just in some areas. I don't really know if this is the original piece of glass or not. It's certainly very old. I think the original glass might have been a lot thinner than this piece. This is kind of a heavy piece of glass, but I don't know that much about it. So, there we have it. This is a really nice 18th century Queen Anne looking glass, and of course it fell off the wall because the old wire in the back broke, so I re-glued the frame and re-glued a lot of these pieces of molding around the perimeter of the glass. I think it looks pretty good.