Repairing a Drawer in an Antique Cabinet - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Hi, I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson, Antique Furniture Repair in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice old 19th century chest of drawers. It's probably made out of birch stain to look like walnut. And it's kind of interesting because it has graduated drawers, but the largest drawer is on the top and it goes down to the smallest drawer. Anyway, on this job, all I need to do, we're cleaning this piece up, but all I need to do is repair just in one place. This drawer side has been destroyed, maybe repaired before, but I've got to take this off, add on a new piece of wood, cut a dado for the bottom and re-glue the drawer. Okay, first step is to mark all the drawer sides. Now I'm going to gently tap this drawer apart. Someone has nailed these dovetails, but it's either glued or nailed to the bottom here, so I've got to get those nails out. These nails through the bottom of the drawer side don't appear to be into the drawer bottom, but something's kind of holding it up here. But I noticed as I'm tapping this a little bit more, there's more nails. Whoever did this nailed the bottom to this piece of the drawer side, then nailed this piece on. So I'm going to pry this off so I can get to the nails in here. And of course, this piece is scrap. I'm getting rid of it, so I'm not too worried about digging these nails out. Okay, here's these nails. I don't want to dig those nails out because I don't want to hurt the bottom. By wiggling it, I get the nail to project a little above. Now I'm going to place this putty knife here to protect this wood. There we go, good. So now I'm going to trim this drawer side so I can glue on a new piece. This is where the dado was for the drawer bottom, and so I want to cut, you know, a little bit above that. So I've got lots of good wood to glue onto. Okay, the finished drawer side needs to be eight and five-eighths. This, I think, is made of poplar. I have a piece of poplar here that's plenty wide enough. I want to glue up my new piece flush with the inside of the drawer. I'm going to leave it proud on the outside of the drawer, and then tomorrow I'll plane that down. Okay, so here's my drawer side with the new piece of wood. Now I've just got to smooth this up on the inside. I've got to take a little bit more off on the outside to make my new piece the same thickness. Okay, now I'll trim my new piece using the other drawer side for measurement. Now I'm going to rip it to size. Okay, now I need to cut the dado for the drawer bottom. This wood's just a half inch thick, so I don't want to cut into it any more than a quarter of an inch, and that's, I think, that's exactly what the original is. Now, once again, I use the side, the intact side, to set up for these cuts. I grab a piece of scrap wood and test it. Now I compare my test board. Looks like the cut is just right. So now I cut my repair piece. Okay, that looks good. That looks good. Left a little piece of wood in the middle, so I'll adjust the fence. Okay, my dado looks pretty good. Now I've got to cut these dovetails. So in this part here, in the back, it looks like I just need to cut away this little chunk of wood, and this part here looks like I need to cut away this little section here. Okay, now we can glue it up. And here's my drawer all assembled. Here's my new piece. I've sanded it smooth. I've especially sanded the bottom here. I'm going to apply a little bit of stain. I actually gave this a coat of shellac and sanded it, because I didn't want the stain to be too dark. I'll never kind of match this. This is poplar also. It's just kind of naturally aged for 150 years or so. Let's see if I can just darken it up a little bit. Okay, let that dry. Just wax this up. A little bit of paste wax. I waxed the other side too, because the sides kind of rub against the case. So I waxed up the sides. I waxed up the inside of the case. Let's see how it works. It works great. The wax really helps. So in this nice old chest of drawers, this drawer didn't work very well. The side was all torn up. So I took the drawer apart, glued a new piece of wood on it, and recut it and glued it back together. Now it works pretty well.