Spindle Chairs, Oh My!

Spindle Captain Chair
Before Refinishing

Spindle Captain Chair
After Refinishing

I'll be brutally honest. I absolutely do not like to refinish anything with spindles. Simply because spindles require a great deal of time due to their shape and amount of detail. When it comes to chairs, that translates into many, many hours of tediously time-consuming work. There is just no way to do it quickly. Stripping just one chair can take up to a week and that's if if you work on it daily.

For this set of chairs (two captain, two regular), the entire refinishing process took several weeks, because there were so many spindles on the top and bottom of each chair.

The bones of these chairs were in great condition, however, the surface was well worn and needed to be refinished, the decision was to use walnut stain and semi-gloss polyurethane. In addition to the entire chair being refinished, my customer wanted the seats recovered, so she chose a soft tan vinyl which looks a lot like leather to replace the original shiny red vinyl, approximate circa 1976.

Chair Before
Refinishing

Chair After
Refinishing

This style was called "early American," which was seen in the seventies and eighties in homes across the country, including ours. My mother loved early American furniture. Now-a-days people are finding ways to give this once popular, now dated furniture a fresh look. Some people choose paint, which is an option, certainly, but painting such nice wood is a shame. I'm all for painting if the wood is too far gone to refinish, but I prefer staining to painting which shows off the beauty of a natural product mother nature has so generously supplied to us.

I chose to tackle the captain chairs first, because I knew they would require the most work, thus more time. I chose to separate the seat from the arm top of the chair, which made handling the chair much easier. These chairs were solid wood and quite heavy, so having two separate sections made each one lighter and easier to move around, while painstakingly removing the old stain and varnish. I had developed a good system which I like to employ for round surfaces, such as spindles or rounded chair legs. I use a good quality stripper and dip a toothbrush into it, then rub in along the surface of the spindle, starting at the top and working my way down, covering a 6" section at a time. This way any dripping continues down the chair leg which will eventually be stripped. The stripper works fast, but in warm weather it dries fairly quickly, so you must keep applying it as it dries or it won't work well.

Once the stripper has started to dissolve the surface finish, I use my trusty toothbrush and dip it into lacquer thinner (acetone works just as well) and gingerly rub it over the stripper in a circular motion. This is when you can see the progress happening before your eyes. These two strong chemicals together removes the stain and varnish, exposing bare wood. The tricky part of this, is once the junk comes off, you need to clean up your toothbrush to remove all the excess which will build up quickly as you continue to remove the old finishes. I use a paper towel and smear the excess goop onto it, then repeat the process. Soon enough, you will see the wood beneath all the murky residue. At this point you will use steel wool, rough grade 0, to remove the whatever is left over from the chemicals. After you have scrubbed away the chemical residue, wipe it down with lacquer thinner on an old rag to clean it up, then use sandpaper for smoothing, but save the final sanding for when the stripping is all done.

For these four chairs, I removed the old, torn seat covers and used them as templates for the new fabric. I added an additional 1/2" to 1" when I cut the template to allow for the puckering on the old seat cover. You want to have enough to completely wrap the vinyl (or fabric) around the underside so you can staple it in place. I use a lot of staples, because this keeps that new vinyl firmly in place. Also, when it was reattached to the seat, it assisted in keeping those new seats in place. After refinishing and new seat covers, these chairs were ready to last another fifty or sixty years.