Armchair Part 3

Saturday afternoon gave me a chance to do a little more work on the armchair. This involved more tack pulling. I did however get the burlap partially removed. This week has been super busy so I have not had time to post much. The regular job is out of control right now.  Plus, I work there this weekend so there wont be too many post for a while. I will be hustlin but it will be academic hustlin not antique hustlin.

I finally got the arms exposed and started work on the burlap underneath. Seems that someone made it from old sacks. 

Getting the burlap off. Exposing the strapping

Here is the chair with just the burlap attached. 

Arm Chair Part 2

Tuesday after work I went to the Hancock Fabrics because they were the only local source for a tack puller.  After struggling to get the tacks off the project the first time I looked up how professional upholsters did it and watched some videos on how to use one. It turns out to be one of the best four dollars I have spent in a while. Once I got the hang of it last night the fabric removal moved right along. After dinner last night I went out to the shop and spent three hours before bed pulling tacks. I got all the fabric off and later this week will pull the burlap bedding. 

This is the chair with the side panel removed. 

The Chair with the front fabric pulled away. I tried to be careful here so I could make a study of how the arms were covered. I don't think I will do the button tufting when I recover it. 

This is the tack puller. Its narrow head and gentle angle allow the tool to slide under the tack and pop it out with little or no damage to the wood. Sometimes a gentle tap from the rubber mallet helps this process. If the tack was really dead sometimes it had to be gently pried with a screwdriver. 

The back of the chair. Where the back panel and front panel met, they were sewed together. 

The three primary tools that I had to use for this project. 

The exposed back and side

The front. Notice how the strapping and burlap on the bottom has failed. 

The back showing the batting and thread from the button tufting. 

I also spent some time Tuesday trying to figure out the style of chair. If you remember the chair has a sweeping back. It does not have wings so that eliminated it as a wing back chair. It is close to the shape of a Victorian slipper chair but does not quite match that style. I have decided that based on what Ic an find that I am going to call this an armed nursing chair. Nursing chairs leaned back to make nursing easier on mothers.  Most examples I have seen do not have arms, but some do. This accounts for the sweeping back. It also like a slipper chair accounts for its short height. 

Child's Rocker Part 2

Well the Child's Rocker got finished Sunday night. I just had not updated blog on the process. After the Clamps were off for the glue up I flush cut the proud dowels. I still worried that the joint would not hold so I decided to go ahead and attach some repair bars to the rocker. A better woodworker would probably not have to do this but I was afraid of them breaking if the rocker got any hard wear in the future. I bent one and place it across the top, another two went across the sides of the break. I then painted these with some enamel paint to match the colour of the wood. This was a brown base with a streaked black to mimic the shellac that is the original finish.  Having sat in a barn or garage for so long the whole piece had to be cleaned. I did this with a little Murphy's Oil Soap. After this dried I coated the finish in a good furniture wax. I prefer Mylands Furniture Wax because I believe of all the waxes I have tried it best matches the quality and tone of antique finishes. The wax glazed over and was given a light hand buffing. All the spindles made this quite a long job but not a particularly hard one.  These pictures were taken at night but in the daylight the colour of the wood is extraordinary. 

The finished chair. 

The chair before cleaning. You can see all the dust on the seat and rails. 

The repair bar before painting.

The chair before cleaning and waxing.

This is the repair bar with the coat of brown enamel. 

The good ole' flush cut saw.

The chair after cleaning.

Paint and other things. 

The repair bar with the black streaks added. 

It's ready for resale. Now I just have to figure out what to do with this piece. 

Unstuffing the chair

I thought work would never end yesterday. It finally did around eight thirty at night and I got to spend a whopping fifteen minutes in the shop before I had to get ready for bed. So I started de-stuffing this chair.

I set it up on the bench and pulled out the tufts of material. I set up two bags. One for the horsehair/wood stuffing and one for the cotton batting. After most was out of the bottom I tried to do some fabric removal. Turns out (a lesson I have learned before and forgot) the antique tacks are really stubborn. None of my regular nail pullers worked well. I try not to have lots of specialty tools but I need a tack puller or this will take forever. Some of them are rusty and the heads pooped off so I had to grab them with pliers.

With the fabric removed it became clear that the fabric that wrapped around the stretcher did not originally do so.  More wood was exposed in the original upholstery. You can see the line where the tacks where that became exposed when I removed the fabric. 

Unlike the fabric wrapping down to be tacked as it was when I got the chair here is how the line would have looked using the original tack line. More of the beautiful wood would have been exposed, I think this will improve the lines of the chair as well. 

Here is another view. Had the original lines been used the piece would have had a lighter look than it does. plus the nice finished wood would have been exposed rather than covered up. 

Caster (castor) detail. 

Bag of Cotton Batting. It filled up about half as fast as the stuffing so they are roughly in a 2/1 ratio. 

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On the bench ready for stuffing removal

Child's rocking chair Part 1

Saturday morning I went to an estate sale. This child's rocker was in a box and four dollars. I hemmed and hawed about the issue and finally bought it. One of the rockers was split. I figured that I could repair it. Rockers are tricky to repair but they are not the worst thing in the world. When I got it home and started inspecting the joint I realized that it had split because the wood was worm eaten and soft. You could lift the piece and a fine wood dust would fall out. I decided that this would take two pins one from the top and one from the bottom. Because the wood was delicate I decided to use the hand drill. I then drilled out and pegged my break. It was then that I realized that if my break was fixed I would have a hard time fitting in my stretcher. So I stopped and prepared the whole piece for glue up. Then two hours later I had the whole buisness clamped up. It was a good time to quit because I had to get ready to go to work at the auction.

This is the chair seat "in the black" 

This is the fracture on the rocker. That is also my hand drill. I only managed to crush a little finger skin in it this time. Also in this picture is an antique hand c-clamp I picked up a few years ago. My workbench is an old sink vanity set I pulled out of a rubbish tip seven years ago. 

Another view of the seat. I am lucky that nothing on it needed repair. The arms appear to be hand carved.  

This is the broken rocker in the vise ready to be drilled. The pins worked pretty well but I still thought the joint was too weak. 

This is the start of the glue up. 

In this picture you can see the rot. I stabilised the wood, but its pretty weak here. You can see the worm holes in this picture as well. This oak dowel is proud and later I cut it down with my flush cut saw. 

Here is the whole child's rocker after reassembly and glue up. I let it sit here for several hours so the glue could set. 

This picture is out of order, but here are some stretchers. I ended up pulling them all apart so I could re-glue the joints. 

This picture shows the other side of the rocker in the vise. The next step was to drill it out to insert a pin.