Beating up the borer in the interests of art

Press, 8 March 1989, Page 17

Beating up the borer in the interests of art

I have found myself a new interest. Actually, it is an old interest revived. It is the restoration of old furniture. Note the word old, not to be confused with antique. My knowledge of the latter is such that I could be lovingly restoring a piece from Furni-ture-Mart while chucking out a genuine period piece. What I lack in experience I make up for in raw enthusiasm. This is my excuse for making work which should take two hours stretch over two days. First up on the restoration block was a colonial dressing table which I think I have safely established as rimu. The borer holes have been sprayed liberally with Borer-off. Anything still living in that chest at the time of spraying would have been lacquered to death, and I fully expect any renegade

borer to leave home without a hair out of place.

Sanding was next. I’m not a fan of sanding. I’m all for ripping through it in the shortest possible

time. This marks me immediately as a craftsman (I refuse to use the pedantic craftsperson) of the swift kind rather than the painstaking kind. And rip through it I did. The palm sander was immediately put on a 60hour week, no breaks, no week-ends.

This brought a minor rebellion on the third day when it refused to hold the sandpaper in place. The little clips were, for some obscure reason, backwards instead of forwards. It sullenly allowed itself to be fixed for the final run. Now it’s borer hole filling time. The putty, tinted to blend with the rimu, is about to be force fed into a million little holes, thus putting an end to the dresser’s resemblance to a dart board.

This will be followed by an oil massage and a couple of coats of polyurethane. Before all you purists shriek that I should be using shellac, I know, I know. But shellac is an expensive little finish, and this really is a very basic dresser. All this work is my apprenticeship for the real thing. An old, and genuinely antique dresser, chiffonier thingy made of kauri. This particular piece has already had its boß|r nuked, is stripped, ancF ready to be finished.

It has several pieces threatening to fall off, such as the two doors, one piece which has been seriously gnawed, and the drawer has formed an unnatural attachment to the space it fills and has shown a real reluctance to leave it.

However, I refuse to believe that it cannot be restored to its former glory, and as soon as I find a picture of this particular piece in original condition, I will know what that former glory looked like.

This furniture restoring passion has been with me for at least two weeks now, which as far as I am concerned is a life-long attachment. I am looking forward to towing a little trailer around behind me to go garage saleing, buying indifferent pieces of wooden furniture that I can restore to even more indifferent condition.

However, over the years I have acquired a smattering of self-know-ledge. This new hobby will go the way of all the others and I fully expect to be holding a little garage sale of my own by the end of the year. It will consist entirely of wooden furniture in various stages of repair, and will be run by a collection of borer, with immaculate hair.