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.