Restoring a Reproduction Desk - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

This is a really nice reproduction desk, solid cherry. It was made about 30 years ago by a company in Massachusetts called Eldred Wheeler. It's really nice. I'm going to refinish the top. It has water damage from plants. One thing that this company did was these surfaces, all these surfaces are not sanded flat. They're all hand planed. You can see that really evident here on the lid where the finish is worn off, the high points. You can see that it's all hand planed. I'm hoping that I just need to re-oil and wax these surfaces and the front too to bring them back. The top though has stains and what I'm going to do is I'm going to scrape that down. I won't sand it, I'm just going to scrape it to keep that texture, that slight texture just like it was originally. I'm going to use a flat scraper and just scrape this top down. I've scraped this down somewhat. I'm going to use some oxalic acid on this top now to see if that gets rid of these water stains. It appears to be working. I see the black marks going away already. After the oxalic dries, you've got to rinse it off really well. You can see that those dark rings are mostly gone, but they didn't go away completely. The oxalic did a pretty good job on getting rid of those rings, but I can still see a shadow there. Same on the other side, so I'm going to need to scrape some more. I think I've got this scraped down pretty good now. I can still see, I think, a faint, faint shadow, but I've scraped it a lot. I think I'm going to finish it. When I put thinner on it, I'm not seeing them. So I'm going to finish it off now with some scrapes. I'm going to try to scrape the whole length of it in long, even strokes. Try to get that kind of texture that it had originally. Okay, I think it's ready for the first coat of oil. As you can imagine, now my top is a lot lighter than the case here. This wood doesn't look like new cherry, but it has a bit of color to it. But I'm going to add a little walnut stain to my first coat of tung oil and see if I can make it closer to this. I think it looks pretty good, and I can see some of the texture in it, so that's good. It's not flat, and now let's get at least two more coats of clear oil on it. Okay, the first coat looks pretty good. Now I will apply a second clear coat of tung oil, and I will wet sand it with 600 wet or dry paper. Now I'm ready to apply the third, and I hope it's final, coat of tung oil. I'm going to apply it with a brush like before, pat it a little bit, and then rub it down with some steel wool. So I'm patting it like I was doing with the rag, this time with this piece of steel wool. And it's leaving a nice coat on here. And I'll also use this steel wool and oil to go over the front. Right now I'm just going to paste wax this top. This paste wax has a little color in it, too. It's brown paste wax that's really helping to bring the color in. Alright, the top looks great. Now I'm going to polish the case of this with my beeswax polish. Alright, so this is a reproduction desk made by the Eldred Wheeler Company probably about 30 years ago. And all I had to do was refinish the top, really, and oil and wax the case. And just as it was made originally, I didn't use any sandpaper on the top. I just scraped it and gave it an oil and wax finish. I think it looks pretty good.