The page you requested cannot be found.When disassembling or assembling furniture, avoid the frustration of a missing screw or other small part by keeping small, loose parts and fasteners in a closable sandwich bag. Then, even if you have to take time out in the middle of the project, you can keep all the parts from getting lost.You drilled without measuring, and now your bookcase has an extra hole.Mix sawdust from the table wood with wood glue to create a thick paste. Fill the hole and scrape it flush. Then sand it completely level when dry.Making a small repair means driving tiny brads into your bookshelf, but you keep missing the nail and hitting wood or flesh and bone.Stabilize a small nail for driving by poking it through a piece of duct tape. The tape lets you hold the nail in place until you've driven it far enough in to be steady. Then remove the tape and finish driving the nail.The holes in your drawer knobs have stripped and the screws aren't keeping them in place.Push toothpicks into the holes of the knobs and break them off, then tighten the screws.
They'll grab the toothpick wood and hold tight.You have to a drive a nail near the edge of a wood piece, but you're afraid of splitting it.Use the trick of professional carpenters: Before driving the nail, turn it over and hammer the point a couple of times to blunt it. The flatter tip will crush wood fibers in its path, rather than prying them apart and leading to a split.Your dresser-drawer guides are causing the drawers to stick.Simple drawer guides cause wood-on-wood contact and can, over time, lead to a lot of friction that creates a sticky situation. Give your drawer glide-power by rubbing a candle or bar of soap along the guides. Use a scented variety to add a nice aroma to the dresser.You want the hinges on the kitchen cabinets to line up perfectly, but repeatedly removing and replacing the hinges is probably going to damage the brass screws, screw holes, or both.When fine fitting cabinet-door hinges, use steel screws during the adjustment process until everything is right. Save the brass screws for final installation only.
Ditch if ... there are large cracks throughout a major portion of the surface area of the piece; the veneer is thin and was poorly applied and is chipping or peeling; major sections of the piece are warped and the piece is constructed of pressed wood, fiberboard, or similar composite materials.Fix if ... the piece is intact and constructed of solid wood, has only cosmetic blemishes, and has mortise-and-tenon joints. by brandy in Antiques, Uncategorized We love hearing the story behind the chair. In our disposable society, somehow people manage to retain sentimental attachments to chairs and get nostalgic warm fuzzies telling the provenance of their chair. Of course some people toss $2000 chairs to the curb because the weave is broken, so it balances out. Speaking of chair stories, my aunt Gladys paid $5 for a bentwood child’s chair for my niece Ellie. It won’t be the easiest chair to repair so Ellie will probably get it when she has kids (she is 3). As we were putting it in the car we turned it over (it is stamped THONET AUSTRIA) and then we did some research.
That $5 investment was basically worth it, because the chairs we saw online range from $250-$1200. Thonet is credited with developing the bentwood process (similar to shipbuilding where steamed wood is bent and braced with a similarly shaped steel component til dry) but others out there are Le Corbusier, Mundus, and Kohn. Once on Antiques Roadshow an elegant bentwood bench (similar to the one below) with a large cane seat by J & J Kohn was featured. We happen to have a few J & J Kohn chairs in the studio at present, and it is always fun to see a tag and know the maker. Moulin Rouge by Toulouse Lautrec I call these chairs “cafe chairs” because of their popularity in Parisian Cafes. I call them other things that I can’t write on this blog because they are so difficult to weave. Each chair took me 10 days to weave. They have to be disassembled to access the holes underneath and then the holes are recessed 1/4-1/2 inch into the frame so tie offs are infuriating.
recessed holes, tiny cane, and lots of holes make weaving super difficult But I can’t help but be drawn in by the history of these chairs. They are stamped and have abundant paper tags denoting that they are from the Kohn Bros. in Austria. So here’s the chair story: In the mid 1800’s, a German guy called Gebruder Thonet, created this mass production process of steamed wooden pieces that could be assembled into chairs. He was “the official furniture designer to the throne of Austria, ” and therefore opened his first factory there. working with water and these delicate tags are also difficult Steaming and bending wood was already popular with Windsor chairs but those chairs had to be worked with and cut to size after the steaming process. Thonet’s bentwood process allowed the components to be used almost immediately after and was essentially an early Ikea! Thonet had factories in Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, & France. He produced millions of these chairs by the end of the century, his patent expired and many copies were made.
Manufacturers began to fine tune the process,40 million of these chairs were made a year! like our Austrian duo J & J Kohn. They began manufacturing and packaging these easy to ship and assemble chairs. Why they used cane, I have no idea…I can’t imagine how they’d mass produce something with a seat that takes a pro 10 days to weave. Certainly, there was a machine for it…and how I would have loved to get my hands on that this last month I worked on these two dang chairs! In the 1920’s Kohn merged with Mundus, and eventually with Thonet and they are still going strong. Interestingly, Marcel Breuer’s cantilevered chair is a direct descendant of the bentwood chair and is equally as infuriating to weave! Do yourself a favor if you are nerdy enough to still be reading, google bentwood chairs, click on images, and you will see some crazy a** chairs. They were so ubiquitous that you can find images of folks from Picasso to Stalin. Stalin in a bentwood chair