Restoring a Regency Card Table - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gore, Maine. This is a really nice Regency card table. It means it's from about 1810 to 1820. It's rosewood veneer with brass inlay. And it's not in horrible shape, but it's got quite a few problems. It's got a lot of chipped loose and missing veneer banding along these edges. Some of the brass inlay is coming loose. And the base also has loose veneer. The finish is all spotted. Maybe some water spilled on it or something. And it's also got a spot on the top. The top needs a little bit of attention. I'm hoping I can polish that out. This is a swivel top because it opens up to be a card table, as you can see. The first thing I'm going to do is take this top off. This metal plate here, there must be a bracket in there that holds this on. That should be all that's holding it. Let's see. It still doesn't want to come off, so I think I want to remove the base. There's four screws that hold the base on. Okay, so I just took part of this bottom board off here. And it has been off recently. And here's the other two screws for the bracket. This corner here is a bit of a mess because the panels that make up the inside of the top have shrunk. And the boards that make up the ends did not shrink, so you have this huge gap here. But all we can do, there's no way I can repair that. I'm going to fill in this void, this mortise, with some epoxy putty and smooth it down. Veneer this edge and then veneer this surface. And there's going to be this little corner here. So everywhere I've glued down brass and some of the wood, there's still a little bit of excess glue and adhesive along here. So I'm kind of carefully scraping that off. I've got some spaces here between the brass and the wood. I think there's some slivers of wood that were missing or something. And I'm going to fill those spaces. I'm going to burn in a little wax. Okay, I've filled in this little gap with wax. I've buffed this some with alcohol, cleaned it as best I can. Now I'll French polish it. I use this premixed French polish. Basically shellac. We're missing a couple of the small pieces of brass from the table base. So I'm going to have to find some and maybe cut some. I hope I have some this size. I've got a piece here that's not bad, but it's a little bit wider. I'm going to have to file or sand this down a little bit to get it to be the proper width. That looks like it fits pretty well. I can glue it in. Because this is brass, I'm using a little 5-minute epoxy. Okay, I've got all my repair work done along the edges of the pedestal here. And I've sanded it a little bit. I'm ready to shellac that. But next I'm going to deal with all these spots that sort of look like they're possibly water spots or something that are all over this pedestal. I'm going to pad them with alcohol first. See if that can make the spots go away. The spots seem to go away instantly as I pad. So we'll let it dry and see if they come back. Some of the spots are trying to come back, but I think I'll just pad them a little bit more. All right, now I'll take a clean rag and I'll put a little French polish on it. All right, there you go. This is a really nice Regency card table. If you remember, it just had a lot of loose veneer all along these edges, a brass that was loose, and had a lot of veneer missing and loose and brass loose all around the base here. So we glued everything down. And then it had a bunch of what looked like water spots all over the base and the front. And I was able to polish all that out. And I think it looks pretty good.