Cabinet cornice; Replace or restore?

Howdy peeps!

I am pretty new here, I did a search around the forums for questions on cornice, thankfully the results were related to actual furniture unlike all the roofing cornice junk I find on google, but nothing really came close to my problem.

I have the top of a china cabinet I am currently cleaning up, go check out my newbie post (pending mod approval as I post this thread) for some more info on it. The top cornice had been removed by the previous owners because.. reasons.. but I am now struggling to get it all back together and am unsure how to proceed. It is gappy as hell when everything is clamped in place and there is evidence it was pretty heavily bogged to begin with. In your wizened experience is it best to pull all the nails, trim/plane the edges so it all fits, replace the entire thing with properly cut timbers, or bog like there is no tomorrow? I am fairly new to this whole restoration shenanigans, either would be a good learning experience on this not-terribly-valuable piece, but my instinct is always to keep the original parts and make it work. Bogging seems like a cheap last option, but if it is common practice then I'll feel a little better about it.

Attachment 429853

Bonus question (not sure if this belonged in the timber section or not, please boot me in the right direction if so) I need to make some new shelves for it but am not sure on the wood/what to buy so it matches. I suspected it was mahogany but some folks have said, despite how dark it is (this is raw timber on the top of the cabinet, no varnish etc) it may be cherry due to the pores. Top is freshly sanded, bottom is the same section after a turps wipedown to bring out the colour. this is about 200mm of timber for scale reference. Thoughts?

Attachment 429854

Thanks legends!

Working on the assumptions that a: perfection isn't necessary and b: you can use a stained finish (and spot stain) to 'hide' any new additions I'd personally tackle it this way:

• Recut the mitres until the faces meet corrrectly, while trying to minimise how much is shaved to reduce changes to it's footprint.
  
• If the footprint is reduced too much I'd think about adding a thin strip, probably the same height as the bottom-most bead, to the bottom of the cornice at the right footprint size. Profile it so it blends in with the cornice less noticably. You could get away with a slight colour difference here, esp. if using a stained finish.
  
• Then comes fixing corner damage that re-mitring didn't remove. This would involve chiselling away small sections so matching material could be glued in and reprofiled. Unless you can scavenge material from the back, unseen side of the cornice to use here, I'd try really hard to source a timber that not only needs minimal colour matching but will also age sympathetically with the rest. Good luck with that. ;)
  
• Bog would only be applied to fill the really small dings and even then I'd be of two minds about it...

This is simply my approach, not a recommendation. :rolleyes:

The grain in the timber you show doesn't look like a mahogany to me, although the colour is a fair match. It very well could be age darkened cherry but any cherry you buy now will almost invariably be a lighter colour when machined.

I wish you the best with it!

For antiques your approach "always to keep the original parts and make it work" is spot-on.

It would be useful to have a photograph of the whole piece to assist with diagnosis as to age and country of origin. For example, if this is one of the many 'repro antiques' imported from Asia over the last 40 or so years, that would give an idea of what was a normal construction technique for it. E.G. if it is one of those then they used green timber and it sometimes shrank by the time they got it on the boat (or after transport) so they bogged it with plaster and stained the plaster with the finish.

However, if this were to be an antique, whether English, European or Australian, then that sort of construction would have been unthinkable, and no decent workman or restorer of such an item would have resorted to large gap filling with bog.

From what I can see the timber may be one of the Asian or Phillipines rainforest timbers that look like Mahogany. The darker timber panel appears to show figure delineated by fine lines (a tissue called parenchyma), such lines are characteristic of the wide group of timbers called mahoganies. In comparison, Australian cedar and its close Asian cousins have figure that is called 'ring porous' because the size of the vessels (pores) changes throughout its growth cycle (annually or twice per year) from large pores in spring down to small pores in autumn/winter, thus creating rings in the timber.

Skew's advice above is well-worth considering. High value items (not many of the English and European antiques currently meet that description but are none-the-less high quality cabinet work that should be respected) need a very tailored approach.

Good luck

David

Looks to me like its the top of an Aussie Red Cedar Bookcase. Plenty of which were ripped from there colonial bases and turned into china cabinets. Great Egh !!

The wood looks like some nice Cedar as well

Better pictures please of the front and back . They must be its doors down the end ? Better pictures of them as well .

There were China cabinet Repros done in the 1990s in this style. So it could be one of those as well .

Rob

Afternoon all, sorry for the delay, action packed weekend.. I *almost* manged to sneak in a beer for myself.. Oh well.

So thanks for your insights, and amazing to see you pop up here skew! I was reading up about your ladies amazing ability to manifest spinning wheels out of nowhere, elsewhere on the forum, sounds like her and mine have the same skill except mine is all about guinea pigs. We have 5, and I'm pretty sure when I walk back in from the shed we'll have another two. Yours are useful, but mine are tasty, but mine poop, but yours take up more room.. We'll let the universe decide who has the better deal here. Solid info nonetheless! I will certainly apply it, but maybe not on this piece, for the below reasons..

@ Xantho and auscab, I think you lot might be right. This is the first time I have had it all together, and even to my untrained eye it seems like a bit of a frankencabinet. I don't believe the top half is a modern repro as there is no modern tool marks (circular saws etc) and there are variances in the width of the door timbers, but then, it seems to have modern hinges (Brass, clearly machine processed and stamped with a maker), but the doors fit terribly when closed, so I think you might be onto something auscab. And old bookcase, with old doors (I assume old based on the construction technique, or perhaps, just modern and terrible), mashed together sometime in the not too distant past. The old owner was a home woodworker according to his daughter so there is a good chance this is the case. She didn't know its history unfortunately, only that it had been around for as long as she had been, 30-odd years. Both parts have MDF shelves, so whatever happened, I would assume it happened fairly recently.

Attachment 430084

Attachment 430085

Attachment 430086

The same can be said for the bottom half, crappy dovetails, uneven thicknesses between symmetrical parts (even the diamond shaped feature blocks either side of the drawers are different thicknesses) and no modern tool marks. All signs of age as best as I have read. The.. raised bits.. around the door panels seems to have been built in the same way as the framing around the glass on the top doors. The original backs are long gone, having been replaced by 3mm MDF which bears no makers marks etc, there are no other identifiers I can find elsewhere.

Attachment 430087

Attachment 430088

As to the comment "that sort of construction would have been unthinkable" I would be inclined to agree. The whole thing reeks of something I would have built in year 11 woodwork on 4 hours of sleep and a morning on the peace pipe. Everything just seems very slapdash. Interestingly, the wardrobe beside this piece in the first pic (another item of many in the batch I picked up) had a stamp featuring "European labour only", which I now understand to mean "not made by a year 11 student on 4 hours of sleep after a morning on the peace pipe, or a low wage Chinese slave".. Perhaps this cabinet is an example of why those stamps came to exist?

Anyway, as I alluded to to skew, I'm not even sure if this is worth the effort. The Cornice needs some decent work, I can't immediately see why the doors on the top are askew (neither door is twisted and the fronts of the cabinet/hinge points seem to be square) and I will need to rebuild (or at minimum disassemble and reaffix) all the rails for the drawers in the bottom half, because they are all loose as a [insert your rude joke of choice here]. Oh yeah, there's also these beauties..

Attachment 430089

..which will need to have their bottoms replaced (I'm keeping the lollies for next Halloween though ^_^)

Oh, I don't know know if this will help age the item or what, but these are the shelve supports. Not fixed in, just cut to tightly fit into the notches. You can see the stamp on the hinge as well if you look real close. "HFH"

Attachment 430090

Yeah its an Antique Australian Red Cedar Bookcase that has been savaged !!! Really SAVAGED :).

The top looks old but still to rough for a 19 Century commercial cabinet maker . Maybe it was a 19thC handy Man?

Id whack some fly wire in the sides and make a playpen for the Guinea Pigs :)

Just kidding .

It may be that the base is a replacement or its been cut down for some reason. It isn't right, though I can see some old Red Cedar in there. In the side and its bottom. And the doors.
Funny how the escutcheon down the bottom is on the left and up top its on the right .

If you need to get that stuck together so it works then Id be doing what ever it takes to get it done quickly and out of sight because you cant do anything to do it any harm . Its all been done .

With the cornice, Id chisel off bog to get it fitting back close , use glue and nails to fix it back together . Not just nails whacked in , cut the head off and fit the nail into a drill and drill them in accurately to hold the cornice while glue dries. Keep the nail in the drill and either fit nails with no heads skewed or with heads on if their not to large . Punch them in and putty the holes. When its dry re bog the gaps and polish it up a bit . Colour the bog well and polishing will be easier .

Rob

It doesn't make any real difference where it comes from as it is pretty much a write off I would say. I am pretty sure it is Asian. There were a lot of 'rustic' Asian pieces imported from village makers when the rustic furniture craze was running here (80's/90's from memory). They made them rough to pretend they were old!. If you need practice on your woodwork, then, as auscab says 'you can't harm it'. However, if you don't need practice I would break it down into boards and make something decent with it. That way you will end up with something to be proud of instead of something tacked together.

I have a policy of not keeping anything that has been so badly made or messed up that it can't ever look good. They niggle at you every time that you look at them or even walk past. But then, I admit I am fussy about my furniture.