I have definitely done my fair share of refinishing of
Robsjohn Gibbings (
MFG. by Widdicomb) pieces and they are all generally very tedious and illusive animals, although very beautiful and very well built. The finishes and the treatments that are done to these in the finishing process, make them very difficult to work with in a refinishing situation, but if you have any experience with them and can get past the initial fear and loathing, then you can really come out with something nice when you have them completed. Well, I always seem to have a run of either a similar designer, similar manufacturer, or a similar wood at one time and in this case it is Gibbings. I just finished this piece (I wish I could afford it. It looks really good in my back room since we painted the walls).....
And I am working on these chairs and this table...(I have only the table base shown here)
-Unfortunately someone got hold of these before I did and there were swirl marks (from a disk sander with too heavy of a grit and too heavy of a hand) all over it, but luckily I was able to raise them out and get to the real wood grain, not to mention it had been dyed a lipstick red color and painted in as thick a finish, so we really had our work cut out for us on this. Not to mention, they had severely burned through the veneer on one of the ends of the table leaf, so I had to remove and replace a piece of the veneer. This repair came out pretty nice as well. I will post some more pictures of the table and base as I get it done.
