(Pictures are on ABPW.)
This bureau came to be in my shop when my wife's Aunt moved into an assisted living facility about five years ago. She's about ninety and all I know is that it was in her parent's home before it was in hers.
She thought, "Tom might be able to do something with it."
I don't know for sure but I figure that it may have come from one of the old furniture stores in Philadelphia, rather than straight from a maker's shop. There are no maker's marks or tags on the piece. It shows some handwork in the drawer dovetails and carving. The primary wood is mahogany and the secondary is mostly poplar. There are no dust panels and the drawers simply ride on cleats, of which few are left.
It has a white marble top, flecked with gray, which is not shown in the pictures.
My best guess is that it was constructed somewhere between the 1880's and 1920 but that is a flat out guess.
I finally got around to giving it a lookover this morning and the old thing has been through some hard times. Some of the molding detail has been broken off or abraided. The drawer runners are either gone or worn down to nothing. The bottoms of the drawer sides are either hollowed out or broken off.
It does have an interesting burl veneer on the drawer faces, which doesn't show much, due to the condition of the finish.
The essential joinery appears to be solid.
The wheels on the bottom fit to the feet with tapered shafts, almost like a Morse taper.
This isn't a piece that I am particularly attracted to on the merits of its design or execution. My real interest in it is in fixing it up for my daughter to have some day, simply because she would be the fourth or fifth generation of her family to have owned it.
If it weren't for that, I'd probably toss it.
My question is: How far should I go and what methods should I use?
My WAG on this is that it would take about fifty shop hours to bring it back to pretty much how it looked when it was purchased.
I don't think it has any historical value, except in the family sense but I could be wrong about that.
Years ago I worked on some furniture that did have historical value and I would make my repairs in such a way as to be reversible and so as to be obvious that they were repairs. I'm not sure that's the way to go with this piece.
My initial thought is to make the repairs as nearly invisible as possible, so as to have it look the way it did when it was new.
I thought to knock the sides off the drawers, trim off the hollowed out bottoms of the sides, put a quarter inch maple rub strip on and sand the old and the new together - then shellac, rather than leave them raw, as they are now.
I figured to make new runners out of maple, instead of the original poplar.
Where surface moldings are broken or missing, I thought I'd run new ones and blend them in with the old.
I haven't tested the finish yet but I thought to clean it up real good as a first step and then decide how far to take things. It is either shellac or a kind of varnish but is certainly not lacquer. I would like to get that burl to pop.
Anyways, these are my poor thoughts. I am looking for wisdom and opinion, which I have often found to be in plentiful supply on the Hard Wreck.
Regards, Tom.
Thomas J.Watson - Cabinetmaker (ret.) tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)