Chair caning project.

Posted on 13 July 2020 by B

A few months ago, my wife and I picked up a couple of chairs that we wanted to work on. Both had caned seats and one (the Empire style rocker here ) also has a caned back.

Two projects we picked up several months ago.

I’d been reading about seat caning for a while and have been following Ed Hammond and The Wicker Woman on YouTube. The book I got was “The Craft of Chair Seat Weaving, with Cane, Rush, Splint, and Rope” by George Sterns. The book is a very good starter and I referred to it quite often for the basics. The YouTube videos are much better for the details and to better be able to adjust for the curves and other fiddly stuff. I also used Ed Hammond and The Wicker Woman as guides for the “no knot” method for the underside.

To start out, I stripped the chair and then prepped it for a new paint job. I went with milk paint and initially tried what I thought was Barn Red, but turned out to be closer to Hot Pink. Rather than remove this and start over I just painted Pitch Black over it. I did not want to distress this, but I figure that it will distress naturally very nicely with the red/pink underneath.

I stripped the chair and then had a good look at the joints to make sure everything was solid. The chair was in great shape so I didn’t need to redo any joints.

Much better! A few coats of Pitch Black and then a few coats of wax later and it’s ready for caning.

I had several false starts on the caning portion. As I got past the verticals and into the horizontals I had to unweave several sections and start over. It took quite a bit of thinking, doing, undoing, thinking, doing, undoing before I got the verticals and horizontals that I thought would work.

Once I got into the diagonals I realized that there were still issues with spacing in the horizontals and verticals. I had to figure out how to either work around some of these obstacles or redo them. I ended up doing both.

I will probably redo this seat in the future, but once I get the border finished it will reside in our kitchen for a while.

Still need to add the border around the sides and front. This has been a huge learning experience, but I do feel better about getting started on the Empire Style Rocker, once my repairs are finished on that one.

Update 26 July 2020: I finally finished the last of the border and cleaned up the underside.

I ended up doing more of a hybrid ‘no knot’ with a couple of knots due to being unable to plan ahead or stage my cane ends well enough. I surprised myself with how strong these cane seats are: I’ve already sat in this chair a few times and I’m a rather large person.

I have a couple more caning projects coming up am ready to improve on this one.

Late 19th C Empire Style Rocker Restoration Part 2

Posted on 14 July 2020 by B

In Part 1, I had finished stripping and disassembling the rocker and had decided to replace the rockers and the side pieces of the seat. After that, I also decided to replace the back of the seat. This because the sides had been connected to the back with dowels, but the way the dowels and the joints fit, they did not make a good joint. If you look at the picture below, you’ll see that at each end, a half a hole for a dowel. So one of the dowels on each side was not even embedded in the back piece.

I then looked at the way the sides connected to the front piece and decided that instead of a couple of dowels, I’d use a loose tenon. This would create more shear strength, across the grain, at this crucial point.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of the loose tenon or any of the fitting process, but I do have pictures with layout lines and also where I filled in the original dowel holes.

My pencil mark shows where the loose tenon is.

This shows where I filled the dowel holes in order to remove the mortise for the loose tenons.

The following pictures show me cutting and shaping the back piece.

I took the number of holes from the original and spaced them a little more evenly before drilling them out.

I countersunk the holes.

Using a bit from a roll that a wonderful friend and classmate from the Chippendale Furniture School gave me.

After quite a bit of dry fitting and tweaking the joints, I was ready to glue up the seat.

For most of my projects, I tend to use hide glue for the joints and PVA for the splits, cracks, and fills (like for filling the dowel holes). My thinking is that for most, if not all, repairs I can use PVA adhesives because the idea is that they should never need to be undone at all…ever. This is for repairs and restoration jobs, but not necessarily for conservation work. For the joints, I use hide glue because I want to be sympathetic to the piece and I want to make sure that the piece can be repaired / restored in the future and still be sympathetic to the piece if that future restorer wishes. If in the future, someone repairs the piece with whatever adhesive they have available, that’s fine because I won’t be around to see them muck it all up 😉

My ultra high tech hide glue melting pot. Plus if I ever need a bikini wax, I’m set.

Seat is fitted and the chair (except for the rockers) is ready for glue up.

For Part 3 I’ll remake the rockers and discuss the changes I made to the dimensions. I’ll also discuss the back frame and the broken pieces I had to replace for the caning.

Small maple table restoration

Posted on 20 July 2020 by B

I’ve just started working on some projects for a customer and I figured I’d get started with a quick and straightforward restoration. Quick for me is a relative term as this “quick” project took me almost a month of weekends and evenings.

This one is a maple end table that has seen better days. It was not old, maybe vintage, but it needed some attention.

Thick layer of paint obscured some beautiful maple underneath.

I was a bit worried about the ink stains and the cigarette burns.

I started by taking it apart so I could evaluate the parts individually. There were a couple of screws that needed to be extracted the hard way and a couple that needed to be cut, but other than that it was in good shape. Drilled out the screws, filled the holes with dowel and then redrilled for new screws.

I’ve looked up the name (American Maple), but have not had much luck. They don’t seem to have been around very long.

This was constructed with slotted screws, but since it will be a user piece rather than a showpiece I replaced them with McFeely’s square drive screws.

After stripping the individual pieces I found some beautiful maple that really popped after a coat of tung oil. I love the chatoyance I got on almost every piece of the table. Unfortunately, much of it will not often be seen unless the person either picks up the table or lays down on the floor to look at it.

The table top had some pretty serious gaps from shrinkage, so I re-glued it.

I was very happily surprised that so much of the ink stain was just in the paint and didn’t go too deep. The tabletop had some very minor cupping and twisting, but the battens on the bottom and the gallery rails on top took it all out.

After a light sanding, I started with 3 or 4 coats of Dark Half (1/2 dark tung oil and 1/2 citrus solvent) from Real Milkpaint. After letting it cure, I then added a couple of coats of garnet shellac and then a couple of coats of blonde shellac.

The chatoyance along with the bit of damage left on the top allow the table to keep its character and still be beautiful.

All that’s left for this piece is to give it a few coats of wax (maybe a dark wax) and then find it a new home. It’s already been conscripted as a work table in our livingroom. I’m using it to hold my caning tools and supplies as I work on some chairs.

Small Oak Serpentine Dresser

Posted on 8 November 2020 by B

So, my glacial progress on these first restoration and repair projects has been a bit disheartening, to say the least, but I’m within spitting distance of finishing the small oak dresser, so here we go.

This is the 2nd project in a group of about a dozen that I’ll be working on in between my day job and getting my workshop insulated (which I will write about in another post). It is an oak dresser that originally came with a mirror. The mirror may be in the group of mirrors that I received with these projects, but I have not tried pairing them yet. The dresser is likely early 1900s or, less likely, late 1800s. The drawer fronts and top are solid oak and the interior is in good shape. The casters are original wood wheel and brass and the drawer hardware appears to be original as well.

Serpentine front small oak dresser. It’s in pretty good shape except for some burns, water stains, and other discolouring.

The dresser was not in bad shape but required some work done to the damaged top, so I got out the card scrapers to remove the burns, then filled the shallow divots with shellac which I coloured to match the rest of the top. Some alcohol and a scrubber got out most of the rest. I then put a few coats of shellac and then some dark wax (Kingdom Restorations). Clare, a tutor at the Chippendale International School of Furniture used to say, “Dark wax can hide a plethora of sins.” In this case, it helps even the tone across the top.

I also needed to replace a damaged runner. This was the only “woodworking” needed for the project.

I then cleaned out the corners of the panels of the frame and panel sides. This may seem like a nit-picky thing, but in this case, I wasn’t going for a heavily patinated look. Getting rid of the black gunk in the corners just sharpened the edges and “youngened” it up a bit.

I replaced the old casters with reproduction casters from Van Dykes Restorations. The new casters are beautifully made and all I needed to do was plug the old holes, then drill new holes for the new casters.

New caster wheels were just a wee bit larger than the old ones, but the larger wheels roll more smoothly over carpet or rugs. The new casters also have ball bearings – very nice.

This picture shows a hole that has been plugged and is ready to be drilled for the new caster.

This shows that on one of the back legs there was some separation between the different sections of the leg, so I used the glue squeeze out from the peg to put those back together.

While I was working on the casters I noticed that when they were making this dresser, they used a table saw or similar to cut the mortises for the side rails.

On this side you can see the kerf of the saw, so it looks like it took 2 passes to get the right width for this tenon.

For the two top short drawers, the saw just went the entire length.

After this I noticed that the stiles for the side panels were starting to separate so I cleaned the old hide glue out and cooked up a few ounces to re glue.

The hardware was not in horrible shape but a few of the bail pulls were either missing rosettes or the rosettes were damaged so I searched E-Bay and found some nice ones and also found some that I liked at Van Dyke’s Restorers. Even though I found some knobs there as well, I decided to keep the original.

One thing I didn’t replace (yet) is the missing escutcheons for the two top drawers. Why, I can’t even begin to say, except that brain farts are real.

I just have a few fiddly bits to finish up like the escutcheons and runner blocks for the drawers to keep them from jamming, but other than that this has turned out to be a very pretty and usable piece of furniture.

Top turned out beautifully. The cigarette burns and other stains came out very well. There is one divot that I didn’t fill because it was wide but shallow and I figured it was not very noticeable. If I had this to do over again, I might put the time into filling and colouring it, but probably not.

I’ll probably take a look at some brighter, shinier hardware for this one, but I doubt that I’ll go with it. I like the darker hardware on this. I will probably post some pictures with the brighter stuff though, just for comparison.

Slant top secretaire restoration, Part 3

Posted on 1 September 2021 by B

I mentioned in my previous post that the hinges for the slant top portion of the desk would be the most involved part of the restoration. The hinges had been replaced a few times and the hinge shape had changed as well. This not only left random holes but large shapes carved into the shelf and the lid.

It looks like these replacement hinges were a bit of a rush job. The mortise that the hinges are set in is too large for the hinge and the person doing the restoration may have used one chisel to remove the material. It also looks like the hinge may have been installed incorrectly, which then caused a portion of the lid to break off when the lid was opened. This is all speculation, but I like to put myself in their shoes and see if I can find explanations for the things I find.

As you can see there are a couple of different sizes carved into this piece and that along with the damage done to the edge of the lid told me that I need to repair these and not just put new hinges in there.

This is where the project gets challenging because I have to remove material and then splice in new material to make the piece stronger. In this case, I need to remove a section where the lid broke and also remove the material around the old hinge mortise. I then splice in the new material. When I cut these pieces I have to pay attention to grain direction, grain orientation, grain consistency (is it clear straight grain or curvy). In the case of the broken lid portion, I saw that the edge showed the flat sawn side and the flat top showed the quarter sawn. For the hinge pieces, I looked at how the quarter sawn grain ran and oriented the new pieces to mimic that.

Here you can see the flat sawn “cathedral” grain along the edge. This picture was taken after I had shaped the new material with a block plane, spokeshave, chisels, rasps and sandpaper.

In the picture above, you can see that I cut the mortise along the grain and oriented the patch so that the grain followed the surrounding grain. Once the piece was glued I then used a block plane and then sandpaper to bring the material down to level.

In my next post I’ll show the rest of the process of cutting in the new hinges and coloring and blending the repairs.

Slant top secretaire restoration, Part 5

Posted on 18 October 2021 by B

So, even with all the physical repairs that I’ve done on this piece, the portion of the restoration that has taken the most time and required the most precision is the hardware. I have replaced the slant top hinges, the slant top lock, the large drawer locks, the front door hinges, and the front door lock. The front door hinges took the longest of anything because they require the most accuracy, with the slant top hinges a close 2nd.

When I started this project, I wasn’t even sure that I’d be able to find the hardware I was looking for. I began my search on eBay and found some great hardware (for future projects), but nothing that I could use on this project. I then went to Van Dykes Restorers and found some very good possibilities for the hinges, but eventually moved on to Hardware of the Past (before they closed shop) for the escutcheons and the lock for the slant top.

The hinges for the slant top were worrisome on many levels for me because not only was I repairing damage from previous repairs, but I then needed to fit and mount new hinges.

Can’t really see it from this angle, but the damage to the slant top meant that the hinge screws were about to tear out.

I had thought about leaving the mortises for the hinges and just trying to find a hinge the same size, but that was a no-go. There had been quite a few repairs and I wanted to make sure that my repairs were on solid ground, so I mortised out a lot of the previous repairs and then laminated in patches for the hinges as well as the damage to the edge of the lid.

I wrestled with the idea of laminating a strip all the way across the lid, but that would have been an unnecessary removal of a lot of original material.

Waiting for the correct (flat head) screws and a couple coats of shellac.

I then moved on to the locks for the large drawers. After the comedy that was me trying to remove the original lock from the lid, the drawers were very straightforward.

Replacement locks for the large drawers.

The front doors were the most fiddly of the hardware because I didn’t use the hinges that were there (they weren’t the originals), the doors hadn’t been hung correctly, and I had to repair some significant damage to one of the doors where a hinge had been torn off.

Wash, rinse, and repeat for the other door.

I mortised the hinges into the doors and into the sides and the doors now close with a wonderfully small and uniform gap all around and the astragal covers the gap between the doors beautifully. I don’t have a picture of that yet, but it’s coming.

After all of that fiddly stuff, the podiatrist is finally in and will fix my lady’s broken toe.

Tune in next time. Same Bat Time. Same Bat Channel.

Slant top secretaire restoration, Part 5 1/2

Posted on 21 October 2021 by B

Just wanted to post a quick update on her foot surgery. The procedure was a success and she is already standing and using her new toe.

All the major repairs and restoration are now complete and I’m now working on the sides and some of the egg and dart moulding. Very close to being done.

Bad Wolf Woodworking

Adventures in woodworking. Bespoke furniture. Furniture repair, restoration, and refinishing

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