Seat Repairs 8-25, 8-26/14

Yesterday, we healed (permanently, we hope) the vertical gaps in the seat corners.

Today, the issue is the horizontal gap between the upper and lower seat back panels.

This one is scary, because I have to remove that big, beautiful poplar panel that makes up the upper seat panel.  I have already ascertained that the screws in the vertical "ribs" will move.

The fear is that once released from its restraints, this piece of wood will warp.  You might not think replacement would be such a big deal, but it is a HUGE big deal for someone who is not a skilled wood worker.  There are several different angles cut all the way around that piece of wood.  I have no idea whatever how they were cut.  Plus, finding a poplar plank this wide would definitely require a trip to a specialty wood shop.  There's a real legitimate concern here.

The first step was to remove that precious panel.

I next sanded all the crud and paint off the mating surfaces with 80 grit sandpaper.

To the bottom edge of the upper panel, I applied a strip of packaging tape that wrapped nicely up and over the edge without any wrinkles.

To the lower edge, I applied Abatron Liquid Wood.  While tacky, I laid a generous layer of Abatron WoodEpox putty over the Liquid Wood.

Then, on top of the WoodEpox, I smoothed a strip of freezer paper, plastic side down.

Then, as quickly as possible, I screwed the upper panel back in place. I removed this excess WoodEpox, which had squished out from the edges, and on the outside, I made sure the WoodEpox was pushed well up into the gap.

I left it this way until the WoodEpox began to set up.
Then I had to take the upper panel off again.

I ended up with a nice smooth impression of the upper panel. The putty was still very soft, but I had to get the freezer paper off of it, which turned out to not be the best release agent in the world.  Fortunately the putty was sufficiently cured to let me tussle with it a bit, and a dampening of the paper with rubbing alcohol and extremely careful pulling peeled all of it away nicely.

The clear packaging tape with which I'd wrapped the upper seat panel edge and the vertical ribs, peeled right off of course.

While the putty continued to harden, I covered every exposed surface of the inside of the seat with wood sealer.  I had also applied Abatron to some shrinkage cracks in the lower seat frame (in a mild state of panic about the poplar panel).

As soon as the sealer was dry enough to handle, I reattached the upper panel to the seat once and for all.  This is a terrible picture.  But the end result is that now, there is a gap between the two panels equivalent to the thickenss of a piece of freezer paper and some adhesive tape.  Now, when I paint, I can keep the narrow joint open, so that I won't have a line of ugly, chipped paint.

I came back a few hours later and the WoodEpox had cured to the point that it was carve-able kind of like extremely cold butter.  This allowed me to carefully shave away a great deal of the prodigious excess of putty that I had applied, saving me countless hours of sanding the following day.

And I am happy to say that the patient - the poplar panel - survived the surgery.  It went precisely back into place, but I wouldn't have wanted to trust it overnight!

While we're waiting for today's repairs to cure, here are some pics of another Abatron job on a carriage seat that was truly failing.  Isn't this the weariest looking old relic you ever saw?  It is the front seat of a Swedish "viktoriatrilla".

These repairs are now about three years old, and have never re-opened. There was no support under these seat boards and the seat was collapsing under its own weight.  This crack is in the right front seat board.

The repaired crack.

A piece broken away on the left front board.  Fortunately the chip was preserved.

  The repaired chip, bottom.

The repaired chip, top.

The finished seat.

Steel bracing was created to support the seat and was installed underneath.  It not only completely supports the underside of the seat, but it is actually a structural support which ties the sides of the carriage together!

It's really quite amazing what a goil wit' a tub o' epoxy can do!


8/26 Update

   So here's where we left off yesterday, with the upper seat back screwed into place and the Abatron impression on the lower seat back curing.

And here is the finished repair.  Some reshaping of the lower panel was necessary to make everything blend together nicely.

Close up.

Some repairs to end-grain cracks were sanded back today (you can see some in the front edge), and the mystery of the corner block angles was finally solved after about three attempts.

The blocks are drying a coat of wood sealer and the iron straps are drying some rust treatment.  They will all be installed permanently tomorrow.

That completes major repairs.  Late this evening I re-attached all the ironwork temporarily, both to check position and to just hold everything together while repairs cure.

One last mischief arose, one that I expected.  At the time of the original repair, the left side panel was re-installed a little bit downhill of where it should have been on the slanted edge of the seat frame. Since there was no communication between the iron brace screws and the wood, I suspected that Joe the Carriage Repair Guy hadn't made much of an attempt to mate the wood and the iron brace properly.  This was the case. I re-drilled the seat frame for screws quite a way from their original position.  Thankfully, the railings went back where they belong.  Tomorrow I'll take the railings back off, surface and prime them, then I think I'll let the whole thing sit for awhile, so I can catch up with my real life!

Seat Repairs 8-24-14

So, we kind of left off here yesterday.  I was preparing to pour Abatron Liquid Wood into all the defects I could find, including upholstery tack holes.

This I did.

Then I spent all afternoon wondering if I should wait for the Liquid Wood to harden before applying the WoodEpox putty.  Finally I went to the Abatron site and watched a video, which said, don't bother to wait until the Liquid Wood is hard (instruction sheet is long gone).

So at 9:30pm last night, with my husband still waiting for dinner (fortunately he is absorbed in a good book), I am frantically stuffing WoodEpox into all the craters and cracks, while the Liquid Wood was still slightly sticky.

This bought me another relaxing full day, sanding.

I am so eternally thankful I sanded before the WoodEpox fully cured!. Anyway, the results are in.  Here is the left (mismatched) corner.  Looks kinda like a baseball seam or a sewed up wound.  The big patch of white above the corner is a large divot in the wood, filled with fairing compound earlier.

Here's the corner in the upright position.

And the right side, which required more TLC than I realized.

  Right corner, sitting upright.

These repairs look REALLY good to me, but of course it's not how the repairs look when they're fresh, but how they'll hold up.

The important thing is that the repair material used is STRUCTURAL as opposed to cosmetic.  "Bondo", plastic auto body filler is cosmetic - and it's made for metal.  Yet many people attempt to fill gaps in carriage parts with Bondo. And I think they frequently apply it over a layer of crud, expecting it to stick. The thing I like about Liquid Wood is that it seeps into inaccessible cracks and makes the crud a permanent structural component! The material selected for these repairs is a material designed specifically for these types of restoration applications.  My experience has been good so I will hope for the best. One can always fix paint, but usually you only get one shot at making a really good, lasting repair.

All the really hard work took place on the inside surfaces.  This is the right hand corner, the dry-rot corner.

A little closer look.  The Liquid Wood infused wood is rock hard.

And the inside of the mis-fit corner.  I thought I'd NEVER get all the excess putty out of this corner!  The "shattered" looking wood is also rock hard now.

All the tack holes and cracks are filled, ready for new upholstery!

A good, thorough sanding of the inside leaves our little carriage seat looking considerably less feral, and ready to receive new protective coatings!

I still have to address that gap in the two back panels, but I'm waiting for a new material to arrive before I do that.

And I'll see if hubby will help me with the corner blocks tomorrow (although I think he's more interested in going to town to buy batteries for the travel trailer).

Tomorrow I will also give the bottom seat frame the Abatron treatment.

This discovery, at the very front of the seat frame edge, got my curiosity up!  Those are screw holes, sawed in half!  One will never know, will one?  All gone tomorrow.

Seat Repairs 8-23-14

When last we met, I was inspired to try getting this combination brace/handhold/railing support off the seat. This entailed removing a rivet on each side.  There are two screws on the side panel below the rivet, and four screws altogether holding this ironwork to the bottom seat frame.

Well, I did remove them.  I tried grinding off the ends and tapping them out.  No joy.  I ended up drilling them out.  Fortunately, no damage occurred to the wood during the pounding and gnashing of teeth.  The four screws on the seat frame loosened pretty easily (hmm), but the two screws on the side panel were welded to the brace with rust.

Happily, the carriage seat did not go SPROING! and go flying apart in all different directions when the braces were finally removed!

Oh dear,look what FELL out of the screw holes when I removed the rivet and the four sound screws in the seat frame.  These screws are rotted almost completely away, which spurs more inquiry.

The interesting (to me, anyway) thing about these screws is that after they had ceased to do their job, they proceeded to excavate LARGE holes in the wood.  I drilled the screw holes out with a 5/16 drill bit and glued in dowels (to be cut flush later on).  These I will re-drill for new screws.

This suggests to me that the screws had failed long before the carriage was retired.

Now I am suspicious that all the other screws, which extracted so easily, were replacements, put into enlarged holes during repairs.  I believe I will peg and re-drill every one of them.

And here is the back side of the brace. Oh dear.  This is forcing more and more inquiry.

The insides of the side panels still had leather and unknown upholstery materials glued to them.

FORTUNATELY there was no rotten wood under the braces!

This is the rather complicated brace/handhold.  Half structural, half ornamental.

Really rusty.

I ground all the paint and loose rust off with a wire wheel on the bench grinder and put them in to soak in the electrolytic derusting solution  for several hours.

One pair of irons, nice and clean.

Surfaced with automotive body filler and sprayed with rust inhibiting primer. That's better! They'll hang to dry for a few days and then I'll paint them with a nice glossy black.

The railings are ready to receive the same treatment.  Fortunately, the railings have never been deformed.

So now we return to the wood itself (all these activities are going on simultaneously.

Pettit's fairing compound has been applied to the heavy grained lower seat back and some decent sized defects in the left side panel.  The stuff has been sanded back and it was really nice to work with.  More like sanding wood than concrete.

The defects in the side panel are worrisome and demand more inquiry.

Which leads me to facing my worst concern, those ratty corner blocks and this iron brace.

You can see that the iron brace has been tilted up enough to remove the block.  There is a specialized rivet or bolt holding the brace to the side panel and I am not going to sacrifice it.  So I reasoned that if I could remove the screw from the wood block, and the screw that was driven part way through the back panel, I could pivot the brace up enough to remove the block.  As you can see this strategy was successful, on both sides of the seat.

The back side of the corner block.  Now we know why the seat was repaired.  Dry rot.

Well of course it was dry rot. I was hoping it was the squirrels that had nested in the seat cushion, nibbling on the wood.

But no.  The repairman had scraped off the rotten wood, painted it black, left it in place and upholstered over it...

...without looking at the side panel.

Which he obviously didn't want to tackle, since any rot didn't go through to the outside.

Hey, he got away with it, didn't he!!

Actually one reason I was avoiding going this deep is because I knew I had to replace those corner blocks and I am deathly afraid of finding and cutting angles.  I didn't want to any more than the original repairman did.

And so now, we find just a bit of dry rot in the back corners of the side panels.  The seat frame is probably "new" and is undamaged.  Since the dry rot doesn't extend to the outside of the panel, there was really little the workman could do,so he ignored it.  You can see here he also attempted to drive nails into the rotten wood, rather unsuccessfully.  Fortunately this nail, and a similar mis-aimed nail at the top of the panel wiggled out of the wood easily.

So what about the dry rot? Fortunately, in this day and age, "we have an app for that."

This is a specialty architectural restoration product, called Abatron Liquid Wood.  It has a companion product called Wood Epox, which I'll show later.  Anyway, Liquid Wood exists for the main purpose of "consolidating" rotted wood, to restore its structural integrity, and to act as a "primer" for it's companion product Wood Epox, which is a putty used for molding and building out rotted, missing wood.

Liquid Wood is a slow curing epoxy that soaks deeply into damaged wood.  I've had some really good success with these products.

So here is one damaged corner, all cleaned and ready to be thoroughly soaked with Liquid Wood.  I brushed as many coats on as the wood would hold.

And as I'm treating this damage, I begin to wander around other parts of the seat, since the pot life of Liquid Wood is so lengthy, and I had plenty mixed up.

This shot is looking down at the opposite corner, the one with the misfit of the adjoining panel.  Look how the wood (which was hidden under the corner block) is just kind of shattered.

And on the outside of this corner, look at this mess!

I've been knocking this problem around in my head for a long time, but now I've pretty much decided that I am going to rebuild this corner and all the attendant damage around and on top of the panel with Abatron Wood Epox.  The first step is to pick out all the old putty and saturate all the surfaces with Liquid Wood.

Including all the upholstery tack damage all around the edges.

I have a different plan for the gap between the upper and lower seat back panels.  These I can separate.  All this other damage has to be dealt with in place.

This is a photo of the back of a carriage seat that was MASSIVELY damaged.  The construction of the seat is similar to the one I'm working on now.  The surface of the wood had been savaged with a sharp instrument of some sort, maybe a screwdriver and there was a lot of gap between all of the panels.  The damage was repaired with the Abatron products about 12 years ago.  The vehicle has been driven and hauled over some pretty awful roads.  These major repairs have never cracked open. This is not to say I've had 100% success with Abatron holding in damaged areas, but my success rate is probably 98%.  This carriage also has a small amount of Abatron repair to dry rot in a key crossbar which is beautifully curved and utterly irreplaceable.  You will never find that repair.

And these are some old boards from a wagon seat I was going to use for patterns.  They were dry-rotted and worm-eaten to death. I re-shaped the edges and the bottoms with Liquid Wood, followed with Wood Epox putty.  The parts have been sitting under my work bench for years and the repairs are rock hard.  The only thing I could say negative about the Liquid Wood is that it did not completely penetrate all the worm wood in the seat riser (above) which was nearly hollow.

On the basis of this experience I am confident that the defects in the seat can be safely and permanently repaired with Abatron products.  As I write, the Liquid Wood is curing in the damaged areas of the seat, which has been brought in the house to cure overnight.  These products love warmth for curing.

And the dreaded angles of the corner blocks?  Conquered with an angle finder and a belt sander with a 50 grit belt.  We have no tool on hand that will cut the 68 degree angle.  I missed it on this try, but the next attempt will be a piece of cake.