Repairing an old floor mirror

[mic-d]

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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[jack620]

Laser cut templates sound good. I don't have that luxury, so whenever I need to route a rectangular hole/pocket I make a template from a scrap piece of plywood or MDF. Rip a strip the width of the hole. Cut that in two. Cut the remainder in half and glue it together. You can even superglue it if you're in a hurry.

[mic-d]

Laser cut templates sound good. I don't have that luxury, so whenever I need to route a rectangular hole/pocket I make a template from a scrap piece of plywood or MDF. Rip a strip the width of the hole. Cut that in two. Cut the remainder in half and glue it together. You can even superglue it if you're in a hurry.

Thanks Jack. I would trust that when the template is well supported, but in this case the top part of the template was primarily there as outrigger support for the router and was completely unsupported, that glue line would have been unsupported. Then you're up with laminating another layer of plywood in the opposite direction. It was all too much trouble. I think a lot more things might become too much trouble now I have a contact with a laser cutter and a CNC!

[mic-d]

I finished off the mirror this morning. There was one silver solder repair I had to do to a previously repaired tension screw on the pivot mounts. Otherwise the result is fair. The repair was perfect, the colour match on the sides a little disappointing but it's passable and redeemable by a more expert hand down the track. The back is a better match

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