Restoring a Jacobean Revival Cupboard - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Here we have a nice oak carved piece of furniture. It's a reproduction piece, Jacobean style. Probably from the early part of the 20th century, so it's 100 years old or so. Really nice piece of furniture, all solid oak. Even the backs and secondary pieces are all oak. It has a few problems. This dowel is broken on the center pillar, so I'm going to replace that dowel. This one doesn't seem to want to work correctly and doesn't want to line up there, so I'll figure that out. And also, more importantly, the top has become separated right along the joint. We've got a big 1⁸ inch gap here. I've got to take this top off, re-glue it, and then I'm going to re-finish the top. It's also got some flaws here where the finish has worn off. And then for the rest of the case, we'll just give it a cleaning and a waxing with beeswax polish, and I think it will look pretty good. This top seems to be okay. It's always interesting how they used this piece is so well made, but they screwed this top down from underneath, not accounting in any way for the expansion of the wood. So I've taken the screws out, but now I can see that somebody has nailed the top down through the top. Okay, top's all glued up. Now we're going to strip it. Okay, now I'm ready to sand this top. It doesn't need too much sanding, but where I glued these two boards together, it's pretty level, but there's a couple places where it's not level. So I'm going to scrape that area and then sand the rest of the top. Now I'm going to apply a dark walnut oil stain. Okay, the stain is dried, and I'm going to put on a thin coat of shellac. So now the shellac has dried overnight. I'm going to sand it lightly with some 320 paper. Now I'm going to fill this top with paste with filler, which is silica mixed with oil, some sort of medium, and color. And the filler will actually fill in the grain somewhat and give me a smoother finish and a better finish. And it's also going to give me an effect that I need to match the case of this piece. My filler's dried overnight. I'm going to sand it just lightly with 220 and wipe it off with Naptha. Now I'll brush on my first coat of varnish. I've let the first coat dry now for a couple days. I'm going to sand it with 320 paper and put on a coat of semi-gloss varnish. Okay, so now I need to reattach the top to the case. The way that this top was attached originally, it had three screws through this front rail, and then it had screws through the back style here that held the top in place. And I think that's why the top cracked and why I had to re-glue it. It wasn't allowed to expand and contract. What I'm going to do, there happens to be a sturdy structural piece of wood going across here. I'm not going to use those holes from the original installation. I'm going to drill a hole here on the other side also, and I'm going to elongate those holes so the screw can move. So now you can see that when I screw to the top, this screw can move with the top. Now I'm not going to tighten this really, real tight. I want it to be able to move. So now I've got to repair the broken dowel on the support that goes on the front of the piece. It's a three-quarter inch dowel. Three-quarter inch. So that's going to be tough to drill. I'm going to have to do that on the drill press. This broken part in the piece, I'm going to drill with a smaller bit and see if I can dig it out. The pieces of broken-off dowel are not coming out of this hole like I thought they were. I think maybe somebody had glued it in there. It's not supposed to be glued. So I've chipped out as much as I can. Now I'm going to drill it. With a big bit like this, it could really be a problem trying to start it in this hole. So I'm going to run the bit in reverse. Now I've got to rub out this top. I'm going to sand it with some 500 paper and then rub it with steel wool. Now I'm going to wax this top with some tinted wax. Okay, I've polished this up with my beeswax polish. And it looks pretty good.