Restoring Antique Furniture---A Rare Find!!

Antiques have always fascinated Cathey and me. We started collecting antique furniture right after we were married, mainly because we couldn’t afford the high prices of new furniture at the time. We would visit flea markets and find a piece that needed some work and refinishing, bring it home and turn it into a treasure for our house. We were told early on by antique dealers if we changed the cosmetics of the pieces that it would decrease the value of the furniture. The decrease in value didn’t bother us because we wanted something that looked nice and could be restored close to its original appearance. At times we would find a gem in antique shops that needed work and get it at a reasonable price; which was the case of the chester drawers we found in a Murfreesboro Tennessee antique shop back in December of 2015.

I knew this piece was old but didn’t realize the age range until I got it home and did some research through Google. Sorry, I don’t have an image of the appearance of the chester drawers when we bought it. The structure of this piece was good, but the dark aged varnish, broken pieces of veneer on the top and drawer fronts, really turned customers off. This is what it looks like now after I sanded it back to its original wood at the time it was built.

Some work had to be done to get the drawers to fit back flush around the drawer rims, but that was minor compared to getting all the broken veneer off the piece.

Lots of wood species were used back in the early days of furniture building. Poplar, pine, ash, and maple were the woods that were used together to construct a piece of furniture in the early days. As is the case here in this piece, pine was used for the drawer fronts, and poplar was used for the top, sides, legs, and drawers rims for this piece. Walnut, oak, mahogany, and cherry were seldom used together in the construction of furniture in the early days. Those woods were rare and not as plentiful as the ordinary woods. If one found antique furniture in the rare woods you could expect to pay much more money for those pieces. 

I didn’t realize the beauty of the top until I removed all the dark varnish. It was solid popular in excellent condition, now back to its original appearance at construction.

What really attracted me to this chester drawers in the antique shop were the joints used for the construction of the drawers? I knew these dovetail joints were used in early furniture construction but didn’t realize they dated back to the late 1700s. This is not your common dovetail joint which was commonly used throughout the 1800s and even in today’s furniture construction. This dovetail joint was the first used in furniture construction back in colonial days; quite a find for fifty bucks!!!

Stay tuned for its progress as Cathey will apply the stain and varnish to finish it. 

 Image of the same type dovetail joint of a drawer constructed in the 1700s

Testing The Furled Leader

Today I was back on the Sipsey to continue evaluating the furled leader. It passed the test last week as I used it high sticking pocket water. The main characteristic of the leader that really got my attention was its low memory. Once you remove it from the package and give it a slight stretch it is ready to fish without any coiling as opposed to a mono leader. I also noticed that I could control the placement of the tippet much better with this leader mainly because of the added weight of the strands that make up the leader. Also, the grey color of the leader helps me know exactly where my tippet was during the drift through the pocket water; superb leader for high sticking.

For today’s trip, I wanted to see how it would react when nymphing and dries were added to the mix. I arrived late today and had a couple of hours to give it a try. With no hatch occurring I decided to wade into position and let a nymph drift through a small run I hadn’t fished since last year. I was using a size 14 beadhead nymph and begin working it through the run. What I notice almost immediately was how much slower the drift was with this leader. The light 6X tippet stayed in front of the leader throughout the drift. Very little mending was needed because I was just letting the leader/tippet drift with the current. As I made cast after cast I would set the leader/tippet in position at the top of the run and the rest of the way it was on its own drift. I did notice at times the leader would overtake the tippet and fly in the fast sections of the run, but after a quick mend, it would correct itself and continue the drift.

Today was one of those outings that caused me to try numerous nymph patterns until I finally connected with a bow. This was my nymph trout for the day that help prove that this unconventional drift method really worked. Two other trout were missed that helped boost my confidence level.

I moved to another area of the tailrace to cast the leader using a dry fly. There was a small midge hatch occurring in a shaded deep run close to the opposite bank. The trout were surface feeding, but not what I would call aggressively. The midges were tiny so I tied on a size 20 Renegade. The white hackle on the Renegade helped me see the tiny fly much better. I was downstream from the hatch activity and casting upstream into the feeding zone. In other words, I wanted to see how the leader performed on a downstream drift coming back to me. As I made numerous cast upstream, I kept noticing how light the tiny little fly would touch the water. As the fly touched the water I would watch as the dry would float back above the leader/tippet without any mending, this I liked. The takes were always close to the spot where the trout were feeding. Using a 4 ½ ft. tippet enable me to get the fly in the feeding area without the furled leader being noticed; I was spot casting. I discovered this technique while watching videos from Jonathan Barnes, who uses the furled leader for all his fly fishing techniques. This downstream drift was my favorite technique I tried today and is one I will continue to use on future trips.



This rainbow along with others landed and lost was brought to the net using the downstream technique. I let this rainbow have the Renegade, which was deep in its throat. I hope it will survive to fight another day.   

High Sticking in Pocket Water

I wanted to try my new furled leader out today, so no generating and off I went to the Sipsey. I forgot it was a holiday weekend, so that explained all the vehicles in the parking area and on the side of the road for a weekday. This didn’t discourage me, because I knew exactly what I was going to do; use the high sticking method on some of the pocket water I normally fish with a mono leader mending technique. 

The video below shows some of the trout I landed using the High Sticking technique in this one particular hole which is about 5 ft. deep. A couple of boulders on both sides of the hole caused fast current in the seam and at the end of the hole, a swirl of back current creates the pocket. By starting the nymph drifting at the mouth of the hole, through the middle and into the back swirl; I got the maximum attention of the trout, which were settled in a depth of 4 to 4 ½ ft. I was using a 6 ft. furl leader with 5 ft. of 6X tippet, the tippet was the part of the leader that got the work. The water was super clear, so the lighter tippet made for more action.

P.S. I am using a new program call Handbrake to increase the volume on my videos now, it works great and I hope this is an improvement from my volume in the filleting video.

I'll use today’s trip as another learning experience in my quest to become a better trout fisherman!!