Cutting Wood Veneer

Series Summary

Furniture serves many important, essential functions for people the world over. In the last few thousand years, chairs, beds, desks, and tables have provided places to sit, eat, talk, work, gather, or sleep. Many people will spend more than a third of their lives in, at, or on furniture. It comes as no surprise, then, that humans have a unique relationship with this group of items they spend so much time around. In some ways, furniture has become a reflection of personality. When choosing furniture for their homes or offices, people are known to concentrate on design, giving it equal or greater weight than function and stability. Many people pass furniture items down from one generation to the next, keeping the item as a family heirloom.

One type of wood furniture is wood veneer, a thin type of wood that is usually glued onto core panels. Just like all wood furniture, veneer furniture is liable to get damaged, and rather than throwing it out or paying someone to fix it, it's best to know how to repair veneer furniture yourself! In this free video series, a furniture manufacturer will teach you everything you need to know about wood veneer repair, from cutting veneer, gluing, and clamping veneer furniture, to measuring cuts, drying glue, and salvaging excess veneer for future projects. With these tips and techniques, your veneer furniture will last a long time!

Video Transcript

"Today I want to sow you a couple of reasons why bubbles form on a piece of furniture. And, what we have here is a small shaving stand that?s approximately 150-175 years old. It's been abused in it's life of course, much more so than antiques you might have in your home. Bubbles here occur when the sub-straight underneath it you can't see being pine or poplar or sometimes even mahogany is laminated over the top with veneer. The veneer is very thin and it was glued down back then with a hyde glue which was an animal glue. Basically hyde glue lasts about a hundred years. When they break down you get the separation between the veneer and the sub-straight. And it doesn't happen all at once, it happens in certain areas. And you see this piece of furniture here you see we have a bubble here, we've got one over here got some here. It's just coming loose in different areas. That is in essence what we're trying to take care of. We want to get these bubbles pushed down, flattened out and glued again so they're nice and straight and smooth. Then we can reapply our finish and get the piece looking back like it did when it was original. And from here, I'm going to show you the tools we're going to use for this and some of the glues and things like that."