Can this furniture be restored from woodworm ?
Dindrtahl
| Posted in General Discussion on
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The furniture is all disassembled. It’s mostly situated on the lower parts of the furniture (you can see the grooves in one leg). There’s sawdust coming out when I tap so I guess it should be active.
I thought injecting with a syringe an insecticide, then a wood hardener and cover up the holes with wax bars. What do you think ?
Replies
You've got a mess there & if its active you've got an even worse mess. The only way I know is to put it in a kiln or a fumigation tent.
I am no expert at this stuff, but I'm thinking epoxy and a pressure chamber would be ideal.
Not what you want to hear, but personally I think it belongs in the fire ring.
Lost cause, get it out of your place before they have the chance to see if anything else you own is tasty. REJr is right, burn it to be sure they get no further.
This will take a lot of work. If you want to do it for pride of workmanship or sentimental value, be prepared for a long journey. If you are planning to repair and sell it, be prepared to put in a lot of work that will amortize to about $1/hour.
I sugggest you start with some borate powder like the one found at this link: https://www.systemthree.com/products/borate-powder
While you are there you may want to check out their Sculpwood paste as well. In the interest of full disclosure, I am biased toward System 3 products. I like them because I have always gotten good results using them. No other reason.
Each hole will need to be treated and filled. Then you can start sanding and refinishing. Until you know what you are dealing with, I suggest wearing a mask at a minimum - preferably a respirator. Enjoy the project, it looks like it could be a beautiful piece.
The amount of work necessary, plus the tedium, difficulty, and likelihood of a less-than-desirable result, point toward only one reasonable plan: burn it. Now. And burn the photos, too. Maybe the camera as well. Then fumigate the workshop. Finally, move to another, distant locale, and start over, under an assumed name. Then we never speak of this again.
What he said but twice over!
Perfect. Although you left out the part about sowing the ground with salt.
I definitely agree that you should get it out of your shop until it's fumigated, but as to refinishing, I disagree with the others.
Yes, those worm holes are unsightly and don't lend themselves to a traditional wood finish. However, if you like the general "lines" and proportion of the item, you could fill the holes and simply spray the piece with a coloured lacquer. Any wood filler would do and it would take very little work beyond the fumigation. Much nicer than flat-pack junk.
Most posters here are just plain snobs. Don't fill the holes and for craps sake don't use it for firewood. Just fumigate or apply multiple coats (submerge or drench) of mineral spirits and proceed with finishing as normal. The holes add character, it will be beautiful when finished. Restoration isn't necessarily returning an object to mint condition, enjoy the beauty of the shape.
Yes, I'm quite intrigued by the mixture of responses. It's not the first place where I post about these problems.
I'm effectively looking for physical treatments (heat, fumigation, congelation) that I can't do myself I think, I'm trying to find a company locally and hope they don't charge.for much.
What I can do myself, is using a specific insecticide, I've seen people keeping the legs inside a bowl of it for 24-48h and apparently it goes up through capillarity and also using a syringe to inject the same product into the pinholes after having the frass blown out with compressed air, ans depending on the damage, also use a wood hardener, the same way by injecting through the holes to reach out the galleries and reinforcing the wood structure.
I don't know which method is the most efficient and also how expensive and labour intensive t is. For the insecticide and hardener it would cost around 50€ (I'm in France) which I find affordable.
Forget the wood hardener. It's a crappy product. It doesn't get absorbed very much. If the piece is not literally crumbling, it will be fine. And wood hardener won't do anything.
The dust coming out might be from long defunct insects. Regardless, the borate product might be the safest. Standing legs in liquid is not going to let it soak in far, nor will injecting.
I agree with user-7335866, not necessarily about most posters being snobs, but about embracing the "defects" of the piece. Having a cool piece of furniture with an interesting story to tell is more intriguing than a cosmetically altered piece to fit an aesthetic expectation. Of course making sure the infestation isn't active is paramount.
May an apparent snob offer a bit of rationality and explanation?
With all due respect to those waxing semi-poetic about “the beauty” of the piece—which is most notable for its nearly complete lack of presentation in the images offered up so far—and the “interesting story” that it seems is assumed to exist, there are some simple facts at play in front of us.
The worm damage is extensive, potentially active, and without any accompanying “story” by which it might become, through the magical attraction of romance mediated by the nucleus accumbens and its friends, An Object with a Story Worth Telling. Perhaps such exists or can be manufactured, but we have no evidence of it as yet.
There’s also evidence of copious mechanical damage, at least of the wear-and-tear variety, in at least one of the images shared.
Finally, there are no images showing the entire piece (granted, it’s disassembled at the moment, but were there no photos before its disarticulation?) or enough of the parts, in coherent manner, to discern much in the way of beauty, etc.
When it comes to furniture, artwork, tools, books, the bits and pieces of a house, bicycles, cars, trucks, airplanes, light and bathroom fixtures, the length of skirts and basketball shorts, the rules of baseball, gardens, and most living things, I’m very open and even encouraging of preservation, restoration, reuse, and more. But age does not necessarily bestow upon an object sufficient value, beauty, etc., as to warrant its preservation. Sometimes old things, even things once precious, lose the things that made them once upon a time precious, or at least worth purchase or acquisition, and they become, well, junk.
It may well be that the “furniture” being considered here has enough character, story, beauty, or function, or a sufficient combination of these, to warrant preservation or restoration. The decision regarding that is rightly to be made by the owner, of course. If I offended the owner of the piece with my admittedly flippant remarks, intended solely to convey my own thoughts, based on extremely limited information, with humor, I apologize.
Should the OP proceed with efforts to repair/preserve/restore the piece, I wish him or her the best. I still don’t, given what one can see hereon, think it’s worth the effort, but I recognize that this is my opinion, and others will have theirs, which may well differ quite a bit from my own or those of yet others. That is okay. I shall not impugn the character or motives of those whose opinions on matters such as these differ from my own.
Great writing. I am inclined to agree that this is not a piece worthy of, or likely to benefit from preservation.
Assuming the OP wishes to do so, there are three problems that need to be overcome:
1. Killing bugs in the wood.
2. Preventing the return of bugs.
3. Patching up the damage.
Killing the bugs is not easy. Heat is your friend here. I'd aim for 70c for 5-6 hours to ensure that the centre of the wood reaches the required temperature. The wood may move, crack and may not return to it's original shape doing this. If old, it was probably not kiln-dried. Ammonia might work as mentioned in another post, but it is not necessarily going to penetrate sufficiently. Even so, it will be more effective than trying to inject the holes, which is a waste of time.
Preventing return is not too hard if you can remove most if not all of the finish. You are going to need to do this anyway I think. Once the wood is clean, liberally apply a preservative insecticide in mineral turps and let it soak in then dry off. After a week you can continue to finish the furniture. This may be all you need to prevent the borer escaping - any left inside the wood will die.
Patching the damage is not easy, but can be done. The best option I have found is to apply a couple of coats of finish, then fill the holes with a near-match wood filler. Sand to 320 or so then use acrylic paints to match each spot to the surrounding grain. don't let the paint mount up too much - apply thinly. You will need some brown, black and red paint. Perhaps a little yellow. Mix a little and blend in other colours. Wipe off mismatches before they dry and try again. It's tough but it works. Really well.
You can also do this to repair the carvings, though they are probably best left. It is one thing to match a tiny spot, quite another a few square cm.
I think this will be a painful learning experience for the OP, but a valuable one.
As to snobbery, I decry such terminology here - taking a pragmatic approach is a very important part of the psyche of most woodworkers. It is not snobbish to point out that furniture should become firewood, though it does not help much either!
For me, I would not enjoy this project and would prefer to spend my time doing something else. Having done it enough in the past, my experience is that it has been high effort for little gain.
I'm not offended. Like I said, it's something I purchased recently... didn't have enough knowledge to spot the damage beforehand, paid some money for it...so it's mostly out of spite that I took the challenge to recover it.
The structure seems pretty sound, I moved it personnaly in a van, it's not crumbling. Apart from that plank in the 3rd picture that's supposed to be hidden anyway the rest has pretty minimal to moderate damage. I'm sorry I don't have the pictures of the assembled piece, the original listing was removed. But yeah it has many curved arches, and little sculpted details. It seems a shame to get rid of it, but maybe I'm subjective.
Anyway, I got an idea from elsewhere for a DIY heat treatment. I have some leftover styrofoam, enough to build a box around it and to use a heater to keep it at 60°C for 2-3h. Apparently it will be enough to kill everything while protecting the wood. How does it seem to you ?
My understanding--not having undertaken it myself, but having spoken with a good friend who has--is that the killing of woodworm by heat requires that the entire piece, to the core, be heated to approx. 60°C for a minimum of 2 hr or so. Ensuring that the core temp gets to the required temperature may require a longer overall duration than just 2 hr if the wood is thick. For what it's worth, my friend, Dan, had access to a sauna, and heated the sauna to approx. 70°C with the pieces he was treating inside, and left them in the sauna at that temperature for 3-4 hr. He has since had that piece, a small corner table, in his log cabin lake home for several years without apparent infestation, etc. I should note, however, that the amount of damage to his table was relatively modest, and restricted, as best he could tell, to a single leg and adjoining apron area. I do not have photos to share, I'm afraid. He did fill the holes (with some kind of two-part moldable epoxy, easily machined/sandable, he said, though he doesn't recall the name) and stain to a near-black; the piece overall is walnut, and dark; the filled holes are not especially noticeable, though visible if one looks for them.
I dealt with a similar problem a few years ago. At the suggestion of a friend, I fumed the piece with industrial strength ammonia in a tent for a week. After almost 2 years there is no evidence of beetle activity.
Out of all of it, if the goal is to kill the bugs I'd put my money on the industrial ammonia week.
I know that heat kills the pin-hole larvae, as kiln-drying does. Once they are dead from the heat, you can clean out the holes and fill them. I generally use two part epoxy, and if needed, mix fine sanding dust with it. Then sand down to smooth. Filler that is a bit darker than the surrounding wood is less noticeable than lighter filler. I wouldn't bother trying to make it completely disappear.
The life cycle of the nasty little worms: an adult female moth (small) lays an egg in a crack in the wood (open pore woods like oak and ash are particularly attractive). The egg hatches and the larva begins eating around inside the wood. When it is ready to change into an adult moth, it pupates near the surface of the wood, and eats itself out, leaving a small pile of "sawdust" as it exits. It then mates with another moth, and the female lays another batch of eggs, etc.
For this cycle to be successful, the wood needs to be moist, and there needs to be a crack for the egg. (The moist requirement is why the lower parts of old pieces are so often the most attacked.) (It is also why I can store dry rough oak in my shop with no further damage after drying.) So, dry wood, and generally a well applied surface film finish are all you need to prevent further infestation.
If you enjoy the process and the outcome, keep at it. If not, decide never to do that kind of thing again!
We get termites here- every decade or so everyone needs to address the problem and fumigation is a real PIA so there is a whole industry of get arounds. Foam up the channels,borate solutions, orange oils etc. None of those I think actually could do the job when your talking about an entire building where they could be hiding anywhere. The gas, vicane, seems to work, kills them entirely ,and you just a little bit, and then on the next life cycle they reenter and in a few years they're eating your house at thousands of dollars a year again. One of the ways they kill them is with microwaves and they have portable rigs for that. It probably is really effective at taking out a known colony but again couldn't get everywhere but would probably be really effective on a piece of furniture.
I guess you might have taken care of the woodworms well before they attacked other items at your place. However, using the right insecticide can help get rid of wood-boring insects, no matter what stage are they at. And then, checking if the remaining wood material is good to go can help decide on the restoration.
My methodical mind would involve a few steps:
1. Address the infestation issue - which means finding a treatment that will be permanent solution. By the look of it, it may require something more than a syringe treatment.
2. Assess the project based on your goal - restore, preserve/conserve. This assessment will be guided by the provenance of the pieces.
3. Subject to 1 and 2, formulate a plan of attack on achieving your goal.
I personally am not a fan of junking stuff without a detailed assessment, even if it only results in parts ending up in your breaker collection. But that is just my personal philosophy about throwing stuff into landfill. Bringing old stuff back for another chapter is often subject to surprises when you start pulling it apart. And sometimes, an extra challenge is a good way to provide a bit of stretch to further develop your skills.
If I really fancied the piece, I would consult an entomologist at a local University or College. It likely won't cost much if anything if it is merely a casual question. I do not know if this is still true but in Maritime Canada and when in the U.S midwest that was the case.
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