Brian Corrigan
Member
- Messages
- 78
- Location
- Maplewood, NJ
Can somebody help me with a finish mystery?
We've got a Morris chair that we bought from E.J. Audi-Stickley around fifteen years ago. It's identical to the one in the attached photo.
We keep it in an addition off the back of our house, an octagon-shaped room that's mostly windows on five sides. The windows are open all summer long.
A few years after we got the chair, the finish on the top of arms towards the front became, for lack of a better term, "gummy." By gummy, I mean it softened and started to lift. You could easily scrape it off with a fingernail.
That didn't seem right to me, considering that we'd paid something like $1700 for the chair, so I contacted the Stickely people, and they couldn't have been nicer. They arranged to have the chair picked up and shipped to their factory in upstate New York, where they did a great repair job and I only had to pay a nominal sum for the shipping. I think the chair was gone four or five weeks.
That was about four or five years ago. Now the same thing is happening all over again. I suppose I could call Stickley again, but it seems kind of silly. Thought they do a great job, there's no point in paying for the shipping and doing without the chair for a month if it's not going to last.
I should point out that the part you can scrape off with your nail is pretty thick and has the consistency of dried wax and the surface below it still retains the color and patina of a finished chair. In other words, I'm not looking at raw wood.
The Stickley people are somewhat tight-lipped about what their finishing process is, so I can't tell you what they use.
Anyway... does anybody have any idea what's happening and how to remedy it?
Thanks!
We've got a Morris chair that we bought from E.J. Audi-Stickley around fifteen years ago. It's identical to the one in the attached photo.
We keep it in an addition off the back of our house, an octagon-shaped room that's mostly windows on five sides. The windows are open all summer long.
A few years after we got the chair, the finish on the top of arms towards the front became, for lack of a better term, "gummy." By gummy, I mean it softened and started to lift. You could easily scrape it off with a fingernail.
That didn't seem right to me, considering that we'd paid something like $1700 for the chair, so I contacted the Stickely people, and they couldn't have been nicer. They arranged to have the chair picked up and shipped to their factory in upstate New York, where they did a great repair job and I only had to pay a nominal sum for the shipping. I think the chair was gone four or five weeks.
That was about four or five years ago. Now the same thing is happening all over again. I suppose I could call Stickley again, but it seems kind of silly. Thought they do a great job, there's no point in paying for the shipping and doing without the chair for a month if it's not going to last.
I should point out that the part you can scrape off with your nail is pretty thick and has the consistency of dried wax and the surface below it still retains the color and patina of a finished chair. In other words, I'm not looking at raw wood.
The Stickley people are somewhat tight-lipped about what their finishing process is, so I can't tell you what they use.
Anyway... does anybody have any idea what's happening and how to remedy it?
Thanks!