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If you recall from an early photo, above, the carcase had these decorative flutes up and down the front edges. So, after finishing with the side, I started on the flute on that edge. Here's what the first pass of stripper did.
These are difficult areas to strip. On flat areas, a flat blade can take up a lot of paint at once. Here, the paint is trapped in any number of oddly-shaped nooks and crannies. The wood here is very porous, and it's difficult to get the paint out without pulling up damp splinters. The spiral sections are apparently oak, which is nice, but a lot of the end-grain is exposed, and there's a lot of finish and stuff that's seeped in there.
So what tools work best? I've found that, for the spiral areas, brass-bristle brushes with long bristles can scrub out the paint and finish residue, although I'll probably have to use methylene chloride for a really thorough job.
For the nooks and crannies, I use dental picks, which are required tools for paint stripping for one reason: their points can get bits of paint out of wood grain. You can buy dental picks at a lot of woodworking shows and even some online shops. There are three kinds. The first are straight picks, with the point bent at an angle. The second are these weird origami-shaped points, probably good for reaching between the back molars. The third are curved picks, where the point is bent into a question-mark shape. These curved picks are the ones you want to use: you can exert pressure without the pick's handle twisting in your grip.
And here's the obligatory safety tip. Under no circumstances should you ever use these dental picks on your teeth, or any other part of your anatomy. Or anyone else's for that matter. Don't use them to clean teeth, clean fingernails, remove splinters, or inject Botox.
Cleaned up those side flutes some more. They'll require some more work in some places, but they're generally very clean for now.
I flipped the chest over, and began work on the flutes on the other side. No pictures are really necessary, since it's pretty much what's right above this paragraph.
But I have learned from a big mistake I made earlier. Previously, I stripped the side first, and then worked on the flutes. But while working on the flutes, I had to rest my tools on the surface I'd stripped-- possibly damaging the exposed wood. This time, I did the flutes first, so when I rested the tools the paint was still there to protect the wood.
A
brief recap. I've stripped the drawers and both sides. This leaves, unstripped,
the front and top of the carcase. And the legs which, this afternoon, I've coated
with stripper and wrapped with plastic wrap as shown in the photo at left.
Stripping the paint from the legs is going to be difficult because of all the curved and stuff. When you're stripping a flat surface, you can pull off whole strips at once, like a snowplow clearing a nice, wide, flat road. But surfaces like the legs and flutes only let you take off little bits here and there. And the curves expose a lot of end grain, which absorbs a lot of paint and shellac. But I've used a lot of stripper here to try to loosen as much paint as possible. Once most of the paint's off, I can take a handful of steel wool, or a 3m stripping pad, or even sawdust, wrap it around the leg with a tight grip, and clean it off with a twisting motorcycle-throttle motion.
I've
decided to take the drawers to the basement (right) and start on the sanding,
staining and finishing. This kicks up a lot of dust, and I may have to use the
stronger chemicals, so the basement's best for this. Also, when I bring the
carcase down there for its last round of stripping, sanding, staining,
and finishing, the drawers will be finished and out of the way..
I don't know if it's evident in the photo of the drawers at right, but there are places where there is still some paint present-- like the point where the dovetails attach the drawer fronts. I decided to clean this up with a Brute Force approach, namely, scrubbing it down with 40-grit sandpaper, which is like a rasp: it's like sanding a board with a gravel road. Some of the edges got sanded down a leetle bit too much, but I kind of like the little bits of wear and tear to show.
The interiors of the drawers were not finished, originally, but I've decided that I'm going to finish them with stain and polyurethane. So, I sanded off the occasional blotches with 100-grint sandpaper, followed with a pass of 220-grit sandpaper. (Note: The higher the number, the finer the grit.) I wasn't really scrupulous about doing a really fine, even job because these were just drawer interiors, and all I wanted was a fairly even and smooth surface.
Above are two photos of a sanded drawer interior. The one on the left is the drawer, sanded, and dry... and the one on the right is the same drawer with a nice misting of denatured alcohol. This helps me wipe up the fine wood dust, but it also gives me an idea of what the surface will look like when there's a nice finish on it. And the stuff evaporates in seconds.
As for the drawer fronts, I used a different procedure. First, I spritzed them with alcohol, because the tiny bits of paint still in the wood grain stand out, visually. Then I pick'em out with a fine dental pick-- which, sadly, cause a tiny bit of grain damage. Then, I sand the drawer fronts carefully, and only with 220-grit paper, and very carefully in the direction of the wood grain. It ain't absolutely perfect, not just because of remaining blotches, but the marks from the hardware are still in evidence. But that veneer is very, very thin, and if I sand it too much it'll wear through. I like that lived-in stuff, and I'll probably reuse the hardware anyway.
But thanks to alcohol, I can show you a wet-and-dry comparison. (Oh, the use of the camera's flash seems to give it a slightly orangey tone.)
As of this writing (July 24), I've cleaned up three drawers, and will do the rest later in the week.
This evening, I finished the sanding of the drawer parts. There were a few new items to address, and here they are.
The first is the photo below. This is a close-up of two bits of trim that were on the sides of the chest's carcase, at the bottom of the frame. I had to remove these to strip them. I also left the nails in, so I could replace them really, really exactly when they're done.
The second is a bit of paint on the inside of the drawer which I did not sand away. This was pretty old paint, and sanding it away would've been ugly, so I applied some of the most effective stripper around: methylene chloride. Just a little. But this close-up shows how this stuff is so effective. Notice that the paint has wrinkled up and the finish underneath has liquefied. It's very effective, but it is extremely dangerous to work with.
The final wide-shot photo is the edge of one of the lower drawers. (I'm surprised my camera can focus this close without a special macro lens.) As you see, the veneer is paper-thin, has chipped away, and has even begun to separate from the front of the drawer. The big chunk missing is, maybe, three-quarters of an inch wide.
Now, if I were a professional furniture restorer, my job would be to remove the veneer in its entirety, and replace it with a nice, fresh, well-glued sheet. Well, I'm not, and since I'm not selling this piece, I'm perfectly willing to accept an imperfection or two (so I tell my friends that it's called "character." So I got some wood glue onto the point of a dental pick, and forced the goop under there to stabilize what veneer's left. As for the missing area, the options I have available are either a) fill it with a very thin bit of wood putty that I'll sand flush, or b) leave it missing. I'll do b), because wood putty stains very dark.
As I said earlier, I gave the drawer interiors a light sanding, and washed them clean with denatured alcohol. Funny thing is, when it dried, it left these large whitish patches on the wood. The photo at far left shows these areas fairly well. I didn't think anything of it because, when they were wet, they looked fine.
But they also seemed a little smooth, like the remnant of an old clear finish. Which is pretty much that I think they are, because I tried a test application of gel stain on this particular drawer's interior. And the stain did not seem to penetrate these regions, nor did it seem to stick to the surface.
So I gave it another round of sanding. I didn't so an absolutely thorough job: I just wanted to see if scuffing this whitish surface enough would give the gel some purchase. It seemed to be effective, if not perfect: the second and third photos above (clickable) show the result. (Photo 2 uses a flash, Photo 3 doesn't. In both, the stain is still wet.)
So here's what I'm thinking right now. I'm thinking that the the drawer interiors have a layer of finish, and that sanding it doesn't seem to really clean it out as well as I'd want. This will take a chemical stripper, and since Safest Stripper is sort of weak, I'm probably going to have to make a thin application of-- Gasp! Choke! Methylene Chloride, and a quick scrub with fine steel wool.
But I'm going to put that off for later. Tomorrow, or Friday, I'll clean off the legs, and maybe get started on the carcase front and top.
The instructions say to apply the stain, wait three minutes, and then wipe it clean. This is absolutely true. Do not wait more than three minutes before wiping off the stain. Otherwise, it will solidify, and you'll either have to sand it off or wash it off with paint thinner or something. Remember, all you need is enough stain to attach to the wood and make it look nice.
It's the hottest day of the year, and I spent some of it with chemicals. I started on stripping the front of the carcase, for one thing. Below is a close-up of one of the cross-pieces as I stripped it. The tiny channels at the top and bottom were cleaned with a dental pick.
And
I decided to try applying a stain to the drawer fronts. The stain, in case you
don't recall, is Minwax's Mahogany Gel Stain: you apply it, let it set a few
minutes, and then wipe it off leaving a residue. It seemed to me that the best
course was to stain and polyurethane the fronts of the drawers first. That way,
they're protected when I do the interiors. I laid the big drawers so I could
eyeball the stains for uniformity. The photo at left is what the stain looks
like when I apply it (like bad paint), and at right is a clickable image of
what the stain looks like after I wiped it off. The stain needs 8-10 hours to
dry, so I'll go back, and try to even it out if I need to do so.
The
two weeks since my last update included a very severe heat wave, which didn't
make bending over a piece of furniture with nasty chemicals and protective clothing
very appealing. But, work has progressed, a lot's been accomplished, and I'd
say that I'm in the home stretch. This project could be done by the end of next
week.
The photo at left shows the front of the carcase, now that I've stripped the front edges (a job I started on August 1). Notice that, in the back, are bits of stripped paint and other garbage that fell back there during the work. I'll vacuum that stuff out before I'm done.
When I took that photo, my plan was to haul the thing into the basement for the final stripping and finishing. It was a while before I got someone to help me do the hauling (big thanks to Matt Van K for the heavy lifting), so I decided to get the drawers done.
And here they are... well, the fronts, anyway. As before, I've included photos both with and without a flash.
But what about the interiors of the drawers? What about alla that white crud I showed you on July 26? Well, I sanded the drawer interiors, stained them, and applied polyurethane, and they look generally Pretty Good, even if the polyurethane isn't completely even.... but the photos I took weren't terrific. Either they were too dark, or washed out. But photos will come, eventually.
As you see, we got the carcase into the basement. Here's a Before and After comparison. the legs were difficult to strip with Safest Stripper, so I kinds figured that I'd be using methylene chloride on them for a serious cleanup. At left, you see what I started with. At right, you see the legs with stain applied.
After this was done (August 11), I applied stain to the legs and to the boards around the edge of the bottom, and let the thing dry overnight.
This part of the job requires some memory-refreshment. As you may recall, the side flutes had lots of nooks and crannies and embedded paint, which required a once-over with methylene chloride before they were ready for a stain. Below are photos in sequence, some of which you've seen before. The bottom two are the flutes after the stain was applied.
There's a bit of stain in the corners, but I'm OK with that.
Earlier, when the side panels got blotchy, I'd said that I'd probably have to clean them up a little. I did, by applying a thin coat of methylene chloride and scraping it off. I also sanded it with a 320-grint sanding block. The results, below, were pretty nice.
Sanded, unstained |
Stained, unfinished |
Finished |
 |
 |
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I spent these days getting the other side done. Below are close-ups of the side flutes, a little shinier han in real life due to the camera flash.
Copyright 2000-6 Brian Siano
(unless otherwise noted)