I Restored Two Abused Finn Juhl Chairs for the Next Generation

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. One of the many things I like about this video is that I was able to unbox these chairs, you know, live on camera. It's pretty rare to be able to actually have the opportunity to do that. This video is very detailed. I did that on purpose. I really wanted to show that there are no tricks of the trade. That each defect has to be dealt with individually and then, you know, one at a time. There are no shortcuts. And I really like that I had two benches going at the same time. That worked out really well. I really enjoyed this job. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you do, please hit like, subscribe, share it. I'd appreciate it. These boxes contain two thin jewel spade chairs. The current owner's parents bought them in Denmark in 1956 or 57. They've been stored for a long time in these boxes. The idea now is to restore them and pass them on to the next generation. I haven't taken them out of the boxes. I've looked in this box. That's all I've done. I wanted to take them out on camera. So let's see what we got. Well, the chair went right together without too much trouble. Of course, I studied photos of these chairs, pictures online before I attempted to assemble this. First thing you notice are dog chews, loose joints, crack in the arm here. There's a metal rod missing. Of course, I'll look in the box again. The straps have greatly deteriorated, and some are missing. France and son, Denmark. Oh wow, this chair is missing one of these metal dowels also, and you can see why. We'll start by doing the most obvious repairs. There's a split in this pod too. I think before I start gluing things back together, I'm going to repair this damage with epoxy putty, and along with this damage in this arm also. I'm using a little water on the putty knife, and that really smooths this out. And if you watch your time carefully, about six minutes have gone by. You can smooth it out a little bit more. You can also dip your chisel in water. A few more minutes go by, and I can use a scotch brite pad with a little water. It will greatly minimize the amount of sanding I have to do. I still have to do some sanding here. In the meantime, I've got chair number two laid out on this bench ready to be re-glued, but I discovered it's got a major piece of wood missing here. I'm going to look through those boxes one more time, but I've got a feeling it's not in there, and I'll grab a piece of teak and we'll have to patch something in. That piece was not in the box, but I've got some teak here and I've got a piece here that I think will work nicely to patch in there. So I've drawn a pencil line where I want to cut out. I've made a template guide here. It's going to go all the way through, although this is very deep. Even though there'll just be a thin piece left on this side, it'll add some strength and it'll also keep the location of this slot, which is very important. I'm about to turn on this router, so if you're wearing headphones or you may want to turn down the volume a bit. I immediately realized I screwed up with the template. I had to make a new template with a place for the outer edge of the router to rest. I think I've got a good surface now onto which I can glue a new piece of teak. Now back to this chair. I've got to glue up the crack in this bullet thing. A little tip on using sandpaper like this. The sandpaper needs to be folded over three times. Now while the glue is drying, I can get to sanding the epoxy putty. These contour sanding pads are great. All right, that looks good for now. On to the bullet. It looked like this entire thing was going to be made out of putty. It's amazing to see how little putty is actually left when done sanding. I'll put a little thinner on it so you can see. All right, now back to this bench and this repair. So now I can prepare these pieces to get these side assemblies glued back together. Okay, now we can get back to this repair. I just realized before I drilled these holes, I should have replaced this dowel. I don't know if you've noticed, but all these pieces with these screws have a dowel in there perpendicular to this grain. We know that wood has its strength along its grain. And so if you put a screw in this way, these threads are essentially cutting the long grain. And so you're losing the strength that the long grain provides. But if a screw goes into wood this way, then these screw threads are interlacing with that long grain, giving it more strength. And so that's why they did that on these chairs. Okay, warning, this is going to be loud. Okay, so now I'm going to wash these down. I'm going to use Murphy's oil stoke because it's nice and gentle. You could also use something like a Dawn dish detergent. I'll use a gray scotch brite pad and we'll see what we got. Quite a bit of blackness here. I have to try some oxalic acid too. Same routine for the second chair and the frames for the back of the seat. I will definitely need to use an oxalic acid treatment on this. This looks like rust, water damage from the rusted spring straps here. Okay, these have dried overnight, so I'm going to scrub them down again, only this time with oxalic acid. I don't measure the oxalic acid precisely. I'm using this eighth cup scoop, so I'm going to put about six of these, 12 ounces. 12 ounces as a liquid measure, not weight. It's about 180 milliliters. And I'm going to add to that about four liters of hot water. This is one of the areas I'm most interested in. The oxalic's working really quickly. There's so many areas where there's all this blackness in the grain, and this is one of the areas I was most concerned about. It's starting to work right away, but, you know, it can take until it dries to be able to see how well it works. Okay, I'm going to let these dry this afternoon. Before the day is through, I'm going to give them a good rinsing off with clear water. And this is the piece with such bad marks along here, and they've already come out. When working with oxalic acid, always rinse everything off really well. Okay, everything's dried overnight. Now I'm going to sand. I'm just going to sand by hand with 150. My goal, as always, is to sand as little as possible. I like to retain as much color and even defects, but there's areas of these chairs, this is an example, that just need a little more sanding. Areas like this, and also areas like the bottom of the feet. These edges of the armrests are really beat, and they need a good sanding. But you can see right away that this arm is not solid, it's a lamination. This is a core wood that's much lighter. As I'm sanding, I find all kinds of splits and stuff that need to be glued. In fact, this whole side assembly that at first I didn't think needed to be glued, when I started sanding it quickly became apparent that it did. The bottom of a seat frame. So after repairing the split on this side, I'm preparing it to glue up, and there's a find another split on this side. Yeah, it has movement. I'll get some glue in there. As I'm sanding, I'm just continually finding these cracks, always in the same areas of each piece, like at these ends. All I can do is just keep gluing them up. So you get that crack there, another crack here, another crack down here. They all radiate out from these screws. All the legs are pretty beat up. I'm only sanding with 150, so I'm not going to sand these marks out. I will fill the deeper ones, which there's quite a few actually, with wood putty, and then sand with 150. Everything's finally sanded. I'm going to apply Watco Danish Oil. You can see I'm going to brush it on, and I'm going to keep the pieces wet for a little while before I wipe them off. Okay, these have dried over the weekend. Now I've got a lot of touch-ups to do. This particular side probably has the most touch-ups of any assembly here. Of course, they all need these strips. This is the core wood of the lamination that makes up the arm, so all those strips need to be stained. But this one has all these bite marks that got filled. I've been experimenting with my Mohawk markers, and I found this brown walnut light oak seems to work well. Now for all these putty fill-ins, I'm also going to use a marker. These are much smaller markers, Mohawk brush tip markers, and in this case I found that honey spice works well. Markers are great for this job. This is kind of a big area for a marker, and you'll find that sometimes markers can start to get dried out a bit. I keep a little container of lacquer retarder right here, and I'll dip it into the lacquer retarder every now and then. That kind of revitalizes the felt tip. This is the area that was chewed up so badly. I'll let that dry a bit and go over it again. I think I'll leave that alone for now to see what it looks like after another coat of oil. I've saved this biggest touch-up for last, and that's this new piece that I spliced into this rail. So I went ahead and oiled this piece, even the new piece of wood. I had experimented a bit with stains on a raw piece of wood and didn't like the way it was going down, so I went ahead and oiled this, and I oiled a sample piece also. I was fooling around with various stains, and I settled on this ancient container of dye stain from Star Chemical. They're not even in business anymore. Boy, I like that. That looks good. I'll go back later after these pieces of putty. Okay, now for the second coat of oil, and I'm going to apply it with a gray Scotch-Brite pad, not just to help smooth it out. Okay, these have dried for a couple days. I'm ready to wax them, and sticking with the Watco theme, I'm going to use Watco Satin Wax. I'm going to apply it with Borot steel wool. So after I apply it with steel wool, and I use the steel wool just to make it nice and smooth, I'm just going over it gently with the rag. I want to leave wax on the surface, and then according to the directions, wait 10 minutes, and then buff it out with a nice soft cloth. I'll probably wax all the pieces first, and then go back and buff them. All right, everything's buffed. Now I have to continue installing these new straps in the seat. I'll show you how I did it. As you can see, I've already installed two, because I had to figure out how to do it. I had to brace the seat with these, and even still put a clamp on it. My first first couple of attempts did not go well. I'm like, this is never going to get in there. We realized I needed to shoe horn this thing in there. An actual shoe horn was too big, but I have a carving gouge that's a larger diameter, but close. I got these straps online. It was pretty easy. I measured exactly according to their directions, and when I got them, I thought, oh man, these are too short. I'll never get them in, but once I figured it out, it's not bad at all. So I just got to do this a total of 28 times. Okay, there you have it. Two thin jewel spade chairs. I wish I had the cushions for them, but they haven't been made yet. And remember, these chairs were purchased by the current owner's parents in 1956 or 57. They were in rough shape. They've been hard used. They had a lot of dog chews. There was a structural repair in the back here, and of course, I refinished them. And I don't know what the original finish was exactly, but you can't go wrong with the Watco Danish oil. I have about 20 hours in this job. I use a table saw, the scroll saw, and these hand tools. If you're interested in the tools and products I use, look at the screen. You'll see a button that says view products, or under the description, press more. You don't have to buy dye stain to support my channel. A like, a comment, subscribing, or share goes a long ways. Thanks for watching. Oh, and one more thing. I think they look pretty good.