I left off talking about the stops on the under side of the wings, but that is going to be deeper in the post. Before I elaborate on the project itself, I need to talk about tear-downs. Restoration and repair work always brings with it the threat of the unknown; you never know what is hiding under the surface of the piece and it is more than likely that what you think you need to do is only a small part of what you will end up doing. It that a professional opinion? No, not really; it is merely what I have learned from the things we have had to fix over the years. Okay, and a little bit of television.
If you can manage to disassemble the piece and know you can put it back together, then you know you have not missed anything that needs work. That is a big if, though. You need to be methodical and disciplined to pull it off, two traits my family is not know for, so I have to be extra careful.
The first trick I use for furniture is cardboard. This style and age of table basically ensures that there are going to be a lot of screws and hardware in a tear-down. The older furniture is, it is generally more likely that it is held together with purely wooden joints and animal glues. But if there are going to be screws, cardboard is your best friend.
You cut out a piece of a cereal box and make a simple line drawing to indicate the piece somehow; for the wing hinges I drew the table top's shape when extended and the seams of the wings. Then you punch holes through the cardboard in the pattern of the screws you are going to remove; as you remove them you place them on the diagram where they go. Of course, find a way to unambiguously indicate the orientation of the piece relative to the drawing; masking tape and a soft, slightly dull pencil are a good choice.
This allows you keep track of the screws; you can know at a glance if one has fallen out or disappeared, and you can easily put them back precisely where they came from (which sometimes is important). It also makes them far more portable and you will not confuse similar screws from different parts of the piece.
Now, on to the tear-down. The first thing I did was experiment to see how easily the finish would come off. I used a razor blade like a small cabinet scrapper; the finish popped off easily. Then I removed the wings and set them aside.
Next, I needed to make a cabinet scraper. I had been putting it off for ages, so now seemed like a good time to finally get it over with. I have a saw or three I have acquired just for the purpose of being metal donors, and an old Keystone franeksteined with mismatched machine screws was first up. I will talk about making those in a different post.
After getting the scraper all squared up and raising a burr, I laid into the table top's core carefully but forcefully. It made quick work of the failed finish:
Why didn't I use sandpaper? Funny thing about working wood with hand tools: sharpness maintenance matters a lot more. Handplanes, hand saws, and chisels need to be very sharp, but they also need to be able to to be sharpened, so a hand saw tooth is not nearly as hard as a circular saw blade's carbide tooth, and a handplane iron is not nearly as hard as a power planer blade may be, because they are intended to be sharpened by the craftsperson, and often at that.
Sandpaper, however, is a literally disposable cutting device, although its action is more like shreading than cutting. Sandpaper is indispensable in many situations, but if hand tools are going to get anywhere near the piece afterwards, you cannot use it. The sandpaper will leave grit in the pores of the wood, and that grit will dull the blades of handplanes and saws. The scraper will dull faster too, but of all my tools I am the least worried about the scraper in this situation. It is only a piece of saw plate, after all.
Since I need to plane off a little bit of the surface to get through the Minwax and some water stains, I opted not to use sandpaper. Also, this thing has already been finished twice; no need to raise the grain or risk scorping* the wood with over-zealous sanding to get it level all over again. And the scraper leaves a silky smooth finish that sandpaper has a hard time matching in the same span of time.
Something to be careful of when using a cabinet scraper like this on boards: you are liable to gouge the edges if you use as much force and flection as you do on the middle of the board. The scraper usually does not leave deep gouges, so they are easy to fix, but it of course is better if you manage to avoid them altogether.
You will notice a bottle of bleach: I went after the clearly visible black water stains. Success? Not especially. I have some pictures, but it is nothing special. Since I am going to plane off a little of the table top anyway, I will return to that subject later.
Next up are the wings, which are in four pieces. The outer boards have those stops and thumb screws, you will remember, and the mysterious evidence of the stops having been on the other side of the wings at some point. This is one of those places where the decay of knowledge comes in:
This is one of the previous locations of a stop, and it is clear that whoever moved them did not know how to treat animal based glues (which should surprise no one). See that flaky film? That is the glue that held the stop in place, while screws reinforce it against shearing. It is britle now, but that is not evidence of the glue's weakness, because we must remember that the person who moved the stops left the residue. They would have only done this if it was difficult (for them) to remove it in the first place. Moisture has eroded the glue now, and it flakes cleanly off.
In order to facilitate refinishing the top, I need to remove the stops and the thumb screws so they lie flat. Unlike our mystery repairer, I know that hide glues are easily reversed: all you need is a hot knife.
I have a small paring knife I keep around for odd tasks that need a knife but are too rough for a good one. After removing the screws, I ran that over a propane torch a bit to heat it up until it just started to turn a shade blonde, turned off the torch, and then carefully cut around the stop and pried, slowly working into the glue. Once you get enough leverage, it pops off:
There is a little heat blistering in the finish because of the knife, but the great thing about shellac finishes is that they can be repaired without any seams or threat of delamination.
The thumb screws have a threaded thumb bolt, a nut, and thread through a brass ring embedded in the wood. When I get to repairing the aforementioned previous repairs I'll go into that more.
Next I stripped the wings with the scraper. The square half of the wings were pretty easy to clamp on my (not so good) carpentry bench, but clamping the outer boards in the bench required a little trickery since the corners are broadly radiused:
While I pick on my factory-formed workbench, it manages to get things done (except flattening boards; not really sturdy enough for that). The bench dogs have square heads but round shafts, a feature that is easier to manufacture and, despite confusing like three different ways a European workbench can work, has advantages, like swiveling bench dogs that still have a wide bearing face.
The white pieces of wood sit against one bench dog a piece and contact the radiused corners tangentially. On the other side of the board are two bench dogs. As I tightened the vice, it pushes the board forward, but the white wooden pieces force it to move to the right into the other bench dogs, clamping the board firmly in place with no special jig or vice. This only works, of course, when the combined width of the white wood and board is greater than the space between the front and rear rows of bench dog mortices.
And that is where the table is right now. The next task is to remove all the hardware and treat it with Evaporust and lacquer stripper, and to clean the mildew and mold caked onto the undercarriage.
*"scorp" is another word for an in-shave. I use it as a verb to indicate the creation of shallow depressions in a wooden surface by power sanders or over-zealous scraping.
Credits: I of course would be nowhere without the knowledge of Patrick Edwards concerning animal based glues; my credits list permanently includes Roy Underhill, Peter Follansbee, and Chris Schwarz, too. But really, what hand-tooler doesn't?
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