Wood 1004 Wood Working: Being Creative

Sometimes when we are making components for our furniture, we need to be creative. Here we needed a bead for a chair, instead of using the lathe for this small piece, we decided to do the work on the drill press.
Getting the detail of the bead was crucial to achieve the right look, we were at a loss for the exact right tool, so we made our own from a piece of tool steel. The drill press spun the bead, it was anchored below by a dowel, then the scraper was fed into the piece, while being stabilized by the block of wood behind it.
It is just this kind on craftsmanship that is needed when taking on antiques, as each piece was usually hand made and unique.

Wood 1004 Wood Working: Making Components

We are in the thick of our 4th of 9 sections. This is Wood Working (Wood 1004) where we start the section by learning how to sharpen out hand tools such as chisels, block plains, cabinet scrapers and just about anything that needs sharpening. After that the goal is to repair damaged wooden components, or, if something is missing, we must replace that piece. We work with both hand tools and power tools, including wood lathes, band saws, routers, table saws as well as hand saws, files, rasps, chisels and many others to hone our skills as wood workers so that we can re-create the original look and feel of furniture that has been worn, or damaged.
You can see in the photos, students are working in the power tool room creating various parts to go into repair work, or working with hand tools making new components. We also focus on veneer repair and hand joinery. Understanding of how furniture is constructed is an important part of knowing how to fix it in an authentic manner.
Although we do not build furniture in this section, we are re-creating almost an part of it in order to complete our repairs.

Wood 1019 Spot Repair II: DCTC Vists HOM Furniture

HOM Furniture employs several NIWF graduates. Today we are going on a working field trip to learn about the life of Spot Repair Technitions in the warehouse. The day was full of learning new techniques and the students having a chance to use their new skills of wood, leather and vinyl repair.

Wood 1019 Spot Repair II: Leather Repair

Spot repair wouldn't be complete without a working knowledge or leather and vinyl repair, as well as an understanding of upholstery. In Spot Repair II (Wood 1019) we cover Vinyl & leather repair. You can see the students working hard to repair and hide the damage done to these leather chair pads.

Wood 1019 Spot Repair II: Bondo fills on a chair

In Spot Repair II we are looking to do problem solving with our furniture. One option would be to replace the broken section or piece with a new piece of wood as we do in our "Wood 1004 Wood Working" class, but for Spot Repair, we are going to look to Bondo to fill and repair this chair. Bondo makes a durable repair, especially for larger repairs in high traffic areas or on edges where you need a strong repair.
Here you can see there was a pretty sizable chunk of the chair missing.











After mixing up some Bondo, we trowel it into the damaged area


Next we get a rough shape of the chair

Then we refine the shape, and prep the Bondo.

Next we paint in a background color and get ready to in-paint, where we mimic the appearance of wood.

The finished product should be unnoticeable to the untrained eye, with the look, feel and durability of the wood, as if the damage had never happened.