Eastlake Chair is almost Done!

Work is progressing on our Eastlake Chair-rebuild project.    In case you are curious how this chair looked when it came to us,  you can check out my earlier blog post here below. So far, we have rebuilt the broken off back leg and reshaped the worn down base caps of the front legs.    The front of the arms had gotten really bad road rash so we smoothed those down, reshaped them, and then restored the carving where it had vanished.  

The top rail of the chair has gotten the brunt of the repair work.   It was so badly damaged that we have had to do a lot of modification.  The florette on the left is an original one from the original top rail of the chair, but we moved it down to fit the modified chair back.  The florette on the right we had to re-create from scratch, so that we could have mirroring decor.  You can also see there were some chunks of wood that we had to replace under the left florette, and some re-shaping needed to be done, so that the old wood, would  work with the new design for the chair.

In this back view of the chair rail you can really see just how much re-construction work needed to be done.  We have done our best to utilize as much of the original wood from the chair, but some of the missing chunks were just so big, that we had to use new wood.   From this perspective you can see the 4 patches we have put in place, to give this  new shorter back the structure and appearance that it needs.   The repairs on this chair are almost complete.  The next step will be to stain and finish all this raw wood, to beautifully re-create the chair's original finish.   I will be sure to let you all in on how it looks when the work here is completed!