Wine racks

Green dyed Poplar wine rack, with copper bronze powder coated steel frame

Birch wood wine rack with copper bronze powder coated
steel frame
The dimensions on these wine racks are.
36" high  x 19" wide x 17" deep
These racks will add a spark to any room.
The copper in the durable powder coat finish adds a deep shimmer to the metal work.
The wood has been left distressed from the marks of a scrub plane that was used to work the wood and has been coated with a durable water based urethane finish, which adds depth to the wood.
The drawers are made with hand cut dove tail joints that makes these pieces a touch of craftsmanship that you should expect from original work of furniture.

UPDATE: dog damaged chair

Hickory Chair Co. well built furniture is always a good investment.
This chair was built by the Hickory Chair Co. Hickory, N.C.  I don't know the date but it is owned by the original purchaser, and was sold at Frautschi Furniture Co. in Madison Wisconsin.  At a minimum, the chair has to be forty years old and is in great condition.  The damage was repaired for a $100.00 and looks like new.  Hopefully the dog has out grown his chewing ways.
The one saving grace to this chair was that it was well built, using good materials and that made the replacement of the leg easier. 

Mahogany must taste like MilkBones

Chair or Chew toy?

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE"!

Are the first words out of your mouth, the minute you walk into the living room. Cowering in the corner is your 8 month old Golden Retriever. " I'm sorry, but my teeth hurt and your furniture tastes good", is what he seems to be saying as he looks up at you.

Old leg removed and new one made and ready to install

It would seem that the damage was far too severe and would cost too much, to be repairable but looks can be deceiving. Anything made out of wood can be repaired, especially furniture. Mass produced furniture is built to be assembled easily, because time is money. Most of the joinery is very simple and strong and comes apart quite easily. The picture above shows the old chair leg next to the new one I built.(I will adjust the length of the leg once I position it back on the chair for accuracy.)  From start to finish that process only took a little over an hour. You can figure that it's going to take another hour and some to finish the leg and install it and it's ready for many more years of service.    Providing that dog has acquired a more discriminating taste in chew treats.

Antique tool chest repair and restoration

Early 1900's carpenters tool chest

This is a pretty good example of a carpenters tool chest, that would have been used by a journeyman carpenter around the turn of the twentieth century.  Carpenters back then built there own tool chests and would add there own style to them as a kind of status symbol.  The person who built this box was a better than average builder, from the fancy lid, brass cast handles and glass drawer pulls. The main box is joined with dove tail corners, which show a high level of skill and also the well mitered corners on the trim work and top.

Dove tail joints

Interior of tool chest
How do you determine The age of a piece of furniture . Sometimes you get lucky and there is  a stamp or mark left by the builder, but not in this case. I tried to find any kind of mark on this chest and found nothing.  So I thought that the nails used to build it, would offer a clue.

Exposed nails on back of lid give a good idea of the age of this tool chest

Wire nails were invented and came into use around 1870. They didn't become common until the early 1900's. This chest was built using wire nails and a lot of them, meaning they were common and inexpensive. That leads me to believe that  the tool chest was built sometime in the early part of the 1900's.

I will start work on this piece in the next week or so, repairing and replacing damaged wood and repairing loose joints.
Keep checking this blog for updates, I think this piece is going to be a lot of fun.

Restoration of a primitive piece of furniture

               This little foot stool has been in my family 
                          for as long as I can remember.  
It is made of what appears to be a slab of oak that was shaped with an axe or adze.
With legs that were shaped with a spoke shave, a very crudely made piece.   I am only able to guess at the age of it, probably somewhere around a hundred years old if not older.

It has had a broken leg since I was a kid, my dad fixed it with liberal amounts of glue, but it truly needed more than that for a repair. When that repair failed, I threw it in a box and have carted it around with me for the past thirty years.  I recently uncovered it from a box in the basement and thought it was time to do something, either throw it out or fix it right.

Time for deconstruction.
Fortunately old furniture comes apart easily for the most part, joints shrink with age and older glues don't have the holding power of todays modern adhesives.  The legs came out with a little hammering with a wooden dowel.  I measured the legs and took notes and photos.  I thought I would only have to replace the broken leg, but when I got the legs out, there was extensive damage from powder post beetles that were attracted to the glue in the joints and they had eaten into the legs making them to weak to reuse.

Roughing out the new legs on the lathe

Using a spoke shave to shape the legs and reproduce the original finish

The original legs were made from rough lumber and completely shaped using draw shaves.  I used the lathe to rough out the shape and then final shaped everything with hand tools, to reproduce the original feel of the wood.

Fitting the new legs in the old holes

The legs are held in place with a tapered spline

Legs installed with spines ready to be trimmed down

New legs stained and ready for varnish
This project brought back a lot of great childhood memories, sitting on  it next to the fireplace on winter days warming up after sledding or hunting.  My dad used it as a foot rest to his rocking chair, where he would smoke his pipe and read next to the fire.
Now we will enjoy the stool next to our fireplace.

Antique Furniture REPAIR

     This is a very common example of damage that occurs to older furniture.  Damage to the ornate carved appliqué work is heartbreaking, because you can't just go to the store and buy a new piece to replace the damaged one.  Chances are you probably couldn't when the piece was new either, so what can you do?
     In this case, even though it looks pretty bad. The repair was fairly straight forward, had more of the work been missing it could have been another story.

Steps to take;
1.)Cleanup the area around the missing work, and if the break is kind of rough square it up with a chisel or a file.
2.)Figure out what kind of wood your working with.
This chest was Walnut, and chances are the appliqué was also.  The appliqué could be Mahogany,  but since they are very similar in grain pattern and both carve very well and look identical when finished, I chose to use Mahogany(because I had some small scrap in my shop.)
3.)I trimmed a small piece down to the right thickness, roughly cut it to shape and glued it in place.

4.) Carving...the trick is to take your time and always use very sharp tools,  especially with small work.  There is very little margin for error, so chip out or tearing of the wood has to be avoided. Most of the final shaping is done with files and a little sandpaper.  I can make no claim at being a great wood carver, but I have spent a considerable amount of time with a chisel in my hand.

5.)Finishing...the finished product, stained and shellaced to to match the original work. Matching stains can be very difficult.  I first start out the finishing process by darkening the wood with a little dye, to kind of age the wood, then it is a trial and error stain battle.  I find it usual takes a combination of stains added in layers to get the job done.  Also the darker the shellac the better when matching old work.  To further age the work a couple coats of wax buffed with ultra-fine steel wool, and there you have it
                  JUST LIKE NEW! or I MEAN OLD!                                     or JUST PERFECTLY AGED!

How To Make Curved Wooden Panels

  ) ) ) C U R V E S ( ( (

How to make curved wooden panels or large diameter cylinders from wood, literally takes the ability to think outside the box.  As a simple example;  I will start with, how to make a large diameter cylinder out of solid wood.

36" DIA. circle 

This drawing represents a 36" DIA. circle that has had one quarter divided into 5 equal wedges at 18 Degrees.
That would mean that 20 boards cut and fastened together would complete the cylinder.

Each board is beveled on each end to 9 Degrees. When the two bevels are put together,  their total is 18 degrees.  The width of the board is just a little bit less than 5.75 inches.  In the drawing above, the blue line is the 36" circle and the red lines represent the boards. The red that falls outside of the circle will have to be removed using hand planes and sandpaper to fair it down to the finished curve.

This drawing is to illustrate how to use plywood over a framework to make the same shape.  I would say that probably the smallest diameter you can bend a piece of 1/4" plywood around, would be 48".  The other option is to kerf the back of the plywood panel to make it bend easier. A kerf is a shallow saw cut made in evenly spaced increments perpendicular to the bend of the wood.  This allows the inside of the panel to compress making it easier to bend. There are also manufactured bending plywoods, which would accomplish the same thing.  They come without a finished veneer, so you would need to apply a veneer over the top.  Bending plywood would allow for very tight bends without distortion.
The advantage of using solid wood is the lack of a need to build an elaborate framework, also it may take less time to construct. The biggest disadvantage may be in the appearance, because grain matching might be a problem. 
The plywood method might take longer, but the cosmetic appearance would be more even.