Furniture restoration advice sought, please

[Fezant Pluckah]

We have a nice olde worlde chair that we've been restoring, but a friend suggested we cleaned the wood with some neat meths and she's kindly stripped the patina off the area she scrubbed.

See below:



We want to get the light area back to the same colour as the darker area below.

What's the best way to do that?

We can strip the polish off to the bare wood no problem, but would it be a matter of simply staining it layer by layer till it matches up?

Any thoughts would be gratefully recieved...

Ta

[Flintstone]

You can buy 'scratch crayons' in sets of six or so. Using those might let you work out which shade of whatever stain/wax/varnish you need before doing something permanent.

[Red&WhiteMonkey]

It may be more effort but you'll get much better results if you strip it all back and stain it all as one. I'll never match the stain finish of one part to your satisfaction.

[freecar]

The only proper way is to now remove all the patina! Then restain layer by layer until the desired colour is acheived.

[herbialfa]

If you are anywhere near Norwich I can point you in the right direction!

[Simpo Two]

herbialfa said:

If you are anywhere near Norwich I can point you in the right direction!

Cover it in beige vinyl!

[herbialfa]

Or Tartan seeing as I'm Scottish living in the land of webbed feet!

[Fezant Pluckah]

Thanks for the replies peeps!

Tempting as it is to cover it in biege or tartan vinyl, one is in the Home Counties and one must do things proper like, doncher know.

I think we may experiment with some stain first, and see if we can build it up layer by layer. The chair is too ornate to remove all the patina and start afresh, and to be honest I think that could be even worserer.

[Simpo Two]

I'm with Freecar. I think staining is going for a whole world of trouble.

[TooLateForAName]

leave it alone.

If you want patina, it will build up again. Just polish it properly (wax) over the whole thing.

If you want to paint it, then you'll be ruining it. (stain = paint = crap idea on any decent furniture)

Edited by TooLateForAName on Friday 16th July 17:00

[Manks]

You might be able to mask it with a bit of this:



I use it for masking the horrendous mess my dog makes of a mahogany dresser each time he thieves fruit from the fruit bowl and uses his claws for grip on the polished surface. It's quite effective.

Alternaively you could apply several coats of the blood of the daft cow that did the damage in the first place.

Manks