Setting up to restore antique furniture?

[rob.]

I have a small space that I can work in and I would like to restore a couple of antique chests of drawers.
The chests have the usual problems of missing **** beading and worn drawer runners. There are also one or two loose joints to glue.

To cut the beading and runners I'm thinking a table saw might be best? However I have read that budget saws are not accurate and I don't think spending a small fortune on a decent one is really worth it for what I will be using it for.


I do however live close to an antiques auction house and can see myself buying a few furniture projects in the not too distant future.

So, back to saws, what do you guys think? Are budget saws any good? Would I be better off cutting by hand?

 

[tomatwark]

If you are going to just restore bits, you would be better off with a good bandsaw as you will find you will need to cut lots of little patches and repairs.

A lot of professional restorers have a bandsaw rather than a table saw.

 

[rob.]

I was thinking that my self, can you recommend a good budget band saw? Or guide me through what spacs to look for? Also, what kind of blade would I need to cut beading etc with?

 

[rob.]

I'm having a look and the Record Power Bandsaw BS250 caught my eye, its a lot more money than I am budgeting for, could I get something like this for less money? Are Draper saws for instance a safe bet?

 

[custard]

The BS250 is about as cheap as you want to go, it's a decent machine with good customer support. Chuck away the poor quality blade that comes with it, replace with a Tuffsaws blade, and you're good to go.

If the budget really can't stretch this far then think about handsaws instead. Really cheap machinery is generally such rubbish that you're just throwing your money away. On the web site it might look it'll get the job done, but in your workshop you'll usually discover it's hopelessly inaccurate, unreliable, badly designed, frustrating to operate, and prone to failure. After a few months of pulling your hair out you'll either replace it with a decent machine or abandon woodworking as a bad job.

 

[undergroundhunter]

If you're not doing it for a living then I would sugest a good handsaw will serve you well, also a lot cheaper than a bandsaw and more accurate than a really cheap bandsaw.

Matt

 

[rob.]

Cheers Matt, I do have a fair bit of work to do, I reckon a band saw would save me time in the long run, I'll always find more uses for it as well.

 

[AndyT]

And just to add one more voice in agreement with the others, a table saw takes up more than its fair share of space and on budget ones the dust extraction will be poor - not good if your small workshop is also used for varnishing, polishing, etc.

 

[Racers]

Power tools let you make your mistakes faster an cut you deeper.
Get some hand tools scrap wood and practice cuting.

Pete

 

[rob.]

Cheers Pete, I work with wood and use power tools every day so I'm fairly competent when cutting wood, but I couldn't agree more, fingers always come first. The place where I work involves building large build frames usually out of CLS and its quite fast paced when the pressure is on , which is 99 percent of the time , so staying ontop of keeping safe is very important to me.

 

[deema]

Either a Startrite 14S5 bandsaw, which has 5 speeds and a 14" throat, try to get one with a fence.

Alternatively a Startrite DS275 which has a sliding table and a 4" depth of cut. The foot print is very very small and its a highly capable saw.

Both second hand, and both sell for c£400 each. Spares are available for both but pricey.

 

[rob.]

A bit too much money for me, are they three phase?

 

[AJB Temple]

Friend of mine has been restoring and selling high end (valuable I think) antique furniture and clocks for about 30 years. House, showroom and workshop in Surrey. He uses almost exclusively hand tools as pretty much everything he works on is hand made and repairs needs to look hand made in terms of repairs. He does have a 14" bandsaw, but its main use is roughing out things like Queen Anne shaped legs. No table saw. No P/T. He seems to use a Hegner fretsaw quite a bit to speed up inlay repairs.

He has a large range of antique moulding planes and a good stock of furniture he has bought at auction that has mostly been knocked down to provide wood for matching in. Large stock of veneers. I suspect electric gear is not really that useful to him. He does, however, have a vacuum veneer press which seems to get a fair bit of use.

For genuine antique restoration as far as I can see handwork is where it is at. Disclaimer: I have sub zero personal expertise in furniture restoration.

 

[rob.]

You are probably right, I think things like mouldings etc should be cut with hand tools. I also think that if you want your work to blend in to a period piece of furniture to the extent that it becomes almost impossible to tell if its been restored or not then its essential to use hand tools where necessary.
I'm not really after transparency, afterall I'm simply cutting some beading (which will be shaped with a plane) and some drawer runners for the furniture I have here at the moment so I don't think machine cut will be a big problem.

I would love to do this all by hand but cutting a piece of Oak to use as a drawer runner for instance 4mm thick, 25mm wide and 600mm long using hand tools with any kind of consistency is well beyond my skill level, I simply wouldn't know where to begin.

 

[BearTricks]

I have to say that after just over a year of woodworking, and most of that messing around with cheap and badly made power tools, I prefer hand tools for accuracy.

Even a well set up bandsaw will knacker your timber if something goes wrong mid cut and you get a mm or so of blade wander. A couple of decent saws and the means to maintain them will set you back a fraction of the price, or if you need speed I'd use power tools for rough cutting and finish everything off with hand tools.

Don't get me started on how badly you can **** something up with a power drill.

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

 

[undergroundhunter]

I would love to do this all by hand but cutting a piece of Oak to use as a drawer runner for instance 4mm thick, 25mm wide and 600mm long using hand tools with any kind of consistency is well beyond my skill level, I simply wouldn't know where to begin.

Saw wide of the line and plane doen, after doing it a few times you soon start cutting closer to the line to sace on planing. As with most things practice is the key.

Matt

 

[AndyT]

I mean this in a positive way, so please don't take it wrong, but planing a little bit of wood like that to size is so fundamental that if you don't learn how to do it, you aren't going to enjoy restoring antiques.
There are plenty of good books and videos about woodworking with hand tools at the present. I suggest you read and watch some and get some practice in on the basics.

(Also, as a generalisation, power tool methods get more dangerous and difficult as the work piece gets smaller.)

 

[Logger]

Like AJB Temple, I know a chap who restores antique furniture for a living and he does not use power tools, it is all hand tools apart from a scroll saw.

Nick

 

[rob.]

Thanks guys, I will look up on some hand tools, I guess using power tools all day long has grown me accustomed to them.
I did however buy the Record Power saw, because I'm at work all day I asked my other half to enquire about the saw at my local distributors, they said they could do a good deal on it at £219 so with that she went and bought it, when she got there the price was greatly reduced to £99.99, how could you refuse a deal like that?
So, they loaded it into the car for her and she came home. When I got home it was still in the car so I carried it into the house. I noticed some damage to a corner of the box so I opened it up.

The saw looks as though it was dropped or dragged across the floor, the base plate is bent up in one corner, the same corner under the motor. :shock:

I'm pretty sure nothing else is damaged and this probably wont effect the operation of the saw but it would have been nice to know before parting with the money that it had been damaged.

I wont be setting it up until the week end but I'm pretty sure it will be fine, so for just shy of 100 notes I'm very happy with it. The rip fence seems to be pretty good quality, the mitre is plastic and doesn't look great, the table is heavy polished cast iron and over all it seems like a good solid saw.

 

[custard]

for just shy of 100 notes I'm very happy with it

So you should be, that's a fantastic deal! Just be aware that the blade that comes with it isn't very good, ok for set up and initial learning, but you'll be astonished at the performance difference you'll get from a decent bandsaw blade. The favoured supplier on this forum is Tuffsaws, there are other suppliers offering equally good products but Ian at Tuffsaws is especially approachable, if you call him and tell him what machine you've got and how you want to use it then he'll sort you out with the right blades.

The other thing you'll soon encounter is the problem of dust extraction. At a pinch, and for really small jobs, you can get by without any extraction, just cleaning out the machine every ten minutes or so. But before long you'll probably want to get something organised. When that time comes do your research, it's a complicated area and it's easy to make mistakes.

Good luck!