Making Inlaid Banding for an Antique Console Table - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson of Thomas Johnson Antique Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice little antique table, probably English. A little half round table, maybe a console table you might call it. It's in good shape, except some of this inlay banding around the edge here has broken off and is missing. And so I'm going to need to reproduce that banding, rebuild the edge a little bit, and glue it back down. So the first step will be to cut some rosewood to this dimension. And I've got some a good chunk of rosewood here that the grain looks like a pretty good match. It looks like I got pretty good on the right thickness there. So now I've got my piece of rosewood the right thickness. Now I've got to glue on either side this is probably holly. I have some 16th inch maple veneer that I will use. So now I'll glue these together, make sure the grain on my maple is running the same way. And my maple is a little thick, but that's okay. I'll plane it or sand it down after I cut these, actually before I cut them. I should be able to plane or sand this down to the exact thickness. I've also got some blocks to sandwich this between. Make sure I've got my grain running the same way. Okay let's see what we've got. Okay so far so good. Now I'll trim off a couple of sides and see what it looks like and prepare to take some slices off of it. Okay so here's my inlay but my maple strips are still too thick. I knew they were going to be and before I start slicing off pieces I'll plane this down. Okay I think my thickness on the upper piece here is about right. I'm going to leave the bottom piece thick until after I glue it on. Then I can sand it level. I think I can do it thinner. I've got to cut a few more and then I can start gluing it in place. Okay the next step is to prepare the table to glue down the inlay. Now the places where I've got to put my new inlay in, they need a little repair. The area behind those places has a lot of chipped wood. Maybe that's why the inlay is missing. So I'm going to use a little epoxy putty to fill those areas. Now I've noticed in this area that the piece of holly is still here so I'll have to cut that off of my pieces that I made. My pieces then will just be the rosewood banding and the lower piece of other areas, kind of a long one here and then a shorter one here that I've got to do the same thing to. I've fitted all these pieces dry so now I'll untape them and glue them all back. So now we'll take the clamps off and see what we've got. All right this looks pretty good. Now I've got to sand this level, especially sand the bottom, level that up and then seal it with some shellac. Okay I've sanded my whole area with 100, then 150, and then 220. Now I'm going to tape off this and seal it with a little shellac. I don't want to forget to stain the underside of the apron where I sanded. Okay I've got two coats of shellac. I'm going to sand that with 320 and then I'm going to touch up the maple with a little bit of walnut dye stain. Let that dry stain for a few minutes and I'll hit it with some gloss lacquer. Okay so if you remember this table was missing inlay in two places here and over here so I put together some new inlay and patched it in. I think it looks pretty good.