Thread: Repairing an old floor mirror

An old friend contacted me about his English-made antique floor mirror. There had been a fall, a desperate grasping and a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the poor thing.

The frame appears to be a pine very similar to our Hoop or perhaps Kauri so I intended to use some old growth reclaimed stuff I've been hanging onto for the repair.

The two damaged sides

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I have a friend with a quite large laser cutter and I asked her to make me two custom router templates. It was a simple job for her to make two perfect templates, not so easy for me to achieve that level of perfection. Then I clampled the templates to the mirror and routed out the damage with my Elu MOF96 router fitted with a template guide. I have an old airconditioner blower with three outlet ducts that I can set up to blow clean air streams across dusty jobs which makes thing more pleasant, you can see one duct in the photo. I also have fitted a prefilter to the blower to act as a room scrubber and it picks up a surprising amout of the larger dust.
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Then I made two patches out of my old wood and before glueing in I created the bottom of the groove for the back with my Veritas plow plane and a 3/16" blade.
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After glueup, I marked out the and cut the mortises for the two swivel fittings
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Then it was on to the poetry of making the patches disappear. The finish is not shellac, I think it may be nitrocellulose lacquer. Firstly I coloured matched the back edges with walnut prooftint and a little black. Then I found that a Cabots pigment (semi transparent) stain (cedar) was a really good colour match on an offcut of the patch, but not quite right on the patch itself. I'm hoping that it will merge much better when I put shellac over it or I will have to make some more tests. Since it's not shellac the original stain may have been a spirit stain since it looks pretty transparent.
Anyone have any thoughts?


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