Sunday, July 26, 2020

THEY'RE BACK !! my slideshows have been restored

THEY'RE BACK !!!
I FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW TO (sort of) RESTORE MY SLIDE SHOWS. 
THOUSANDS OF PICTURES AT THE LINKS BELOW
updated 11 16 2020
after some experimentation and finding that some folks can access these slideshows
and some can't, i think i have an idea how this works ... 
if you use google photos (https://photos.google.com/) and you are logged in,
you MAY be able to view my photos ... try that and post a comment if not ... thanks!
after discovering picasa a few years back, i have been posting edited slide shows
of categories and periods of our work.  some of those slideshows contain links
within them to the original blog post (some work, some you will have to copy and paste
or type in directly) about those pieces where you can view photos and 
descriptions of the design and construction details .. with a good connection, you
can scroll through these slides shows as fast as you can click the arrow button ..
click on any image to start the show ... lots to see here ..

click the links below to access the individual slide shows ..

Friday, July 10, 2020

a challenging repair

i got a call earlier in the week asking if i was still doing repairs.
i got some pictures via email and decided i would take it on.
it didn't look like this when it arrived though ...
in addition to some flaking and missing quartered 
veneer of some kind
the thin edging around the very nice ( and perfect) marquetry scene
had suffered some insults and some significant  pieces were
shooting off into space or missing completely ... 
how to proceed ... ????
we decided to tackle the sort of easy stuff first,
the missing and loose veneer pieces on the legs and
top edge borders ...
that took a while, but was uneventful, and with a little french 
polish touch up it looked pretty original, or at least our repairs 
blended pretty well with some previous ones.
after that we were stuck with fixing the edges of the top ...
we had two pieces of the broken edging which we were 
able to clean and glue back on ...
i decided against trying to remove the whole edge and replace it
for a number of reasons.  it was obviously glued and nailed to the
edge of the top and i worried about chipping the veneer on the top
which would have been extremely hard to repair and match.
so, i made some short pieces of mdf with matching curves and used my 
flush cut saw to saw through the1/8th inch thick edging about
half way down the thickness of the solid top, and carefully chiseling off
what remained of the broken sections. 
that went pretty well ... surprisingly the wood under the
veneer was plywood !! which dates the table sometime after
about 1865 when plywood was introduced for furniture construction.
i tried bending a couple pieces of mahogany edging, but
couldn't make the tighter curve of the end of the oval ...
we made two sets of forms, in case i screwed up the fitting, and
we fired up the steamer, steamed them for about 15 minutes
and then put the pieces in will's banjo rim kiln overnight to dry.
since they were so thin, and i was gluing and nailing them
to the substrate i put them on and finished them today.
they spring back a bit and required a little wrestling to get in place
they gave up after a while and i was able to nail them into place and 
match the finish as best i could.
and did i mention that the top flips over and there is a checker board
on the other side?  someone spent some time on this piece ..
actually, we did too.
quite the piece ...