Repairing Buckled Veneer - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

We've got a new camera, so if you've got the bandwidth, click the gear icon in the corner of the video player, select your preferred quality, and enjoy the video in HD. I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson, Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is an antique cabinet to which I'm doing a lot of veneer repairs, but there's one area here I want to show in this video. This is an area where the core has shrunk and the veneer has buckled. This is a very common thing we see. What I'm going to do is I'm going to heat up this buckled veneer with a heat gun, work hide glue under it everywhere I can, and then just clamp it down, and then we'll see how well it worked when I take the clamp off. The veneer, as it heats up, is just becoming very, very flexible. I'll keep heating it until I feel it's as flexible as I can get it. I think I've got this about as hot as I dare, and it definitely is more pliable. I might point out I'm using hide glue here. I think it'll be really compatible with the hide glue that's under here, but you can, you know, you could actually use any kind of carpenter's glue. Okay, I'm just warming this up a little bit before I put the column on. This is a board I use a lot for veneering. It's got a camber to it so that when I put the clamps on each end and apply pressure, it'll apply pressure all the way across this board. All right, tomorrow we'll see how well it went down. The beauty of it is is that if part of it didn't go down the way I want it to or anything else that's wrong, I can heat it up and redo it. Hopefully I won't need to. Okay, let's see what we got. Wow, all that buckling went down. It's flat. Now, I got to get this, all this excess glue off of here to see what I've got. I'll get a damp rag and a scrubby pad and clean that off and then have a better look. Okay, all that glue came off pretty easily, and now with the glue off, I can see that there are some areas where some of the veneer is sticking up, where maybe it overlapped a little bit, but I'll let this dry. I've got more veneer to glue down over here, and then I'll sand this and see how it sands out. I think it'll sand flat. Luckily, this veneer's got some thickness to it. Okay, this is sanding up nice and flat. I got a little sanding to do. I've got to use some putty and the cracks and defects and sand everything flat, but I can tell that when I get the first coat of finish on here, it's going to look pretty good.