 This began geek builders. I restored 1940's crew office chair. My dad found an old crew office chair from the 1940's and thought I'd like to restore it. I'd done several furniture restorations before, but thought I'd film this one and chair on the channel. The chair looked like it was in pretty good shape, but it was kind of hard to tell what it would look like with all the leftover finish that was actually on the chair. I thought the best way to start out by removing the finish was to use a card scraper. Card scrapers are pretty efficient at removing the first couple layers of finish when looking at a furniture project without having to rely on chemical strippers, which I've done before by really don't like using. Card scraper makes pretty quick work of what's there on the chair and I can start getting a better look at what the grain actually looks like. The only problem is this is the other card scraper I have and it doesn't get into like a lot of those nooks and crannies that are needed to fully remove all of the finish left on the chair, as well as trying to watch out for the damaged areas that are there on the chair, primarily on the railing, and then at the center of the chair there's a large crack. Once I exhausted everything I could do with the card scraper, I moved on to 220 grit sandpaper and sanded and sanded and sanded. This process took quite a while, but because of the work I done with the card scraper, the sandpaper didn't get gummed up quite as quick. Through the, from the advice I'd gotten from some friends on Facebook, I decided not to try to remove all the areas that it looked like they were worn and used to try to retain some of the character that's been developed over the last 60 years on the chair. And then after I had enough hand sanding I went to the random orbit sanded, only to some areas where I knew I could clean up pretty quickly without causing the damage to the chair or changing the geometry or surface of the wood. Before getting to a point where I could apply any finish, I needed to take a look at the damaged areas of the chair and kind of fill those in. I decided to go the wood filler primarily because I found some wood filler that looked like it was the same color as the natural color of the oak of the chair. Looking back on this now though, I wonder if epoxy might have worked a little bit better. The wood filler did work, but I'm not really too happy with the final result and it looks like it's a slight discoloration after I put the final finish on. I didn't get any footage of actually applying the filler. I ran out of memory of my camera, but here's how it looks after those areas that have been filled in, especially along the back rail that have been damaged probably just over time and where the wood would possibly be drying out. Once I had all the finish removed and sanded pretty smooth into a point that I liked, I used a rag and some solvent and wiped out all the dust. You can see the wood green pattern kind of pops out a little bit more than it did in the original pictures. I decided to go with somewhat of an unorthodox finish for a chair. But here's a fun fact. I first learned about Brewax from Jimmy D'Arrest as TV show Dirty Money. It's a little bit of a shout out to Mr. D'Arrest that there. As I mentioned before, Brewax might be a little bit of an unorthodox finish for a piece of furniture that's going to be handled quite a bit primarily because the wax and the finish will wear off fairly quickly, but I wanted it to have this certain kind of sheen and satin feel after it's finished. If I need to put a different sort of ceiling coat over that after, I have no issue doing that, but I really enjoy working with Brewax. It was on pretty easily, you let the solvent evaporate and wipe it off. From looking at the bottom of the chair, you can see there's even some damage under the chair. I did some light sanding and I don't know. I might go back and seal that later, but I'm leaving it open for right now. The other primary concern with finishing the chair was taking a look at the legs. They had some visible damage. I'm not sure if it was a water damage or just general use. They weren't splitting yet, but I could see where they would split in a very short period of time if something wasn't done. So I decided to do something I haven't tried doing before. I decided I was going to wrap the tip of each chair leg in brass. I found some sheets of brass were about the size that I needed and I attempted to wrap them around each leg. I'd never worked with brass before, so I didn't know how I was going to turn out and just consider it an experiment and a learning experience. Because it's so thin, it jules really easily and actually bends and wraps around the leg pretty easily too, but it wasn't without its own challenges since I'd never done this before. In fact, I actually decided to leave the nails that were holding the pieces of brass on the legs, not hammered in all the way that way. I actually take it off and remove it, which I did several times to bend it a little bit more snugly around the leg and also to cut off the excess like I'm showing here. Only enough the brass is thin enough to cut with the fairly strong pair of scissors. This is definitely a learning process and getting used to the springiness of the metal and how far I could bend it without distorting it or even causing a ripple in the metal, which I think happened only on one of the four legs. Each leg presented a slightly different challenge as well because they weren't solid, just rectangles moving down. They're actually tapered at the ends and the back legs are tapered and they're curved. So there's a little bit of a challenge trying to wrap it around and getting the seam to meet up even in the back. I ended up cheating a little bit in the end on the top of the brass. They're wrapped around pretty snugly but at the end there's a little bit more. I'll probably go back later and see how I could wrap those around and maybe I can hammer it underneath at a later time. But the time I got to the last leg, I had a lot more confidence in what I was doing and was far better than I was doing the first leg. Once all the finishes dry and polished out and the legs are done, this is the finished product. Overall I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Well that's it for this episode. Please subscribe and follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Geek Builders. And please check out the other videos I have available on the channel and I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching Geek Builders and bring some Geek into your life.