Tommy's Tips: Taking a Torch to an Antique Chair - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Whenever a chair is caned, either hand caned like this antique chair or cane webbing, which is the pre-woven webbing, you're left with a lot of fibers sticking up all over the place and you can feel them and you've got to get rid of them. You could either sit here and use a little sandpaper to try to get them off, you could snip at these with little snips, each piece, or you could use an exacto knife to try to snip them off. But another way to do it is to, is a torch them off, and that is a much more dangerous way and therefore much more fun and more appealing. So once you stop seeing all those little flare-ups from the torch, you know you're done and this feels nice and smooth. You have to make sure when you're using the torch that you keep moving. That's good.