And on top of that I have great great gramps' and great gramps' tools. Most of them, anyway, but is a story for another time. Or I already wrote about it; I do not remember.
My mother has collected a number or fine pieces of furniture over the years, and there is a lot of sad sad story that goes with them, but I will not dwell on that. Because today I am talking about doing something about it: today I am talking about furniture restoration.
It is no surprise to most anyone that furniture is not as 'nice' as it used to be. At least not here in the United States. U.S. Americans* live fast paced lives and the economic-media complex continually fosters a culture of disposability. Houses are not homes, they are investments, cars are not precious tools, they are merely a thing that gets you from point A to point B. Combine that with an iconoclastic relationship with whatever the previous generation valued, and U.S. Americans have a generally cold attitude towards antiques and fine furniture these days. There is ample evidence that this is changing, but for the moment it is a lonely world for furniture. Consequently, the skills and knowledge needed to maintain fine furniture is lacking and the decay of that knowledge over the decades has not been kind to pieces.
Take my mother's Duncan Phyfe style dining table as an example. It has spent about five or more years in a shipping container ("on-site storage unit"), which turned out to be a fantastic way to make sure all your cherished valuables are exposed to a high-humidity, moldy environment. Family politics and a noted surplus of "stuff" means that, like it or not, this was pretty much unavoidable; oh well!
We got his table from a yard sale in very nice shape. It is solid Mahogany through and through; the only part that is not Mahogany is the spar on the inside that serves to synchronize the two pieces of the table top as they separate; it is instead made of veneered Poplar (aka, Tulip Poplar, not to be confused with Tulipwood or the wood of actual poplars).
On to the damage. The high humidity of the container has swollen the wood; luckily the table is solid Mahogany and not veneered (except for the Poplar spar on the inside). I have a pile of veneered pieces that completely delaminated in the dampness; one piano bench completely fell apart. Hardwoods have it easier, too, since they are less vascular. The table did not swell as much as other pieces made of Pine or the like; some of those have changed dimensions so much that they have split stiles and rails. How the joinery was designed helped a great deal; this is not a rigid box being forced into a shape but an elegant assemblage of pieces all connected so that they may move but not break.
The table is old enough to not only have been finished with a shellac, but also the glue used was clearly animal hide based; the ends of the wings have completely fallen off, cleanly, indicating it was not shearing that cracked a more modern glue (or, more likely, force the wood to crack instead), but moisture that degraded an organic glue. This is a good thing: it makes the repairs easier, and animal glues are not weaker than modern glues, but they are reversible.
Most ferrous metallic hardware is rusted; after I got into the tear-down I found little evidence of rust so severe that threads eroded or screws seized in their holes. The components of the table splitting sync mechanism are better off due to the amount of grease congealed on them. All the brass hardware, which consists of the four leg tips and the threads for the thumb screws on the wings, are intact. The leg tips had been lacquered some time before hand and the threads were tightly sealed by the thumb screws.
The previous owners said that they had paid for the table top to be refinished. No one needed to be told that, of course, because whoever this mysterious refinisher was they failed to match the original finish of the rest of the table. Instead of a gorgeous and deep burgundy shellac based finish, they instead used a similarly dark but distinctly more yellowy-brown modern finish in acrylic or urethane. That would have been okay on an old Oak piece, but here it was jarring and the contrast only highlighted a sickly palor hidden in the color.
I can even tell you what color it is: along the edge of one wing there are four distinct splotches of what I readily recognize as a Minwax stain and finish; it is either Red Oak or Red Chestnut. There are also three faint dart-shaped divets in the table top that still cling to the Minwax; clearly the table was very beaten up when it was refinished and the refinisher did not want to sand any further lest they end up with a 5/8" thick table top instead of a hair shy of 3/4". On top of the Minwax stain the acrylic or urethane finish was applied.
After being put through the gauntlet of the storage unit, the results were predictable. While the undercarriage looks like this:
The table top looks like this:
The shellac finish, though run throughout with fine cracks and some separation, is intact. The table top, on the other hand, failed completely. Moisture has swollen the wood, and the inelastic nature of the modern finish caused it to crackle and peel off.
But under closer investigation it is clear that this table has been repaired no fewer than three times before the table top was refinished. The thumb screws thread into brass rings embedded in a circular blind mortise on the underside of the outer board of the wings; the size of the ring is such that it will eventually work loose. This happened twice before, and the previous mortices are evident; they have been corked not with milled plugs but cut dowels. Consequently the staining of the repair only highlights the contrast between end grain and long grain, not to mention the oval shape dowels take on when they dry. Furthermore the slight overlap of the mortices ensures that the brass ring will work loose faster the next time.
The last repair, and this looks to be the only respectable previous repair, the top of one of the arching supports snapped off and was replaced skillfully with a clean cut and a new end. The staining ended up much darker, but it does match the hue.
There is one anomaly in the history of the table, and that is the stops on the wings. These small blocks of wood are on the underside to force the table top to stop rotating once it has done so through a right angle; the table top core also has two stops.
But on the wings, opposite their current location, there is clear evidence of the stops having been the other away 'round:
The only way this makes sense is if either the wings have been removed then swapped, or the entire table top has been removed then put back on 180 degrees contrary to how it originally was. I have not yet encounter similar evidence of the core's stops being moved, so I assume the wings have been swapped.
I'll talk more about the stops in the next post about this table, where I go through some tear-down and initial treatments.
* Eww, that sounds almost wrong-er than "Americans", but I agree with friends that it is silly that U.S. citizens are referred to as "Americans" as if we own the continent.
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