Refurbishng two 19th Century Chests of Drawers

    

The handmade chest as it appeared on FB marketplace

The refurbished curb find     

       I've finally completed saving two antique pieces of furniture to add to my house in Huntington. The first item was a handmade chest that I bought through FM marketplace. A bit impulsively but I am more than pleased with how it turned out and my having rescued it from further decay.

    The second chest, a factorymade item, was picked up curbside shortly after acquiring the former.  I hadn't yet gotten a functional woodshop in order but they could serve first as motivational projects while assessing the collective damage and developing repair strategies.

    The factorymade model was manufactured with ceramic casters. Three of the wheels were intact but even that's not good enough. I purchased replacements in brass. I ought to have bought the models with the thickers stems but I made the undersized models fit snugly by using electrician's tape to bulk it out.

  

Properly supported andlestick holders and drop pulls on a handmade chest

     I pondered how to repair the broken candlestick holder.   These are often attached to mirrors as a means of reflecting the light back out into the living space.In better quality construction, the support is bracketed.  The candlestick supports on this model were secured with a singular woodscrew, one of which remained attached; whereas, the second had failed. Initially I imagined that I could fabricate a bracket that would be joined to the support pad with a sliding dovetail.

The meretricious candlestick shelf

The compromised improvement 

Underbuilt and underscrewed

     

 

        I wasn't until I had obtained a piece of locally milled walnut (along with tulip poplar planks for other repairs) that I realized that such an upgrade would not work. The uprights were beaded and A bracker would cover them. At best the bracket would only provide stability and I didn't want to drill through the uprights in order to better secure the candlestick supports with an additional woodscrew. This meant that even with the brackets jointed into the bottoms of the pads, they would only be held in place with a single woodscrew. It dawned on me that these were simply decorative items that were not functional today any more than in the past. I determined to remove the remaining support before it was also broken.

    Even though the handmade chest had its own distinct challenges and quirks, one problem straddled both items and many other similarly constructed chests of drawers.  The drawersides present two intertwined weaknesses. The narrow bottoms must bear the full weight of the drawer's contents as it is withdrawn and reinserted into the chest. This repeated action causes the drawerside to be worn down over time ad well as the runners. 

    A second inherent weakness of such a groove that is plouhged into the sides in order to receive the drawerbottom. This necessary groove renders a weak component even weaker and is the source of many drawer failures. Solutions to this are slips and tapered sides. Slips do appear on high end furniture yet I have only ever heard of the Shakers using this technique, likely due to its slightly greater labor investment.    

    

the restored drawerside

    My solution to counter the wear on the factory chest was to square up the bottoms of the drawersides and then to attach shims in order to repair the loss. I used beech in this case because they were handy but even a dense pine would suffice. 

Screwed down in slot

 

Drawerback thickener

    The Knapp joint cutting fixture likely was also used to join the drawer back into the sides.  The pins were were cut out of a drawer back of the same thickness which was then driven into a line of holes drilled into the drawer sides.

    

damage cased by loose drop pulls

The replacement pulls and closeup of the faux veneer

    The vanity dresser was originally produced with drop pulls. Even though this piece was set to the curb, stuffed with a bag of various hardware fittings and components from other furniture items, the correct drawer handles were absent. I tried finding modern drop pulls with backings large enough to cover the circular scoring caused by the originals into the drawer fronts. It turns out that elaborate drop pulls have fallen out of fashion during the previous 100 years. And there isn't a very active secondhand market. I settled on a different style, obtained from a hardware supplier located here in Indiana. The walnut adequately covers the damaged fronts and blends in with the vintage design.

    

Escutcheon inlay

Patched

Drawbored joinery and drawer stop

    The handmade chest is a piece rich in history. It's the only signed piece that I have obtained and it is extremely confusing to interpret what occurred during its construction.  The piece exhibits the qualities of what, I believe, would have indicated a high status piece. I've not been able to identify the primary show wood, but it is extremely dense which is in contrast with the escutcheon inlays.The split turnings and uprights suggest perhaps and workshop with specialized tradesmen or a diversely skilled individual cabinetmaker. The drawer fronts exhibit London style dovetails. 

    

It doesn't show so the mistake didn't count

Chopped and unfilled 

        And yet the piece is notable for the errors of its original construction. The damaging repairs across the years will get itemized separately. The most obvious mistake is the groove that runs around the inside top of the largest drawer. Evidently the layout lines were mismarked and the components were too valuable to dispose of and begin anew. Peter Follansbee has documented many examples of this with handmade objects. It's the case that the amount of labor already sunk into the the boards compelled the workman to make due. He and the customer were willing to overlook such flaws. Similarly there is a unused mortise in the front uprights due to mistaken layout. The stretcher just above the split turnings enters the uprights with a double mortise. The upper stretcher, by contrast, is oriented so that it only enters the upright with one tenn. The ghost mortises remain empty.

Original nail, suitably placed, clinched onto short bottom board

    The drawer bottoms merit their own highlight reel. The goal must have been to construct them out of one flatsawn pine plank. I have seen examples of bottoms that have shrunk over many years of use. A gap either emerges at the front of the drawer because the bottom is fixed to the drawer back or a gap opens up at the back as the wood fibers age and sometimes cup.

    

Original shim on bottom board, nonetheless too small

Hammer blow marks and a later repair

    The drawer bottoms, too narrow to serve their only function, left the workshop with gaps. I lost some of the photos of this project when my mobile was stolen at my workplace, but there are enough details to show that the oldest style of nails were used to pathetically patch these gaps. Roughly chopped shims were crammed behind the pine bottom, leaving slits. It boggles the mind to understand such shoddy work, albeit hidden, could commingle with the classically proportioned and decorated front

    

The workman's signature on a drawerside

    I initially planned on fully replacing the bottoms with new tulip poplar. In the end, I instead decided to incorporate as much of the original pine as I could with a width of new tulip poplar glued onto the reworked bottoms. All this would be for nothing, however, if I could not come to terms with the damage done to the drawer sides     

earlier repairs

 

        

Nail holes from a century of bodging

    After injecting some hot water into the dovetail joints, both front and back, the drawer sides components could be easily disassembled with light blows. I would be using hide glue to reattach these joints and PVA glue to widen the drawer bottoms.

gap at the drawerfront due to shrinkage 

    I selected the densest and straightest stock of southern yellow pine to serve as shims for the rebuilt drawer sides. I left the stock slightly fat, a nod to tapered sides, but also to allow for some variation with the old wood. I glued the new stock onto the old, flush with the outsides.

Ripping off the bottom of the drawersides on the new bandsaw

     

cracked groove in a drawerside

    I was able to rip off the bottoms of the drawer sides with the kerf passing between dovetails. I then jointed the edges. Because I would have to groove the sides with a handplane, I left the stock longer. This procedure would be better accomplished with a tablesaw.  I should have taken better measurements since I struggled to layout the grooves onto the newly rebuilt sides. The third ones were the easiest and produced the best fit.

  

Reassembled drawer with London style dovetails

   

a broken pin cleverly glued into its corresponding socket

     I transferred the marks from the dovetails onto the sides and sawed. One was too tight and cause a split, which I invisibly glued and clamped. I applied hide glue to the dryfit joints and assembled, checked for squareness, and let sit without clamps.

   

New drawer bottom in use

     Regluing the new shims of tulip poplar onto the old pine bottom was only slightly tricky. Each glueup required three of the long bar clamps. Out of the clamps, they were handplaned where the inside surfaces weren't aligned.  I planed down the underside bevel so that it matched up with the original contour, using a strip of wood with the same groove groove and with the sides to test for snugness. Since these are flatsawn, some cupping was evident which made assembly rather difficult. I chose to plane down some that cupping to make the newly widened bottom slide more easily into the grooves. Additionally I planed the front of the bottom panel,  squaring down the steep bevel with a skewed rabbet plane so that the would fit readily into the groove of the drawer front. I would thus secure the bottom with hide glue alone. The thickness of the bottom didn't require any fastener at the back.

    

wood butchery

 

wane in back of top and a clipped corner

    This chest suffered abuse throughout its existence. Not only the botched repairs with nails driven willy nilly in the manner of an annoying uncle, but at some time, the top was sawn along the right side and at the back left corner.  I can only surmise that at one time this chest was crammed into a closet space which required the butchered modifications

detail of back corner and distinctive chamferring of dovetails on the drawerbacks 

 

 

    Happy 250th anniversary to the constitution! It feels invigorating to be back in the woodshop and diverting Americana away from the landfill