Care of Spar Varnished Exterior Doors, Gates, and Furniture

Here’s a post from Dean!

“People often ask what finish they should apply to exterior wood so that it will maintain its beautiful natural glow indefinitely. We have found that the only way to achieve this effect is proper care and maintenance. 

Natural resin spar varnish, the same finish traditionally used on the bright work on boats, is the best finish to use. Initially, a minimum of 10-12 coats must be applied. After 3-4 coats have built up, the finish must be flat sanded in between succeeding coats until all grain and pinholes are filled with finish. Now your piece looks beautiful! Job well done! Finished! …Not quite.

All exterior wood must be properly maintained and cared for. If in a salt water environment, the piece must be rinsed weekly to ensure that the magnifying properties of salt and sun (U.V. rays) won’t expedite the fading of the wood color. 

While rinsing, look for any chips, scratches, or other damage to the finish. If damage is found, that area must be “touched up”, that is, sanded and sealed with several coats of spar varnish. Water must not reach the wood itself or graying will begin to occur. 

The bright work on boats should be sanded with 220-320 grit sandpaper then spar varnished at least twice a year for proper water and U.V. protection. Most exterior doors and gates can be sanded and recoated a minimum of once a year.

This to most seems to be an excessive schedule of maintenance. Even though it requires such extensive yearly maintenance, we have determined that spar varnish is the best finish available.  Because of its elasticity it handles the constant movement of wood well and has been found to protect wood’s natural beauty best, both in our experience and by all of the boat finish experts that we have talked to. Any harder finish, such as epoxy, does not move with the wood, ends up cracking, and has to be completely removed (a very costly and tedious task). An oil finish at the other extreme, although very flexible is permeable, and will gray rather quickly, even if reapplied frequently. We believe that the beauty of wood is worth the labor intensive process of spar varnishing, and is worth maintaining.”

D.I.Y. Chair Repair

This post may seem a bit counter-productive for us, since one of the services we offer is the repair and re-gluing of chairs. However, if more people used proper materials and techniques when doing their own re-gluing, then we would have an easier time doing the repairs that require the tools that are generally found only in a furniture shop such as ours. I must also confess that I am myself a DIYer, and understand the desire to tackle the simpler problems that happen around my house rather than pay a professional if I can help it. So, without further ado, here’s a brief explanation of how to repair your own chair. 

First, we have to talk about materials. This is incredibly important! When we repair chairs, we have to think about the next person who will have to repair the chair, whether that be next year or in 200 years… Eventually something on the chair will break, and so the joints will have to come apart. So, we have to use water-soluble glues such as Elmer’s Carpenters Interior Wood Glue http://elmers.com/product/detail/e7010 . Never use epoxy, or gorilla glue or Titebond II or III when repairing a chair, as these products make it extremely difficult to repair in the future. When repairing a very old chair, you can use Hide Glue (actually made with animal hide), as that is the only product that will attach to the old hide glue used on period pieces. Also, do not use nails, screws, or steel brackets, unless they were very clearly part of the original construction of the chair; when used in joints, they will only weaken them by removing vital wood.

So, Step 1. Label all the pieces with masking tape. Left to right, front to back, with numbers on spindles or rungs. You may think you can lay them all out and remember where everything goes, but inevitably you WILL be distracted by something right after you get everything apart, and you won’t remember where things go.

Step 2. Check for nails or screws and remove them. If you don’t, you WILL break the chair, and the repair will get much more difficult. 

Step 3. Take the wiggly old thing apart! Depending on how loose the chair is, this can be easy or hard. You will want to get the joints wet, and either use a rubber mallet to gently tap things apart, or use a hammer with a piece of pine between your hammer and your chair to protect your chair. Once you have some of it apart, you can wiggle round joints clock-wise so that they end up turning in the hole counter clock-wise and spin out, continuing to use a lot of water. (If you are dealing with a water-soluble glue, this will be easy, and your hands will be quite sticky by this point)

Step 4. Scrape any remaining glue out of the holes and ends of spindles with a standard screw-driver, old chisel, or knife (don’t cut yourself!). 

Step 5. Assemble any and all clamps that you have (you will need at least 10-12) and dry clamp your chair back together, using pine blocks between your clamp and the chair to protect the chair. This is frustrating, since you have to take it apart again, but if you don’t do this, you may find in the middle of gluing your chair up that your clamps won’t hold and you can’t pull the joints back together tightly (if the joints aren’t tight, the chair will break!). Once you have done this, take the chair back apart and proceed!

Step 6. Put glue on each rung or spindle and its hole consecutively as you put them together. Start with the base, and move up the chair. (that is if it is a windsor or something like it. If it is a ladder back, start with the back and then move to the front.) 

Step 7. Clamp it all together, and wipe any glue off of the chair that has squeezed out of the holes with a damp cloth (if there is no squeeze-out, chances are you didn’t put enough glue in!). You need to leave the clamps on it for an absolute minimum of 2 hours if you use yellow carpenter’s glue, and 12 hours if you used Hide Glue, and do not allow anyone to sit in it for 24 hours. 

Now, just kick back, relax, and wait for the glue to dry! I hope this helped you in your quest to return your chair to it’s previous sturdiness! If at any point you find yourself in way over your head, give us a call at 978-281-6024 or bring your chair to our shop!

Why Do You Do This?! (Part 2)

Last week I tackled the piece of our business that has taken the bulk of our time over the last 20-some-odd years, furniture restoration. Now, I will tackle something that Dad has done since he was an apprentice to another fine wood-worker, custom furniture construction, or as we’re calling it now, “artisan furniture creation”. 

From the beginning of the design process all the way to choosing which finish to put on a particular piece, Dad and I bicker our way through each decision. We have gone back and forth over things like the height of our “Low Tavern Tables” which you can see here:

https://www.facebook.com/therestorationworks/photos/a.1113664745329517.1073741834.163034613725873/1121684214527570/?type=3&theater

When all is said and done, and our unique relational method of making these decisions has finished changing our furniture, we are happy with the result! So, quick answer, we enjoy almost everything about the process of taking raw materials and making something beautiful. 

Another piece of it, though, relates to my previous post, where I talked about how large companies are cutting huge corners in their construction process and using materials that will not last, and suckering people into a vicious cycle of buying new furniture every few years after their particle board monstrosities have begun to disintegrate. At every step, from the design process to choosing wood and actually building the pieces, we are thinking about how to make our furniture outlast the person who buys it. We believe that choosing the best materials available ourselves and putting great thought into about how wood movement will affect our design, while employing traditional methods that have served master woodworkers for centuries, will achieve this goal. 

We often use reclaimed pine in our furniture (in fact I have saved some boards from my house project for this purpose!), but we don’t restrict ourselves to this, and have built pieces out of all sorts of local and exotic hardwoods, always choosing the wood ourselves. In the interest of making our work last as long as possible, we do employ fine plywoods when we do not want wood movement to ruin veneer work, or Dad’s etchings. You see, if we veneered over solid wood, eventually the veneer would buckle and flake off, due to the movement of the wood beneath, but when we veneer over fine plywood, we can be confident that the veneer work will last, because the plywood doesn't move the way solid wood does. This is part of the “marriage of traditional methods with modern materials” that I referenced in my third post on “Veneer…Good or Bad?”

So, to sum all of this up, we are passionate about building furniture that will last for generations to come. However, we could do that without incorporating etchings or using the designs that we do. We also love our little island, and the beauty and the history of the port of Gloucester inspires the images that become part of our furniture in the form of Dad’s etchings and the carvings and marquetry that we have included in our pieces. We love the history of the pieces that we have restored, and so we use many of the same design elements in the furniture we create, hoping that these pieces will be handed down for many generations.

Why do you do this?! (part 1)

This is a question that we have heard from various customers over the years as we have described all of the details that go into restoring a particular piece. We usually laugh and brush it off, and I can’t lie, there are times when we ask ourselves that same question while dealing with a particularly persnickety project. We have never really answered it in a serious way, and I guess it seems like now would be as good a time as any to give it a go. 

The way I see it, since our business has two sides (antique restoration and artisan furniture creation), the answer to this question has two parts as well. Today, I’ll tackle the antique furniture restoration side to the question and I will try to cover the other part next week.

As you walk into our shop, the building itself gives you the feeling of well-worn age. While it certainly isn’t nearly as old as many of the pieces that we restore, its early 20th century post-and-beam construction (mixed with steel reinforcement) just feels old but solid. This feeling is something that we prize in many of the pieces we restore. Some antique pieces are simply delicate by design (and should be carefully restored and displayed), but many pieces were originally very sturdy and have just become a little wobbly over time. These pieces were built in such a way that they can be taken apart, the old dried-up hide glue replaced with new hide glue that will last another couple of centuries, and the pieces are once again as solid and functional as they were when they were new.

We also love to see the care and pride that went into the building of furniture in times gone by. From the wood that was chosen, to the finish that was applied, great care was taken to ensure that the piece—be it a simple chair or a fine high-boy—would last for generations to come. This is something that has nearly been lost today! Many companies are happier to build pieces out of particle board and staple them together, than they are to build something that would last. Granted, the piece made of particle board is much cheaper to manufacture, but it will only last a few years before it begins to disintegrate and the customer gets stuck in a cycle of replacing it with more pieces of the same quality. We fight this trend daily, by taking antiques which are beginning to fall apart after over a hundred years of frequent use and breathing life back into their old bones. 

We enjoy the variety in our work, as no two pieces are the same, and we enjoy the challenge of figuring out how they were made, and how best to restore them so that they last as long as they possibly can without losing their historical integrity. So when you bring your piece in, feel free to ask us how we will approach your particular project, but don’t be surprised when you get more detail than you bargained for; we care deeply about what we do!

New Babies and Old Houses

I am sorry for taking such a long hiatus between posts! It’s been more than two weeks now, and when I started this blog, I intended to make a post once a week. There has been a change to my family which makes this a bit more understandable. Eleven days ago, my second son wriggled his way into the world, and ever since then he and his brother have kept my wife and I both very busy and rather exhausted! It seems that newborns don’t believe in keeping predictable sleep schedules and toddlers don’t believe in sleeping past 6:15 even if their brother happens to still be asleep. 

On top of all that, I have embarked on another project, and had actually begun before the wee one came on the scene. You see, my wife and I had closed on our first house a week before he was born, and since we are a young couple, and my dad and I are fairly handy, it is a house with a ton of potential… but not much in the way of modern updates. It is a small colonial house built by a Gloucester sailmaker in the early 1850s, so it had great bones, but no insulation and a fair amount of crumbling plaster. I started to work on it the afternoon after closing, and have been doing careful demolition ever since. 

My first surprise came after my first night taking down the plaster in a ceiling, when I found that instead of being a typical stick-frame house, it was actually post-and-beam construction! I was all but jumping up and down with excitement (this is because when I was young, I helped my dad with a lot of the joinery that went into building our own post-and-beam home). That made the house a slightly unusual house for the era in which it was built, but not so unusual as to put it in a different era. 

My second surprise came when my brother and I were taking the plaster out of one of the exterior walls in the first floor, and he started pulling out what we thought was a simple squirrel nest. He called me over when he found something hard, and we started to be a little more careful about removing the items that were stashed in the wall. We were both surprised when the hard thing turned out to be a concealed shoe! (you can learn more about concealed shoes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_shoes) He continued to dig, and found four more shoes, ranging from a toddlers’ shoe to a grown ladies’ shoe, as well as a three foot long saw-blade, a stick that turned out to be part of a parasol handle, some children’s toys (one of which turned out to be a miniature of a whale oil lamp refiller), and some newspaper articles that dated back to 1846! 

I invited a couple of friends to come see the house, since they are both good friends and huge history buffs. I knew they would be excited to see what I had found. They were able to tell me that the shoes I had found did indeed date back to the 1840s, as did everything else. I was very interested to learn that these articles stashed in the wall were not actually put there by a pilfering squirrel or rat, but were actually part of an ancient tradition among carpenters and house builders meant to bring good fortune to those living in the house. 

I am excited to see what else this old house has to teach me as I bring it back from its abandoned state, to a home for a young and growing family, much as it was when it was originally built.

Kayaks!

Now it is October, and since we are putting our kayaks away, my mind has turned to kayaking. Having spent most of my life here, I have realized that Gloucester is a beautiful place to put your kayak in the water and just go for a day, and Dad and I have spent many hours exploring its coast. One year, I took part in Gloucester’s annual Blackburn Challenge, and raced around our island in a kayak that we had built. We have done some kayak camping up in Nova Scotia, Canada (You can see pictures of that trip here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.931377710224889.1073741832.163034613725873&type=3 ), but for the most part, we stick to day trips, either together or with our respective families. (In fact, the first time I took my wife out kayaking, a baby seal jumped up onto the back of her kayak!)

Since we live in such a beautiful place to go kayaking, and enjoy doing it so much, we needed to have our own kayaks, but, being woodworkers, we wanted something a little more aesthetically pleasing than the typical plastic or fiberglass boats you see cruising around Cape Ann. So, when I was 10, Dad found an old book that described how to build a tandem sea-kayak out of thin strips of cedar. This is one of the first major projects that I can remember working on with Dad, and while building it took some time and was somewhat tedious at times for a 10 year old, we’ve put that boat through a lot over the past 16 years, and only now has the time come to retire it. 

The wood that we used for that tandem was beautiful, but the design was something less than gorgeous. It seemed to me to have been designed by someone who looked at it like a canoe with a roof, rather than as a sleek kayak, and over the years it earned the nickname “The Barge”. So, when it came time to build my own single kayak, six or seven years later, Dad and I took a stab at designing it ourselves. The lines of that kayak are quite sleek, but the design could use some serious tweaking for performance… We definitely discovered that we are better at designing furniture than kayaks. 

Finally, when we built Dad’s kayak, we used a design called the Guillemot Expedition. Nick Schade designed it, and it is a beautiful design, both to use and to behold. You can see the Guillemot here, as well as many of his other boats: http://www.clcboats.com/shop/boats/kayak-kits/touring-kayaks/guillemot-expedition-single-strip-built-sea-kayak-kit.html Nick sells both full kits to build the boats and just the designs. We bought the design, and milled out all of our own pieces.

We found that the Guillemot Expedition (We nick-named Dad’s the Zipper, due to the large zipper he put on the deck using marquetry!) is a great boat both for camping, due to the great amount of space in it, and for day trips, since it handles like a smaller boat and tracks very nicely. 

All in all, we greatly enjoy our time on the water, and we enjoy building these kayaks as well. Let us know if you want us to build one for you, or simply want some tips on how to get started!

Veneer... Good or Bad?

Normally I’d be posting this on Saturday, but my brother is getting married this Saturday! So that means that you get a post a couple days early! Today I want to talk about veneer and it’s use in antique and modern furniture, because I can’t tell you how many people have walked into the shop with an antique piece of furniture telling us how their empire bureau (or something of that sort) is “solid Mahogany” or “solid Birds-Eye Maple” and their face falls when we explain that their piece is actually a veneered piece. Many people think that simply because a piece has veneer, it is either not valuable, or isn’t actually an antique. Neither of these assumptions are necessarily true, though they are based in historical fact or practice. 

Veneer was actually used as far back as the Egyptian Pharaohs. That means that it was used 4,000 years ago! The guys over at Wood River have a more in-depth description of the history and how it has been used and harvested over the years. You can take a look at that here: http://wood-veneer.com/history-of-veneer.php 

The furniture we most often encounter are pieces from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and while many of these pieces are solid, there were many furniture makers who did use veneer, so as to avoid using a lot of the more expensive woods, while retaining the beauty. Because the method of slicing the veneer was different, and they didn’t have the same precision tools that we do now, the veneer varies in thickness from 1/16th of an inch to 3/16ths of an inch. This makes it relatively easy to repair. Modern veneers are about 1/64th of an inch, and are very hard to work with.  So, if you have a piece and the veneer is flaking off, or buckling, and it’s thicker than a piece of paper, bring it in and we will most likely be able to repair it! 

The reason that many people believe that if a piece is veneered it is a fake or a piece of junk, is that in the early 1900s factories began covering pieces with veneer to disguise cheaper material choices. They began using cheap plywoods and using dowels instead of traditional mortise and tenon joinery or dovetails, and so the pieces were built faster and cheaper, but they also fell apart quicker. Dad and I do use veneer and plywood occasionally but only where it doesn’t compromise quality, but improves it.  The marriage of traditional methods and modern materials is a tricky business, but that is a topic for a different post!