So, back in June...yes, June, I went on a particularly costly moving claim out in Hillsborito, a.k.a. Tortilla flats or...as the city planners call it, Hillsboro. For those of you not familiar with the Portland area...its clear out on the west side of town, on the way to the beach, about an hours drive from our house, and thats when you hit no traffic.
The shipper had a small curio cabinet that was made out of Mahogany and had some mirrored backers on 2 shelves and 2 little drawers. Needless to say...the movers destroyed this thing. Not just destroyed, anniliated it!
Obviously not something a little glue, epoxy and color was going to fix. I knew this was going to call for full on replacement of those end pieces. Everything else on the thing was fine, the shelves, the 2 drawers on the bottom and the mirrors. Somehow, all those pieces were fine...not sure how that happened, didn't much care really. So, 2 new tool purchases later (hey, I had to have them to complete the job! :) ), scroll saw and new drill press. I went to the local lumber yard to get me some mahogany that would most closely match up to the existing grain pattern. Needless to say, this thing is old....therefore, it's made of old wood. Wood that was likely sitting in some forest somewhere in the world and cut down and turned into lumber to make furniture. New Mahogany is grown in a controlled area, allowed to get just old enough to be harvested and chopped down. The grain just isn't the same, no matter how hard to search, it just doesn't exist. So, I got the closest thing I could that matched it color wise, that was a lot easier to do.
Got it home, got the new lumber on the bench....and there it sat....for weeks. I just wasn't motivated to get going on it. Well, I shouldn't have waited around, turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. I think the reason it went so well however is because I thought about it over and over again in my head about how I was going to go about doing it. So, I was able to glue the 2 old ends together, and they had just enough material on them to produce a good template to use in order to get everything transferred over to the new lumber.
4 hours was all it took to drill and cut out all the shapes and what not. Another 2 hours of sanding making everything baby butt smooth, an hour to color, 3 hours to lacquer, and blam-O! Shes done and put together. Returned it this morning where a more than satisfied customer signed off on my work. Now she has 2 tables she wants me to refinish for her, but told her that aint going to happen til after the move! Here are the after pics.
I have a dresser in the shop now that got one of its legs torn off, hideous thing! It's painted white with green....brush strokes....all over it, it screams vomit. Since it has to get painted to be repaired, the shipper decided to go with a solid sherbert green color....its equally hideous, but at least doesn't make me want to vomit. The leg is fixed, now I have to caulk all the seams and cracks, prime it, and paint it. Want it done before vacation next week, so I gotta get cracking on it!
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