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“It’s really very ugly that I just stuck it in the corner and forgot about it” she said. This year she decided that it would be better to try and put it to use by cleaning it up a little. That’s where I come in. She called our house and asked me if there was a way to repair scratches and dings to a wooden finish. I told her that they could be any number of ways but it might be easiest to strip it to bare wood and start over. She told me that she was going to paint the base of the altar but wanted natural wood for the top. I said that I could get it done in time for her next class if she could get me the top by Monday. My wife picked it up from her on Monday after work and called me on her way home to tell me that this board was the ugliest thing she has ever seen and it might just be better if I cut something new from my stores. Here is what she brought home.

It was really hard to tell what I was dealing with a there was this muddy, almost opaque coat of what appeared to be polyurethane on top of the wood. I immediately set to work with a cabinet scraper to get the majority of the hard stuff out of the way. After a few scrapes I started to see red showing through. I switched to my jack plane and before I knew it I have beautiful shavings of Mahogany peeling out of my plane! Whaddaya know there was some treasure under that beat up and abused old board!

I don’t know a wood species that is more fun and easy to plane than Mahogany, and I had a ball flattening that top. I then switched to a smoothing plane to bring the top to it’s final surface before finishing. Check out the pile of shavings I made in a half hour of blissful work.

The bottom edges has a small cove cut into then so with a very light pass on the router table I was able to remove the finish there and then I cleaned up the mill marked using a gooseneck scraper. I was ready to finish it.

Here is the first coat of Boiled Linseed Oil. Man does this stuff come to life when you apply oil.

Over the course of the rest of the week I applied two more coats of Linseed oil and two coats of gloss Arm-R-Seal from General Finishes. Here is the final product.

I delivered it to my mother-in-law today and she thought that I had switched boards on her. She was thrilled by how beautiful it came out.

“Aw shucks, it’s the wood that did it, not me” I said sheepishly. You gotta love the praise you get when the wood does all the work. Ironically I still haven’t seen the base of this altar yet so I have no idea how it will look in it’s final place. I’ll have to see if I can get a look and picture of it to share with everyone.

One thing that was gratifying was seeing how the wood soaked up the varnish and began to take on a nice warm glow. I wiped on the entire finish using a cotton rag. On the first coat I did get quite a bit of lint showing up, but I reused the same rag on the successive coats and had no problems from there on.

You can see that the seat really took on a nice glow and there is definate evidence of it being a hand rubbed finish. I particularly like this look since all the of spindles and bent pieces have the slightly faceted feel of a spokeshave as compared to the perfectly round spindles on a lathe, giving an overall “handmade the old fashioned way” character.

I am also quite pleased with how the maple legs came out. This being such a tight grain I wasn’t sure how they would blend after all the coats but they have that same glow throughout.

Finally, I did some extra sanding on the arms to give a bit more of a weathered feel to it and to expose some more of the wedged through tenon.

This was definately a labor of love and I wanted to make sure it came out just right. Sanding was extremely laborious and I want to thank Alex for his moral support and company while I sweat through it.

I messed around with some of the mix your own dyes. Specifically I was seeking a dark brown with a touch of red for the final hue. I used Transtint’s Cordovan and started mixing and mixing. I have three scraps of wood in the 3 species represented in the chair: poplar, maple, and red oak. No matter what I tried I was not getting the depth of color I wanted. I kept strengthening the dye and I kept getting a purple cast to the pieces.

The picture may not bring out the real colors, but trust me in the light this is definately purple. What did I do? Whenever I have a woodworking question I turn to the blogosphere to help. I put a query up on Lumberjocks and I dropped a question to The Wood Whisperer. Ironically, my frustrated Twitter update brought the first response, and Marc Spagnuolo offered to show me some of the General Finishes water based dyes. This solved my problem and I took a trip to Woodcraft for some Medium Brown dye.

After a couple more test pieces I was excited to apply this to the chair. The consistency of this stuff is such that you can brush it, wipe it, or spray it without any messing with the formula. I poured this straight into a small spray bottle and was ready to go.
I set up the chair in the driveway on some of my Painters Pyramids.

Next I went to town with the spray bottle. It takes a certain technique to get the dye into all the nooks and crannies while dodging hornets the size of Volkswagons but the dye did go on easily. Since this is water based and the chair was sitting in the sun, the chair dried very quickly. I did go back over a few spots, but the shade was perfect with just one application.

In these pictures you can see how the color has unified nicely. There are still grain differences but I am not worried about that at this point.
After the chair was completely dry I did hit it with some 400 grit sandpaper. Even though I had already raised the grain with this amount of water based spray it is only natural to expect a little more to rise.

Next I will put on the oil/varnish topcoat. Stay tuned…

Milk paint was the solution to unify those different species and to present a common theme. Lately I have seen a growing number of Windsors with a natural wood finish. Mike Herrel of the Colonial Chair Making Company says that the majority of his customers now request a wood finish over the milk paint. Fortunately, the technological advances in finishing products provide us with much better and more consistent dyes that we can use to unify the varied species in our Windsor chairs.

I recently finished a Windsor chair that I build from scratch. Previously I had taken an abbreviated class where the bending and turning was already done for you. This time I wanted to do the whole thing. Since I have already been turning for several years the legs and front spindles came out nicely using the turning from my first Windsor as a model. The bending was a smooth process and I had no trouble completing the arm and bow. I have done a significant amount of reading on this subject lately and I believe that I had a case of beginners luck this time around since I hear of so many botched attempts when you first get started in steam bending. No arguement from me, but I am cautious of my next attempt because karma may catch up to me eventually. Considering the amount of work and pride I have invested in this chair I want to make sure the finishing stage goes smoothly. I have decided to dye my pieces and apply an oil/varnish topcoat to them.

Before I could even think about adding color to the chair I needed to raise the grain and make sure that I have gotten all the glue spots up that would prevent dye from soaking in. I loaded up an everyday spray bottle with water and completely doused the chair with water. This served two purposes: it will raise the grain as it dries, but it also highlights any glue left over. Boy was I glad I did this because I have glue every where. It shows up on the wet wood as white spots.
You can see that at just about every joint I had missed some glue. It looks like I am in for a long afternoon of sanding.

Finally, aching arms and shoulders, crumpled bits of 220 grit paper everywhere, I brought the chair back into the shop free of glue and with a silky smooth surface.

Now I am exhausted, I’ll put on the dye tomorrow.