Edward Owens - Restoration and Creations

Cedar Rapids IA

edsstore@yahoo.com

COME SPRING OF 2020 I WILL BE INTERESTED IN DOING WORK FOR THE CEDAR RAPIDS AND SURROUNDING AREAS!

This blog is for the purposes of showcasing and documenting my work. I have restored antiques and repaired furniture and created my own designs along the way. Chairs, cabinets, tables, Pelicans from Honduras, doors off of a monastery in Tibet, the occasional Giraffe,  weaving, lamps, ornate chandeliers, light fixtures, you name it. This is my portfolio with commentary.

 Very Large Outdoor Courtesy Lights

Large 2 foot tall wall mount lights. In very poor condition but with lots of potential. Everything has potential.

These are the bottoms of the lights. One of those bottom finials, the big round things, was made using a plaster negative mold and a can of fiber glass.  Can you tell which?

 I could show every step of the process but it was long and drawn out. As you can see the glass has been replaced with soft white double laminate glass that contains a sheet of white poly sandwiched between. Makes a great diffuser. The lantern tops were solid brass so I chose to strip instead of sand blast them. Some of the ornamentation on the top was made using a repair material called Alumibond. I used it because it is strong and picks up detail very well. As you can see.

 

The beautifully restored Russell Lamson Hotel in Waterloo Iowa.

I used porcelain sockets because they resist the heat of the bulbs better in an enclosed space. Many people choose to use CFL (compact fluorescents) these days but if they decide to use a higher wattage incandescent bulb the sockets can handle it.

These are some of my favorite restorations but it wasn't easy. The welding of the bases that attach to the wall were done by a third party. Welding is not a skill I have picked up yet.

Hanging Oil Lamp Fixture

This is another one of my favorite projects. But I guess that's a given since I posted it here.

This was left hanging in a barn apparently. Someone painted it once. Some might junk it. I restored it. It's all about seeing potential.

 It's hard to tell where the aged brass begins and the paint ends. Going to have to clean it up first.

 The mechanism to the right is what facilitates the raising and lowering of the light. If you are going to use it as an oil lamp this was essential "back in the day". I personally would not. Open flames and burning oil in my house bother me. This was being restored to original condition though so the mechanism needed to work.  Doesn't look like that is going to happen.

Or maybe it will? It is surprising really when  you look at something that has been neglected for decades and see all that rust and corrosion and you are just pretty sure it will never work again.

Believe it or not this worked perfectly. After I got up the nerve to tackle it. It was totally disassembled, cleaned, oiled, and put back together. I have to admit I was surprised myself.





Here it is. Stripped, brush polished, crystals cleaned in a sonic cleaner (best way to clean real crystal), and reassembled.

You will notice the oil font is different. When lifting out the oil font I discovered the bottom had been broken off and remained in the holder. I found an exact match for it online several times. Gotta love Ebay!  My employer at the time settled on this one from a catalog.  Not the way I would have gone. But it turned out nice.

Fire Damaged Chandelier

As a home owner who is fortunate enough to have never had a fire I can only imagine how horrible it would be to live through such a thing. Some things will be damaged beyond repair and some things will only seem that way.

 This chandelier don't look like much does it?  That's because it has been disassembled down to the skeleton. The crystals have all been removed for cleaning in the sonic cleaner. Between each crystal there is a piece of metal commonly referred to as "bow ties". These are often brass but sometimes thinly gold plated. Austrian and Czech Crystal lights usually use the gold. They almost never tarnish but fire will make them peel. Some had to be replaced.

Doesn't look like much does it? Ah but wait.

 We start at the bottom after the crystals are clean and the bow ties and end hangers that need to be replaced are replaced.

This came assembled so its good, and wise, to take lots of pictures. And since electrons are cheap you should take lots of pictures. LOTS!

I took lots of pictures. I just didn't include them here. I wanted to show you what a chandelier looks like from the inside out.

 Part of putting something like this back together is realizing how it was put together to begin with. You figure this out over the years after getting it wrong a few times.

You have to count crystals and figure out where you can put your hands after you put the last piece on.  I could have started at the top but then my face would have been buried in crystal strands as you will see.

I could lay on my back and look up at this like Michelangelo is reported to have done on the Sistine Chapel. I'm not into crossed eyes and neck strain so I took some pictures instead. What I was looking for was symmetry and orientation of the crystals. This is how people would view it when it is hanging from a tall ceiling. Not from the side unless they are across the room.

But when they do this is what they will see.

The "cups" with the candelabra sockets are called Bobeches. You don't want to break one of these if your chandelier is custom made unless you have a connection in The Czech Republic. But you can find that too if you try.  Gotta love Google!

Outdoor Courtesy Lights

These two have been around for awhile. You don't really notice their condition until you put the new siding on your house. Then you notice everything.

 That yellowish looking stuff is the glass plus dust.  Socket seems in good shape though. Might save it.  Porcelain sockets last somewhere next to forever. Always a smart choice especially for outdoor lights and lights that are closed in. They are rated higher, they don't cook and become brittle like bakelite (old school plastic) sockets.

 Metal was bent up in the removal. Straightened that out. Not too much though. Don't want it to look like it came from the Big Box Store. All parts painted. Glass cleaned. Rewired with new wire.

Now that's a nice cozy glow to greet your family and guests at your front door. Don't you think?

Too Tall Lamps

 These lamps were nice. Very stylish but were too tall. In the second picture you will see one after I cut it down and how tall it was before. It looked awkward with that small diminutive shade.

 Cut one down. Sounds easy doesn't it?  Maybe if you've done it enough. Do it the first time though and see what you didn't take into consideration. I learned on these lamps.  There is an outer decorative sleeve made of brass usually with a faux finish. Better be good with a metal cutting blade. Measure 2, 3, maybe 4 times. Cut once. Hopefully.  Inside the lamp is a threaded tube. You might think you cut that the same amount. You don't.  It has to go past the decorative tube and into the bottom to be fastened. You cut the same length as the decorative tube minus how much you need for a fastener. Usually a part called a check ring goes at the top and bottom of the decorative tube.  That gives you a little room for error or scratches. But not much. And if your cut isn't flat, especially on tube this skinny it will lean at an angle. Not good. Unless you like that sort of thing.

The trick is to get them the same height of course. Some people think "close enough" is close enough. Not me. I like precision. Probably an OCD thing.

Now those shades are perfect for the lamps. In all honesty if these are sitting fairly far apart and you are off perhaps an 1/8th of an inch no one would notice. Most likely though these will sit on a buffet or entry table not very far apart and some guy like me will notice it, tell you, and then you will obsess about it endlessly.

You're welcome.

It's Not All About Lamps

I really enjoy lamps, chandeliers, and light fixtures in general. I once repaired one of those leg lamps from A Christmas Story. It was everything you think it is. Awesome American Gaudiness. But it's not always about lamps with me.  I like a challenge too. Here's a brief example of a challenge.

 I think the picture speaks for itself but doesn't tell the whole story.  When I got this project this was glued together with....well I am not sure what it was. It was yellow, sticky, and the pieces were not exactly where they should be. My boss at the time asked if I thought it was possible. I said "uh....maybe."

I soaked the piece in hot water. This caused the "glue" to release and pull off rather easily with a dental pick and tweezers.  Then I dry fit the pieces one by one looking at where adjacent pieces met. The last thing you want to do is put on a piece with super glue and find out it gets in the way of the next piece. So you find which ones go on without interfering with others and do them first. That's the easy stuff. Then you look again at what is left and develop a plan. You don't have to do it all at once, but sometimes you have to do two at a time because if you glue one you won't get the other one in.  Repair a teacup sometime and you will see what I mean.  Glue a few. Let it set. Come back and do a few more. Repeat as often as necessary.

You can't tell it of course but some pieces were missing. You can't tell it from the picture above or to the right. But there is a solution for that. They make these epoxies that you use on stone repair. They are color-able. The one I used, when wet, looks like alabaster stone. When it dries it looks like slightly whiter alabaster stone. And if you can do color matching and touch up you can restore just about anything. Parts of the broken one were fabricated. This picture was taken before the final touch up so you might be able to spot them. Look at the jaw line. Also the end of the cane was missing. I fabricated one from a two part putty that gets hard as a rock. Good stuff.

Wood Repair

Wood presents its own challenges but whoa!  What is this? Word of Advice. Invest in a good mover who knows what packing material is and how to use it. Just sayin'.

 My camera wasn't a very good one at the time this came in. It might have been my phone. If you could see the Mother of Pearl Inlay all over this thing and then opening a box with this in it after you moved  it would make you cry. I didn't even own it and I got a little teary.

Boss asks "What do you think?"

Ed says. "Someone's in trouble."

And the shop erupts with laughter and then a moment of silence for the packers job.

 Maybe we can save their job if not their future pay raise.

Curved wood is one of the hardest things to put back together. And that's if there is one piece. Try seven curved pieces meeting at 3 points each. In one case 4.

Bent wood when released, like a china cup, likes to spring back or open up the curve. But that's why they make clamps and pliers right? Not for china of course. Now do that on fragile Mother of Pearl Inlay to the Nth degree. And you see the problem.

Look at that craftsmanship. I'm envious.

 You can't take the approach of piece by piece with everything with multiple pieces. Especially when its bent wood and its supposed to end up as a circle or in this case kind of a sphere.

Man this is awesome. I love to clamp.

You got to clamp almost everything at once making sure all 21 joints line up with maximum precision. You aren't going to get perfection very often. The best you can do sometimes is decide where you are going to put the imperfection. This being a side table that point would be at the bottom and on the opposite. You can see the inside bottom when you are looking down. The outside back is mostly hidden by the curve of the piece.

There. That's better.

After this photo the touch up people got a hold of it. My understanding is everyone was happy. I know I was. One of the best touch up and refinisher people I have ever met was Leon Wright. The man was a genius. He stayed a short while at the shop where I worked for 13 years. It was a pleasure working with such an artist.

Anything Can Be A Light - No Really

 Remember these when you were a kid?  I do. My mom saved these kinds of things. Apparently someone else likes them too. Glass Electrical Insulators.

This was a custom light made totally from scratch. This is a mock up I did to determine how they would hang. That's regular silver clear flat cord or ordinary household lamp cord. Looks odd with the roundness of the insulators. They make pendant cord that's round though. We'll use that.

This was just a sample to get the customer's ideas on how the lights should hang. Designing the circuit was a challenge. Not much space inside the insulator and try drilling a hole through 1/4 inch thick glass on the top of a curved surface.  The customer gave me five, I needed three, I only messed up one.  Hey it happens.

 Above is the pendant cord with the fittings that hold it in place. Notice the pendant cord happens to be clear, silver, with a green ground wire. Perfect for the color of the glass. The bulb was a low profile 25 watt bulb. Three of these hanging over a sink in a little boxed in area is perfect.

These insulators are made from thick glass but they aren't that heavy. Regular cord would hold them but the weight would be carried on the connections inside on the socket. That's not a good idea.  Pendant cord and the appropriate gripper fitting transfers the holding function to the connection between the gripper and the socket structure. That's it to the right of the lit up insulator. That ring at the bottom is called a hickey and its threaded. You put a short piece of threaded pipe called a nipple on there and then the gripper screws onto that. The weight of the glass is transferred to the hickey and isn't resting on the thin copper wires wound around the connectors. That's that brass screw you see in the picture.

Sometimes you can find ready made hardware for attaching it to the ceiling. If you make mason jar pendant lights you can just use an old wood timber. You should look that up. It's looks pretty neat.

We had to make this one. Two sheets of stainless steel with a box made from stainless steel between the two. This holds the wiring connections. The bigger plate goes against the ceiling, over the pretty blue box your contractor should have installed. Stainless steel screws hold the two plates and box together in a sandwich. This allows the installer to remove the entire lower light assembly, screw the larger plate to the box in the ceiling, and then you just attach the light assembly with two screws. Easy breezy lemon squeezy.

I always think ahead for the installer. Why?  Because I've been the installer and sometimes I still am the installer.  Save the customer some money. Electricians are well paid professionals for a reason and they aren't cheap.  Do everyone a favor and just design it to be Plug-N-Play. That's my motto.

You Would Be Surprised What Can Be Saved

Yes that is cord holding the rest of that arm on. You aren't seeing things. Well you are but they are really there.

 This arm is still here thankfully. Now I know what the other should look like.

Most people would throw this away. But this rocker belonged to a beloved family member of the customer. While money may run the world it doesn't trump  everything.

This conversation began with.

Boss  - "You don't want to do that do you?"
Ed - "Not really but I can."
Boss  - "How much time?"
Ed - "If I did it every day like the kids in Central America probably about 2 days. But I'm a middle aged man in the Midwest with thick fingers.  4 days minimum."

I'm not going to lie. This wasn't cheap and it was a challenge.  I had to rebuild the arm on the right before I even started. I soaked a piece of cane 3/4 of an inch round to make the bends then worked fast on the weave of that arm before it dried. The weave held it in place while it dried.

I have a ton of pictures of course. Every different weave style had to be documented. Only had a fragment of the left arm to go on for the arm pattern. But the frame was sound. Nice and strong still. Everything else had to come off. Had to improvise here and there.

When you are weaving and don't do it every single day and don't do the exact same pattern everyday its like putting the candlestick of a thousand pieces back together except when you are half way through a weave and realize you started at the wrong point you don't pull it out unless YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO.  Fortunately that didn't happen. One of the things about being a craftsman is knowing how to work around your errors in judgement and still deliver the goods.

 Weaving is done.  Thank goodness. My fingerprints were disappearing.

 Before the stain and the sealer.

Yeah. Go ahead and say it. Whoa!

Being a craftsman is one part skill, one part whimsy, and one part magic. And when your hard work is something you can be proud of and you saved a memory for someone there is no greater reward.

Don't get me wrong. Paychecks are great. They feed the kids and keep the lights on. But restoring something that means a lot to someone else is a pretty great feeling too.

The cushions are original. A larger cushion in a box style goes in the seat.

For full disclosure I did not do the staining or sealing. I can but that was someone else's job when I did this.

Danish Cord Chairs

 This is the week I got a crash course in weaving one particular style of Danish Cord chairs. Over the last 13 years this is how I learned to weave. Prior to my arrival at my job I had rudimentary knowledge of weaving and if I remember correctly the people I worked for didn't do the weaving until I got there and took on the challenge.

This wasn't my first chair. But it was my first experience with this particular kind of weave from start to finish. Before that it was just repairs. Removing broken cords and replacing them.

I like weaving about as much as I do creating, repairing, and restoring lamps which is a lot. Not completely mindless work. You got to keep your wits about you. Don't lose count.

I started practicing on my own time and then did these from start to finish.

 The process moves in stages. I call this the harp stage. Kind of looks like a harp don't you think?

You can't see it, and I didn't include a picture, but underneath are these nails in the shape of an "L".  They are appropriately called L Nails. The double strands are looped underneath over the nails. Since most of this is hidden you can pretty much do what you want. Not me though. It's all about symmetry for me.  If you looked under this chair you would see the same uniform pattern. It isn't just about symmetry but then again it is.  These cords are made from paper and while one or two alone won't carry much weight they work together in a system and if you have a kink or chaos in that system you will have a weak place. You figure that out when you sit down and a cord pops out from under the chair. Good luck getting it tight again.

 The side to side weaving has begun. There are far more L Nails from side to side than front to back. Every two loops go on one nail.

The wrap in between the front to back strands is just that. A wrap. You wrap your cord from center out, left to right, right to left, and determine how many wraps between strands to get even spacing. Its not always the same. You have to plan ahead how far apart you want your front to back cords to be and sometimes the math doesn't work out so you have to cheat with an extra wrap  on both sides of center or wherever. Most people can't detect if you wrap six times between or five. More than one strand one way or the other is pushing it. If you put them in the same place on both sides of the chair it seems normal. No one notices.

By the time you get to the end you are fighting the weave.  You have to start inventing tools like your ancestors did to get the cord through from one side to the other. A long 3/16ths of an inch steel rod helps until you get to the very last row. If you notice there is a gap at the front where the weave goes over the front to back strands. You can pinch your cord together and poke it up, back in, up, back in, and so on until you reach the end.

Now repeat ten times in a week and you are qualified to weave this pattern of Danish Cord seats.

Yes. Ouch is in order. Don't cut yourself either or you have to stop. No bleeding on paper. It doesn't come out easy.

The pattern can vary. When you start weaving these chairs you begin to imagine all kinds of patterns you can make. When you realize this, somewhere around the 2nd chair, you also realize you have to do 8 more of them and won't get to explore that possibility for awhile. By the time you get to chair 10 you've probably lost interest in experimenting with different patterns. At least until your fingers return to normal.

There Are All Kinds Of Cane

No this is not a potty chair. Everyone says that.

 This is sheet cane. It pretty much gets installed like a window screen.

You see that solid white line around the outside?  That is called a spline and it is tapped into a groove. The edges of the sheet of cane get trapped between the spline and the wood on either side and the bottom of the spline.

The challenge here is alignment and even tension on the cane. You begin with small wedges holding the sheet cane in the empty groove. You have to do this.....yes you guessed it, symmetrically.  You watch as you go. If it begins to pull one way or the other you counteract by going to the opposite side of the cane and adjusting it.

You start out with wet cane. It's best to work fast. When this dries it will sound like a drum when you thump it with your finger. If not then its too loose.

 A larger version.  Another challenge, especially with circles, is putting something that is essentially a square grid into a round groove without warping it out of shape. You also need to leave room for the spline to go into the groove along with the ends of the cane.  You need to selectively go around with a good pair of scissors or nippers and cut excess strands so that when the cane ends are pushed into the groove it is neither too tight or doesn't pull the cane out of shape from one side to the other.

These nippings are made just into the area where the cane crosses the groove. This will allow a point where several strands meet to collapse into the groove when you tap in the spline.

 This is a simple side table I made in my new shop. I call it primitive style. I took four pieces of pine 1-1/2 by 1-1/2 studs and drilled holes in them for dowels That's what the splint is wrapped around. I will finish this off with a piece of glass on top. There is an identical shelf underneath for magazines or cats. The material is a paper product folded with an adhesive. One thing I like about this material is that it comes in very long continuous pieces. If you are brave enough you can weave an entire surface with one continuous piece.  Not easy. Probably unnecessary but if you like a challenge there's one waiting.

This is Binder Cane woven in a herringbone pattern. This pattern is simple as long as you keep count.  This particular one is over 7 under 7. The trick is figuring out where to begin on the underside so that you come out in the correct place back on the top side. You can also change the pattern underneath and run two patterns at the same time. Just don't get confused.

Mess this up a few times say 10 feet into a strand and have to pull it back out you will know why I say "its simple, but you have to keep your wits about you"

Mess this up 30 feet in strand length and about 6 rows deep on a large chair and you will learn that this isn't a mistake you can hide on the bottom by pulling out a couple rows because you wove your pattern correctly after the mistake and now every row is wrong. This is a small stool. This becomes more obvious on a regular size chair.

 This is paper  Rush. This is a common pattern. The trick here is both about keeping track of what you are doing and keeping constant tension on the strand. It looks simple when you watch the pattern being performed. But it is an unforgiving pattern and material.  Regular Rush chairs are made from real Rush. A natural fiber. You soak it first to make it more pliable. Like leather it will draw up tighter and tighter as it dries. If you leave natural Rush a little loose the drying process will take care of the slack.  Paper Rush you don't get it wet. The tension you put in it now is the tension you will have when you are done with an exception. Somewhere in the middle of the process you form pockets both under and on top as you weave. When you are almost ready to seal it up you take cardboard cut into triangles and stuff both the upper and lower pockets.  If you have a little slack that cardboard, which acts as support, will also push the strands up thus tightening them.  This is a sitting bench I made for a friend. It is two foot square which is probably too big for this pattern. I had to stuff two boxes in it to get out the looseness.  A lesson learned.


Thank you and I hope you have a creative life. It's the best kind.