Restoring the Door to a Tall Case Clock - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Okay, here we have a door from a tall case clock, an antique tall case clock, and the client wanted me to reattach this molding, but I realized I couldn't do it because someone in the past had re-glued some of this veneer that makes up the banding along the edge and misaligned these pieces of veneer in three places. So what I've got to do is I've got to remove this piece of molding, loosen these pieces of veneer and re-glue them in the proper position so that I can then put the molding back on the proper position. There's also a big crack in the door and we're not going to do anything about that crack, that's fine. I'm just going to concentrate on getting these moldings back where they belong. Now with this molding off, I see that it's not just a piece of veneer, it's this whole chunk of wood that the veneer is glued to has got to come up. It's kind of strange, but we'll see if I can loosen it up with a little bit of heat, get it out of there and figure out what's going on. This is odd, it almost appears that it might be a different piece of wood, I can't tell. Maybe I'll know better after I loosen it up a little bit. All right, now since I didn't have much luck with the last one, I don't know what's going on. I'm not going to try to loosen and repair this piece of wood. I'm going to take this piece of veneer off of here and then repair and trim that piece of wood down flat and put the piece of veneer back where it belongs. I'm not going to try to get the whole piece out, it didn't work very well in the last one. I'm beginning to realize here and suspect that what I'm looking at here, this is a piece of wood that's dovetailed in. We're looking at end grain, so what I think happened maybe when this was originally built, they dovetailed a piece of wood perpendicular across this door here and here to help keep it stable. Then over time, as the door shrunk, that perpendicular piece protruded out the sides and pushed this molding out, and that's what we're looking at here. It's a good thing I didn't keep trying to get that board up, it's not coming up. So now I'll remove the veneer, trim this back down flush to the side, replace the veneer, and then the moldings will go on the way they're supposed to. Doesn't fit perfectly, but not bad, as good as it's going to get. Here you can better see this dovetailed board that's going this way, you can see the end of it I trimmed this piece a little bit before, and now I've glued my veneer back down, I've just got to level this up again a little bit better, square with this edge so that I can glue the molding back on. Now I'm going to nail this molding back on. I need some little antique brads, keep all these old nails when I can, little brads like this to nail these on. Okay, you can see now that the molding is now reattached, there's no space between the door panel and the molding, I've got that all reattached. Here are the areas where I re-glued the veneer. Here you can see it didn't quite go down flat the way I wanted it to, it's protruding a little bit, but I'm just going to leave that alone. I've got to get a damp rag and remove some of the excess glue, and then I'll fill in any gaps with wax. Okay, so now I put the hardware back on. Okay, I just need to wipe this off with a polish rag, it's all done, and I'll install it in the customer's home. And here it is, installed on the clock case in the customer's home. Whoa, that's a little bit of a flight there.