African Mahogany Antique Rocker

Here's a really fun and amazing story.  I really love this! 

My customer brought her marvelous old rocker to the shop for repair. (Sorry, no pic)

But I wiIl use what I'll call a "pic narrative" to help me tell this story. 

The initial goal was to reglue the right broken leg and then generally stabilize the chair's joints. Then we'd recover the chair seat. However, when I got a really good look at the break and it's relationship to other vital joints in the immediate area,  I knew we had an even bigger problem.  Three joints were located in very close proximity within that same structural area.  The break was compromised by past multiple repairs in the same area. The leg's present break, and this repair, promised to fracture the integrity of all three joints! Ugh. That won't work.  We needed a Plan B. 

Plan B required my taking the front of the chair apart. It meant replacing the broken leg-arm and fabricating a new one from contemporary African Mahogany wood...a "do over." We'd use the existing leg-arm as a pattern and start from scratch. One looming question persisted: Because this chair was hand-made @1860 could we get the new wood to look like the original? Hmmm. We'll need to wait and see, but I was reasonably confident. 😊 👍 

My customer trusted me.

So the process began. I removed the fabric from around the perimeter of the seat.  Wow, you can (enlarge the

so you can) see the battered tack strip securing the velvet fabric. It's been re-upholstered at least five times through the past 140 years! 

Then I worked to separate the leg-arm assembly from the frame.

And I pulled the leg free from the chair arm and began to use it as our pattern for its now-to-be-fabricated replacement. 

The new leg is taking shape. Multiple "dry fits" of the new leg gradually affirmed its fit, and clarified the appropriate hole positions and alignment with other critical joint connections. Yaaay!

Finally I glued the new leg into place and also glued the arm back onto place. Then I clamped it all securely for 12-hours. Yaaay yaaay!

Will the new wood look like the old wood? I sanded and prepped and then re-stained the entire chair front area.

 Then I carefully hand stripped the entire chair and re-stained it all so all the patina promised to match. It looked so good! The next step...re-upholstery. Wow 👌.  So pretty. 

My customer graciously forwarded this pic of her great grandmother (1865) seen here as a child standing next to her mother (left side). Mom is seated in this marvelous OLD rocker.  It's wow wow wow stuff!

And that's why I call this special... the amazing stories these precious pieces can tell.

So, that's WoodTalkin.  Are you listening?

Happy New Year 2022 everybody!

Dick Brandow

720.350.2992 cell & text

A Hand Carved Hickory High Chair

Check out this little high chair.   It's completely handmade--hand carved out of Hickory branches! It is a really fun story,  and it's a fun story to re-tell.

As you may know already,  the business name,  WoodTalkin, was chosen because of the stories pieces, like this little chair's, whisper to us. And they deserve to be listened to.  So bend your ear this direction for just a minute.

 My customer brought this little chair in the door and described how it had been in his family for several generations.  He didn't know who originally fabricated it--perhaps a great grandfather. The issue for them at this particular point in time--the reason he brought it to the shop--was because it was really rickety, unsafe for a child to sit in.  So he asked me to make it safe again.

 Well, as you may know, literally everything I do in the shop boils down to time and materials for work done. And this little chair was going to be a project requiring complete disassembly in order to clean and re-glue all the joints.  That appeared initially an easy enough task to accomplish, and in a reasonable amount of time.  Well so much for 1st blush conclusions.  When I began the task to disconnect the joints and pull the chair apart, I realized all the joints had been pinned with tiny nails. Ugh!

These were "wire nails"--production made.  People began using wire nails--slowly graduating from the use of blacksmith-made steel nails--in the late 1800s. Then they gradually replaced hand made steel nails in the United States and Great Britain.

 I had to carefully locate the nailhead(s) in each joint, dig that little nail head out of its position--enough so that at least I could grab it and pull it out--and then move to the next joint.  And I soon discovered some of the joints had several  embedded nails. So,  I needed to get back on the phone with my customer to let him know how and why  this effort was going to take longer and cost more than any of us had anticipated.  (Ongoing customer collaboration is key to good customer relationships!)

 Having to dig all these little details out of these joints left some nasty scars on the chair (look closely). Each of these little holes then had to be filled and then re-stained to match the surrounding patina, or blend it to compliment it.

 When I was able to start pulling the joints apart, I concluded this wasn't the 1st time these little joints had been re-glued. The glue in these joints was not in every case the old glue one would expect to find in a chair made in the late 1880s.  Some of the joints  appeared to have the old glue, but others were sporting glue contemporary of the past 35 or 40 years. Hmmm. So the chair's joints were probably  "pinned" together in a previous re-glue effort. In fact, the finish  was also unmistakably contemporary. This sweet hand-made highchair had been re-glued and and refinished at some point in the comparatively recent past.

 One of the handmade spindles fitting into the yoke of the seat's back was badly deteriorated. With antiques I don't re-make a spindle and put it in place with the old ones. So,  I removed the spindle from the yoke and cut off the portion that was damaged beyond repair. I placed a new piece of Hickory into the spindle,  glued and shaped it to accommodate both the figure and fit, and reintroduced it into this beautiful hand-carved yoke medly .  Then it was time to re-glue all the pieces and the chair back together. Wow, fun stuff!  

Such a fun little piece.  My customer was happy.  This little beauty is going back home to grand kids. I'm happy!

That's WoodTalkin for today. Thanks for listening. Merry Christmas!

Dick