New shelves from old

Here is one of a set of thirty shelves made for a primary school maybe 80 years ago.

How do I know there was a set of thirty ? Because whoever made the backs for the shelves wrote a chalk message on the back of the set here saying that thirty similar backs were needed.

You can't see the finish very clearly on the picture, and you certainly can't see any grain. The finish was really fashionable for a while and consists of a yellow undercoat on which glaze was applied. They used a comb to draw the glaze into a sort of faux grain pattern. Sometimes the grain produced is very very good, but these were for a school, and the graining is terrible.

The shelves are solidly made and have lasted pretty well in a demanding setting. But to fix them, they needed to be dismantled completely, have some joints re-cut, and be re-assembled after stripping the glaze and undercoat.

Here's what they looked like just after dis-assembly.

And in this shot you can see the build up of decades of school floor polish on the feet. It was a thick coat of blackened waxy stuff. You can imagine generations of caretakers happily sloshing the floor polish about on sunny afternoons when the kids were on holiday.

Removing the glaze was a bit of a chore. There no alternative but to plane the timber down, making sure to remove every last nail, drawing pin and staple. Once done, the wood began to breathe a bit, and looked like this:

And suddenly you can see the grain, and the genuine wood. That feels better already.

Now put back together, with a nice new back, they look as if they might give good service for decades still. They are much lighter in colour without the glaze, and the pattern of the grain is joyously visible.

The shelves are a bit shorter in height than they were. The feet had to be sawn off a little to get rid of damage under the black goo, and the top shelf needed a new joint, so the old joint had to be cut away.

Apart from that, they are good to go.