Upholstery - attaching of the textile

The following photos will document the attaching of the textile on a prepared chair.
The spring system was already installed in the seating area. The following photo shows the seat ready to apply the textile.

The textile is cut - minding borders and the patern.

The textile has to be attached with some auxiliary nails while streched - always nailing two opposite sites and not sinking the nails totally to correct errors. If the textile is stretched unevenly, the patern is warped on the seating area.

The auxiliary nails are applied and the even stretch is verified based on the textiles pattern - now the textile can be tacked.

We spare the corners because here the textile has to be applied correctly and fixed with needles before it can be sewed.

The textile is tacked onto the frame and the front corners are sewed, now we can rejoin the parts of the chair.

The bottom side will be screened with a white textile which is sewed to the top textile.

That's how the result looks like.
See more about upholstery on Wikipedia.

Books of the Gutenberg projects library

You probably now the Gutenberg-Project, who provides copyright-free or copyright-freed books on the Internet for free downloading.

There you can find the Illustrated History of Furniture from Frederick Litchfield (1893) (already a little bit older). I recommend to download the HTML-format because of the embedded links to the relevant illustrations.

An other recommendation concerns a book from 1909f: Mission Furniture - How to make it from Henry H. Windsor, part 1, part 2 and part 3. He describes how to make different furniture. You can find a lawn swing, a billiard table and even a nice porch chair. One of my favorites (because it's sooo retro) is the settee on page 70f.

Thonet-style chair

The bentwood chair is in good conditions, apart from the seat's broken wickerwork. For restoration we have to take the chair apart.

At one leg we have to repair a contusion in applying wet cotton fibers. This should help to swell the wood to its original form.

As next step with a screwdriver we have to remove the broken wickerwork from the seat.

Now we remove the stain of all component parts. On the picture you can see the upper leg in its original state and the lower legs already stripped.


To give it a darker appearance we apply colored shellac. Afterwards, when you like the color, apply (with some cotton fibers) a lot of thin layers of colorless finish.

Soak the machine-made wickerwork for some minutes in water. Then put it on the seat frame and batter it into the groove of the frame. It helps if you cut a piece of wood to the exact size of the groove. As you can see on the picture, this is used like a wedge to tuck the matching round wood (which pins the wickerwork into the frame) and the wickerwork into the groove.

Cut the protruding wickerwork. If you desire a darker seat, apply some color pigments (dissoluble in alcohol) with a brush. In our case we used some colored shellac.


Now you can rejoin the parts - some will be glued, others screwed. At the end apply some wax and polish the chair.

Here you can find a link to the offical Thonet website: Thonet

Basic joints

Here are the basic joints for restoration (Crisi, thanks for the fotos!):

This is a basic Mortise and Tenon Joint.
It consists of a protruding part, the tenon, and a well fitting negative form, the mortise. On the picture you see a joint cut with chisel. This technique is used e.g. on shoulder parts of chairs, but also for reparation of broken parts.



This is a Corner Bridle Joint with a 45° cut.





The Half Lap Splice has less glueing surface. This makes it a weaker joint, so we use it for smaller loads.






The Mitred Half Lap has an even smaller glueing surface.







This kind of Dovetail Joint is used for reparation of broken parts, in particular for torn seats or tables.






The Dovetail Joint prevents withdrawal.


On the following website you will find all joints with description, possible applications and methods:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodworking_joints

In progress...

At the moment I'm working on following chairs (details coming soon):


This one has a horrible finish but some nice carvings.

Let's see if we can save the chair seat...

This is a nice chair but was upholstered at least three times, the latest with some plastic coating.

The Thonet chair is nearly done. Details will come up soon...

These are some wonderful school chairs who unfortunately were repaired with nails, and they don't go out easily.

And the last acquisition.

Hope you're interested to see what becomes of all the chairs! So keep in touch.

Preparing fish glue

You can buy fish glue in pearls. You soak them in doble amount of water over night. The next day you can heat the mixture up in a water bath until the pearls are dissolved totally. It smells bad but the pearls have nearly no expiry date and the glue can be reheated whenever you want to use it again. But you have to apply it rapidly as it toughens and gets hard quickly. One of the advantages of fish glue is that you can undo the glued connection by applying warm water or heating the glue up, e.g. with an iron. Fish glue is used on old furniture and also on marquetry. On the Old-Woodworking-Tools webpage you'll find a really nice copy of an old newspaper showing some gluepots.

Links

Please, feel free to add a comment if you found a good webpage explaining woodworking techniques, about history of ancient furniture, restoration in general or whatever you find interesting to be shown on this site.