Thread: Bow tie inlays - can anyone help?

Wonderful feedback. Thank you.

Originally Posted by TheWattleRoad

Oh thank you so much. Does the bow tie need to be across or with the grain?

As you can see from my piccie, it has to go across the grain with the butterfly.
I've marked the direction of the grain in each case
Tom

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Originally Posted by IanW

"Butterfly keys" as I've mostly seen them called were once used discreetly on the "down" side, so you could get away with something a bit less than perfect. They began to be "flaunted" more during the "craft revival" of the 70s & 80s.

"Flaunted" yeah Ian .
I will never forget seeing 1970's book on Antique restoration in a bookshop once. I later wished I bought and owned it. It would have been entertaining to show for some of the most stupid suggestions Ive ever seen . These butterfly patches were recommended as a solution for any crack anywhere. As a show piece. How to clamp case furniture using a doorway in a house and jammed sticks for the pressure was another one . It would work well but you'd have to have gone out the front door and back in the rear one to get to the loo if you used the wrong doorway for your clamping.
I have very nice antique Mahogany tea table from the 1770s that needs work in my stash of unrestored things . I believe its the early used high quality San Domingo Mahogany.
Ive never repaired it because Ive never had a good enough piece of wood up to the job. Someone used one of these Butterfly patches in its top for a crack repair. The crack is still there and so is the patch . They have a place to be used and are good strong thing . I cant stand seeing them used the wrong way though like that book suggested. So after seeing my lovely Chippendale table altered like that I had a new fun workshop name for them that me and the guys still use. "Go put a W patch in that " Think of Banker but replace the B with a W.
We use them (The W patch) under the four corners of a mitered bordered top table join all the time .

Originally Posted by auscab

... It would work well but you'd have to have gone out the front door and back in the rear one to get to the loo if you used the wrong doorway for your clamping. ...

My place, you would have to get out the window.

... I have very nice antique Mahogany tea table from the 1770s ... Someone used one of these Butterfly patches in its top for a crack repair. The crack is still there and so is the patch . They have a place to be used and are good strong thing . I cant stand seeing them used the wrong way ...

If they had done the butterfly patch in 1820 when the table was just 50 year old second hand furniture, then I think it would have been quite commendable. But now the table is 250 years old and I must agree with you. What a banker!

Will be really interesting to see how you salvage the situation. If you remove the butterfly then you leave a hole, so some how you have to repair the crack and make the butterfly a feature - like it's been there for 200 years?

Rob, the bloke who "W'd" your table obviously never read the restorers' bible, did he? Rule #1: Don't do anything that can't be reversed (especially as a more competent person may be along in the future! ).

I did my share of butchery on some "old" furniture in my early days, but thankfully none of it was any older than I was, and certainly not of any appreciable value. I've only had a few genuinely old & possibly valuable pieces through my hands since, and I certainly observed the golden rule with each of those!

Ian

Originally Posted by IanW

Rob, the bloke who "W'd" your table obviously never read the restorers' bible, did he? Rule #1: Don't do anything that can't be reversed (especially as a more competent person may be along in the future! ).

I did my share of butchery on some "old" furniture in my early days, but thankfully none of it was any older than I was, and certainly not of any appreciable value. I've only had a few genuinely old & possibly valuable pieces through my hands since, and I certainly observed the golden rule with each of those!

Ian

Someone sure had a go at butchery with this Ian . I haven't touched it yet but don't want to take away from it or change it more. Just get it back to original looking would be nice .
I did have a friend suggest shortening the over all depth as a means of dealing with the missing wood.
Its veneered top is short. I believe the top has beef flipped open with the gate leg closed and not there to support the top. Snapping the back section of the top off at the hinge . And instead of repairing it they just worked on it and screwed the shortened bit back on . As well as that one rear leg is later and wrong wood. And put on shorter. And the gate knuckle join is gone and replaced with a steel hinge .
Apart from all that Its a nice table .
IMG_8748aa.jpg IMG_2175a.jpg IMG_2176a.jpg

Hows the veneered top on it . Its got that Plum Pudding look about it .
And an example of how the old guys could veneer one side of a board and not both and get away with it not warping . It looks dead flat after all these years .
IMG_2171a.jpgIMG_2172a.jpg

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

Will be really interesting to see how you salvage the situation. If you remove the butterfly then you leave a hole, so some how you have to repair the crack and make the butterfly a feature - like it's been there for 200 years?

Here's the Patch Graeme. Not on the veneered top when its closed but on its inner top when open . Its a Tea table so has a polished inner top . One way of hiding it would be to change it into a games table and line the inside with felt . Id like to keep it the way it was made though . Id probably leave the patch. Or I could re do it with a right grain direction patch but it would still show .



Hows the veneered top on it . Its got that Plum Pudding look about it .
And an example of how the old guys could veneer one side of a board and not both and get away with it not warping . It looks dead flat after all these years .

Id better decide on what to do about fixing it ( the missing top wood) or it'll never happen with me .

If I did shorten the depth it I'd not have the problem of trying to match the wood . And I'd also be able to loose that patch.

Rob.

It's worth remembering that the 'bow tie' or 'butterfly' key doesn't have to be restricted to that shape. Have a look at the ties on some of Leon Sadubin's pieces.

"Plum pudding" - so that's what you call that pattern? A good, evocative name I reckon.

Yeah, well I'm glad that table is your problem & not mine! There are so many things to consider, I can easily see why it's been in the "I'll get to it later" bin. One way of looking at jobs like that is "How do I make it best appeal to folks down the track?" Since there is really no fixed dimensions for these sorts of "accessory" tables, reducing its dimensions slightly would break no rigid rules & tidying it up would give it more general appeal. OTH, a dedicated restorer cringes at performing such major surgery. How does one decide?

I faced a similar problem with an old cedar sideboard that was given me in a very sorry state. Someone utterly unskilled (to use the politest term I can think of), had got at it & made a complete mess of it. I won't list all of the crimes committed, but anyone who drives wallboard screws into end-grain hoping to hold ill-fitting pieces that are going to be load-bearing should probably not be allowed to touch any piece of furniture!

The piece had originally belonged to an old lady in the town where I grew up & was almost certainly made by the local cabinetmaker/undertaker somewhere between 1910 & 1920. It was no paradigm of cabinetmaking, but because of its connections I really wanted to bring it back to something I could live happily with. I put it aside for a very long time, occasionally studying the mess & thinking about it. The doors were missing and other parts irreversibly altered, so there was no way I could observe the "restorer's motto". In the end, I decided the only way to proceed was to cut it down a bit so I could re-cut butchered joints & re-use most of the original material. By reducing both height & width, the proportions were improved a bit, imo, because the original was sort of tall & gangly. I had some very old cedar from a derelict barn on the family farm (built circa 1918) which I used to make up some non-salvageable parts like door frames. The original drawer-fronts were still there, but attached to the crudest attempt at drawer repair I've ever seen. The drawer-bottoms were thicker than typical drawer bottoms & I used them for the door panels (originals were AWOL), whilst what had been a rather thin internal shelf became side panels (not certain, but from some nail holes I suspected the sides had been punched metal screens).

Unfortunately, that all happened back in the days before digital cameras so I have no "before" or "WIP" shots, this is a recent shot, taken close to 30 years since it was rebuilt:

Old Herb piece.jpg

As I said, it's nothing brilliant, but it has strong attachments & I like having it around (so does LOML, it's stuffed full of her 'good' dinner set!)...

Cheers,
Ian

Originally Posted by AlexS

It's worth remembering that the 'bow tie' or 'butterfly' key doesn't have to be restricted to that shape....

Yes, since you mark the socket from the piece to be inlaid, it can be whatever shape you like. That's fine when they are a decorative feature and mechanical strength is either secondary or not part of the deal but it would take me quite a while to inlay such irregular shapes by hand to the quality required. I'd imagine someone doing it for a living would use 'lectric routers & templates.

If you are just wanting to shore up a crack & putting them out of sight, the "bowtie" shape with its straight sides is boring, but much easier to fit to an acceptable standard, I suggest....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by auscab

Someone sure had a go at butchery with this Ian . I haven't touched it yet but don't want to take away from it or change it more. Just get it back to original looking would be nice .
...
Apart from all that Its a nice table .

IMG_2176a.jpg

I also like the lines of the table, Rob, and its patination is obviously also something that you do not want to impact. Perhaps, rather than thinking about a museum restoration, we should be thinking in terms of highlighting a life well lived.

There are a couple of jarring features to my aesthete:

• That gate-leg hinge is amateurish butchery,
• That split across the table top could be minimised with a fillet rebated into the underside,
• Those coffee cup rings will be hard to remove without also removing 100 years of history.

But the butterfly plug seems to be part of the character of the table; it is a little crude, but not too bad.

Butterfly 2.jpg Butterfly.jpg

PS: The stepped top is rather unusual in a folding table. Do you think that it is original or has the leaf been shortened at some stage? This feature alone probably excludes putting in a beige top. And why hide the mahogany?

Graeme, the scabbed-on metal hinge is probably one of the less severe "repairs" Rob has to deal with, at least it's easily "reversible".

But it looks like all the knuckles of the original are broken off, so it needs new skirt pieces to preserve the same arc of rotation of the legs - or does that not matter in this case?

I've only made one knuckle hinge in my entire life, which took me an inordinate amount of time, as I recall. It worked ok, but I suspect I would give it a bare passing grade these days....

Cheers,
ian

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

PS: The stepped top is rather unusual in a folding table. Do you think that it is original or has the leaf been shortened at some stage? This feature alone probably excludes putting in a beige top. And why hide the mahogany?

The "stepped" top was smashed shorter Id say Graeme . By flipping / throwing open the top and not having the gate leg out it comes to a sudden stop on the hinges and snaps the top off . That's why is roughly a hinge worth shorter at its back edge . The back leg may have been out a couple of inches at the time as well rather than all the way?

IMG_2175a.jpg

Sadly, your explanation is almost certainly true, Rob.

It could also explain the other splits in the top. Drop the hinged leaf carelessly, and it would act like a crow bar on the fixed top, creating a pressure line from the ends of the metal hinges - right where the splits are.

Butterfly 3.jpg