Repairing an Antique Card Table's Broken Leg - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice little half round card table. It opens up. It's actually a round card table when you open it up. I don't think it's a period piece, but it is pretty old. Maybe it's over 100 years old. I'm not sure. It's a very nice table. Solid mahogany. Of course, the apron's not solid, but it's veneered with a really nice mahogany veneer with an inlay. The top is solid mahogany, and it's what's called a plum pudding mahogany, and I've only seen that figure in veneer. I've never seen it in solid wood like this. The main problem with this table, though, that I've got to address is this leg is broken off. The legs are attached with a bridle joint throughout here, as is very common, and it's broken along those parts. I'm going to turn this over, remove the top, and figure out exactly what I'm going to do to repair this. Now you can see what I'm dealing with here. You get a good idea. A bridle joint is a joint that saddles the apron here, and the problem is it creates some weak spots. First thing I'm going to do is take these screws out and remove the top from the base. You can see I've taped the screws where they go so I can be sure to get them right back in the same holes they came out of. I think the first thing I'm going to do here is glue this leg right back where it goes, and of course, I've got to make sure that it ends up in the right place. I can take a measurement from this leg to this leg. These legs are both strong. I'll take that measurement, and I'll take a piece of scrap wood. I'll figure out my measurements. I'll tack it to the bottom of that leg, and I'll tack the other end on this leg with that exact same measurement. Anyway, it'll end up hopefully right where it's supposed to be. So I want to get my measurement center to center. I've got like 25 and 7 eighths, 15 sixteenths, somewhere like that. I think that looks about right. I've mixed up some high-strength epoxy here because, let's face it, I've got terrible glue joints. So I want to get as much out of this as I can. Now that came together really well. All right, let's see what happens tomorrow. All right, let's see what we've got. Well, the leg seems good and strong. Now, I still want to strengthen it, so there's still some of the old repairs. Somebody put a nut and bolt in here. I'm going to remove that, and I'm going to remove this screw, and then I'm going to route in a spline in the back of this leg through all the broken area. I love how this guy just put a big old nut and bolt right through the leg. Yeah, this seems to be just some kind of putty. It doesn't seem to be a screw slot in there. I guess I've just got to tap it out. There it goes. I thought it was going to give me more problem than that. After I do my repairs on the other side, I'll plug that with the mahogany plug. So now I've got my hardware out of there. I want to clamp this down to the bench. I've got a little template guide here I made on the table saw, which I'll clamp on the back of this leg right where I want it, and that'll allow me to run my router straight down there where I want to put the spline. All right, I'm going to prepare this table for the routing. I'm going to clamp it to the bench here. I'm going to put a piece of tape right here where I want to route because I want to mark out the exact middle of this leg to use as a guide. So now I can position my template right where I want to route that wood in. Now I realized I made my template narrow because of the curvature of the base. That doesn't leave me much room to clamp it down, so I drilled some holes in the template and I'm going to screw it to the table here routed out and I've come just a little bit shy of halfway through the tenon that is this apron. I don't want to cut away too much of that, but I think it's going to be good and strong. Now I want to square off this rounded part where the router bit stopped. All right, I've got my piece of wood all milled up ready to glue in here. You know, typically when I'm repairing antiques I'll use hide glue. Sometimes when I'm gluing in a new piece of wood like this I'll use yellow glue, but my routing out this mortise has revealed some rotted wood back here and some other voids and especially this rotted part. I think I'm going to use epoxy on this joint. I feel like I've really got to fill that and strengthen it somehow. Boy, it's taking a lot to fill up the voids. I'm not sure where it's going. Let me make sure it's not just running out the other side. That's it till tomorrow. Okay, so there's my spline in there. Everything seems good. I'm going to sand this down, plane this end down, sand this down, and fill in these gaps with epoxy putty. Okay, now I've got to plug this old hole where the bolt was. Now I've got a nice plug here, some nice dark mahogany, but the hole isn't really three-eighths. It's kind of weird and it's a little sloppy, so I've got to drill it out. Now I've got to drill this out. I don't know if you've ever experienced this yourselves, but sometimes when you're doing something like that the drill bit can grab the edges and do something crazy and make the hole not as neat as you'd like it to be. There's a little trick to that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start off by drilling in reverse. I know it's counterintuitive, but it'll get the hole started and it won't grab. Now I'll put the drill in its forward position. Now I'll taper this edge of this plug a little bit. All right, now that the plug is tapered I can start it in there and I'll be able to pound it down in there. It'll be pretty good. My goal is to get this smooth enough that I don't have to sand it. I really would like to not sand this surrounding area. All right, so now I've finished sanding my spline. The original wood is pretty dark and doesn't need to be stained. I'm just going to try to stain this piece as best I can with some dye stain before I then seal it with some shellac. I can't forget about that plug on the other side. I'm just going to put shellac on the plug, not the surrounding area, and I need to darken it with some more dye stain too, but I'll do that after I seal it. My shellac is dried so I'm just going to sand it lightly with some 500 paper and then tape off around my spline. Tone it with some van dyke brown toner. My plug is a little trickier because I really don't want to get any finish on the surrounding area so I'm going to sand this carefully. This is a little van dyke brown dye stain. All right, now I'm going to take the tape off and I have some little touch-ups I'm going to do where there's some putty and I'm going to spray the whole area just lightly with the same toner. Back to that little plug on the front, I'm just going to brush some shellac directly on the plug. Okay, now I want to spray one final sealer coat or seal everything in rather with a flat aerosol. Now I want to spray just my little plug there so I'm going to tape that off. So to tape off that plug I got a piece of scrap plywood, put a piece of tape on it. So now I'll place this over my plug but I'm not even going to let the circle touch the wood. I'm going to have the whole piece of tape raised above it a little bit. All right, I think my touch-ups look pretty good so I'm going to attach this swing leg and then I'm going to use the beeswax polish with some 4-0 steel wool on this base and then attach the top. All right, there we go, this nice little card table. Basically all that was wrong with it was that the leg was broken. This leg here which I repaired. I showed you the beautiful top. This was all scratched up but I just cleaned it and brushed on a coat of the tung oil varnish and then the rest of it went over it with the beeswax polish and yeah I think it looks pretty good.