Abu Dhabi Airport

Boring!

The next piece of furniture awaiting repair and restoration is Wardrobe No. 2, another oak piece.  It also appears to be locally made, with what looks like  rimu softwood on the parts that are not visible.  This one was won on the TradeMe auction site for the princely sum of $29.

Wardrobe in original condition

As with Wardrobe No. 1, there is some damage requiring repair.

Damaged door trim

But the most significant issue is borer, which has been eating away at all of the concealed softwood (bottom and top, drawer sides and back) and even some of the oak in places.

So first thing to do is to treat it with a permethrin insecticide concentrate mixed with mineral turpentine.  Permethrin is used in a variety of products from flea killers to a treatment for head lice in children. 

  

Wardrobe and escritoire

And here it will stay for the next six months or so.  The borer beetles take flight some time between November and March, so any evidence of this or dust from larvae will decide whether a second treatment is needed.

The big bag is a heavy duty king sized mattress bag - free from a local furniture store.  The writing desk or escritoire in front of the wardrobe has also recently arrived in the workshop and also has insect damage, although as with the wardrobe we don't know whether the guests have vacated.  A very boring wait but better safe than sorry.

Wardrobe No. 1

The latest project to leave the workshop and head into the house is this oak wardrobe.

It was purchased on auction site TradeMe for $80 in slightly scruffy condition. The knobs were missing, the lock was broken and there were a couple of pieces of damaged wood trim.

Carcase being cleaned

The wood trim was repaired with some American white oak we had left over from our skirting boards.  The match is not perfect, mainly because of the stain colour and grain differences. 

Broken moulding repaired

The half round moulding on the edge of the door was completely replaced and this was a better match to the original door frame.

Half-round moulding replaced and new knobs and lock installed

New hardware was sourced from Handle Solutions in Albany.  Over-sized Victorian cupboard knobs were chosen to hide the marks and holes left from previous hardware.

 

Drawer bottom replaced

The new drawer bottom was perhaps unnecessary but the existing CCA treated pine plywood one just looked awful, even if the only one who is going to see it is me.

We have since purchased another wardrobe of a similar style and in similar dilapidated condition for a mere $29.  It is going to need a thorough borer beetle treatment before I can begin though.  Look out for Wardrobe No. 2.

Armchair Restoration

This project has been simmering away since May last year when I started a furniture restoration course with Johan Van Westen at In Studio.

Completed Restoration

The chair was bought for a good price by Shirley some years ago.  The original springs had lost their temper though and the supporting webbing had broken through.  All the joints were loose and there were several cracks in the frame including a major one through a rear leg.

Upholstery removed, showing original horse hair and straw filling.

Johan took me through the process of breaking down the chair and splicing in new pieces of wood.

New mahogany spliced into back leg to reinforce a cracked mortice joint.

New mahogany in foot to reinforce a crack in the bottom of front leg

It was an excellent, hands-on course and I immediately enrolled in the next one to learn about reassembling the frame and applying French polish.  The frame was re-glued using traditional hot hide glue and then re-polished with shellac.

The cleaned frame prior to French polishing

I then passed the frame on to upholsterer James Backhouse (JBU Limited) who has done a lovely job with the upholstery.  New webbing and steel springs were fixed in place.  He used traditional coir (coconut fibre) filling to supplement the original straw and horsehair (horsehair being very difficult to obtain).  A calico liner was fixed in place before the upholstery fabric was secured.  Shirley had already obtained the fabric and James matched it with a gimp scroll around the edges.

Gimp edging to fabric.  Note the veneer repair to a rail (The rails are beech with a mahogany veneer).

The chair had lost its castors some time in the past.  They would have originally been either brass or ceramic.  I sourced new brass castors from Heico in the UK.  There were no New Zealand made castors in the right size (round ones for the front legs and square ones for the back legs).  The NZ ones that were available were about triple the price anyway so it paid to shop around.

Brass castor.

I briefly considered ageing the castors with ammonia fumes but it sounded like quite a toxic process, so nature will have to take its course.

Repair to back leg

The sign of a good furniture restorer is that he or she has not advertised their work so to speak.  There are a few things that my eye falls on.  The splice on the main leg is still visible, even after fitting and staining it under Johan's instruction, but overall I am reasonably happy with the finished project.  On to the next one!

Space-walking Over New Zealand

Cool photo of a space walk on the International Space Station as it passes over NZ.  Christchurch, Farewell Spit, Malborough Sounds and the lower North Island all visible.  Thanks to Twisted Sifter for putting this one up.  Image from NASA on Wikicommons.  It was taken back in 2006, so not exactly current.  Looking forward to seeing SpaceX Dragon etc making visits in the future if US/Russia relations continue to deteriorate.

Computers I Once Knew

When I was about twelve I got my first computer, a ZX81 made by Sinclair, in Scotland of all places.

Wikipedia

The purchase price was NZ$199 and you could do very basic programming (literally Basic programming, as in the language) to run simple games etc.

It came with a whopping 1kB of memory.  To put this in perspective, the computer that I am writing this blog on has eight million times the memory in RAM (8GB), with a further billion times as much memory on built-in hard disc storage (1TB) - all this on a fairly run-of-the-mill new business laptop.

In science and engineer we often refer to 'orders of magnitude'.  A widget maker that processes ten times as many widgets per hour as its predecessor is one order of magnitude faster - quite some achievement on a production line and sure to get the inventor a promotion.

This pales into insignificance when compared with changes in computer speeds (computer accelerations?).  My current laptop is nearly seven orders of magnitude faster at processing calculations as the old ZX81.  If my 1982 computer was a car, say a nippy Toyota Corolla hatchback with a top speed of 150km/h (down hill, with a following wind) that would mean the current 2014 model Corolla could do 1200000000km/h, which is just over the speed of light.

But of course the ZX81 wasn't quite that bad.  It could easily be expanded to a generous 16kB of RAM by plugging in a notoriously wobbly black box into the back of the all-in-one basic unit.  And if you didn't inadvertently wipe your laboriously typed code by knocking the RAM module you could save it.  On what you ask?  A standard screechy, hissy audio cassette tape of course!

Little wonder I never became a programmer.

Entertainment Unit Part 2

Here is the completed entertainment unit in place.

Completed unit

The simple plywood doors run in an aluminium channel routed into the base and top. 

Aluminium track and sliding door

The handles are pieces of solid oak, tapered to match the chamfer on the top.

Oak sliding door handle

The cables run in a 100mm wide gallery at the back of the unit.  Here is a photo with the top slid out slightly.

Power points, aerial and phone sockets in the gallery behind the plywood back prior to cable installation.

The next step is to make the bookshelves which will sit on top of the unit and be attached to the wall.  After this, access to the cables will be through holes in the back of the unit.

Another Beautiful Misty Autumn Morning

Taken from the same spot as the previous blog, outside our bedroom window.  We are very lucky to live where we do.

View From The Bedroom This Morning

Entertainment Unit Part 1

This is a project that I have been working on sporadically for the last few months.  It's a built-in entertainment unit for our living area.  This is the first piece of furniture of any significant size that I have worked on - over 2.4m (8 feet) long.  My other projects have been small tables, chopping boards and a wall cabinet (blogged about previously here).  

Front Elevation

It is intended as a multifunctional piece of cabinetry with the following features:

• Central open shelves for the Freeview box, DVD player or whatever piece of technology replaces them.  The shelves are open to allow the infra-red remote controls to work.
• Storage for DVDs and CDs on the left behind a sliding door.
• Storage for our small stereo on the right, also behind a sliding door.
• A false back to hide the cables, with access to the power points, phone jack and aerial sockets in the wall behind.
• Bookshelves above, random sizes to fit our books and other objects.
• A wide enough lower unit to sit a flat screen TV on, with space each side for guests to sit/perch on during parties.

End Elevation and Sections

The main part of the work is in the lower unit, which is made from oak veneered onto MDF (main carcase), solid oak (trim around the edges) and meranti plywood for the back and doors.

These are not necessarily the ideal materials to use.  It's more a case of what is available and also what is appropriate.  Because the unit is going to be 'built-in' like kitchen cupboards and also because of its significant size the carcase needed to be stable.  Hence oak veneered MDF was used - not my favourite material to work with but it allowed the bottom, sides and back to be fully glued together for strength.

Gluing up the ends to the base

The back and doors are made from inexpensive plywood, which is a little bit splintery as I have discovered, but hopefully will be ok with a few coats of shellac and some wax.

Gluing the partitions, shelves and pre-stained backs in place

The rest of the unit is finished in Danish oil.

First coat of Danish oil applied

Once the second coat of oil has been applied I will bring it inside to see how well it fits against the wall.  Hopefully I've got my measurements correct for the positions of the power points etc, directly behind the central section.  Fingers crossed!