Gates Antiques

Hi, Today I thought we'do a tour of my workshop and I thought I'd introduce you to two of the guys that make all of this possible, so follow me. We have a two-room workshop in the front half. We do our wood repairs. This can include anything that we do. It can be veneer work, where we plane and we cut and we mold and we turn. We have a lathe over here. A nice table saw. You can see we're working on a slack front desk right now. This is a particularly nice one. It's Virginia. It's made out of San Domingo mahogany, somewhere we're storing for a customer. Steve over here is working on it. You can see we pulled off the feet. Only one of the feet were his original and so what right now he's doing is cleaning everything up and then we're going to use the original foot to copy and reproduce the others. The problem with the ones that were on it is they were made out of oak, not mahogany. So we've got to fix that. Over here you can see David and he's working on a chair. It's one of a pair. This is the other one. The one he's working on is actually in this pile over here. This is quite often what happens when we have to reg glue chairs. They come completely apart. People always want to know why it'so expensive to reg glue a chair. When you break a chair down all the way It takes a lot of hours to work on it, clean it, glue it all back together. In this case, David is making a piece of a splat that's missing. You see he's taped this all up to kind of protect it and he's using this as his guide. He's making this piece up here so he knows what it'supposed to look This is in the wall state right now. He's just glued his piece of wood on and now he's working it down. So come on back here. We work on a lot of things that are not just wood. This is a good example. This is an early 20th century trunk that belongs to a really nice lady. Her family came over here in the previous generation in the early 20th century and they used this as their luggage. So we cleaned it up, we're sealing it. We got the top to work where it opens and closes. We replaced the straps and we had to fix the hinges in the back to where it's going to work. Now we're going to get a piece of glass cut for the top and she's going to have a functioning coffee table. Over here we have a cherry droplet table. For repair services, it doesn't matter if it's old or new. This is a 20th century solid cherry droplet table. The folks that had the finish get damaged and they asked us to refinish it. Currently it has one coat of finish on it and it has to cure and later today we'll get another. And then two more on Friday if everything works out alright. Back here we have our spray equipment, all our custom stains. That's what all of these jars are. They're each individual stains that we make up. Every piece gets its own stain made for it. Some of the colors are more typical and we'll save them and reuse them if need be. Over here is where we strip furniture. You see we have fans over here on this wall and other fans over here for ventilation. All those are off right now while we're shooting the video. We do spray lacquer. We can use shellac but today lacquer is a superior finish. It dries faster, goes on easier, it's harder, more moisture resistant, more heat and cold resistant. It's just a better finish than shellac. But if we're doing something and someone wants us to do that we can do that as well. If you ever have any questions feel free to contact us. You can email me pictures and I'll try to give you the best estimate I can. And we're always happy to talk with you. Thank you and have a great day.