Q: I live with my grandfather's hall rack, which has the original mirror held by two half-circles of wood. They are tacked onto the main piece by brads. The half circles are warped, and some brads have fallen out. I've tried Krazy Glue, but it doesn't hold the warped wood. I don't want to try re-tacking the wood for fear of making things worse. What can I do?
Washington
A: A framed mirror, which is essentially what you have on your hall rack, typically sits in a rabbet, or groove, that rings the opening. With a beveled mirror like yours, the groove might even have an angle that matches the bevel. Behind the mirror, there is usually a thin wooden backing, often made of relatively ugly, unfinished wood. The backing can also be plywood or hardboard, a panel material made of wood fibers that began showing up in furniture in the 1920s.
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Whatever the material, it usually isn’t especially good-looking on furniture designed to sit against a wall, as with your hall rack. The builders knew the backing would be out of sight, so it was a good place use pieces that might otherwise be scrap. Also, the functional demands on the backing are modest: keeping the back of the mirror from scratches that would remove some of the silvering and preventing the mirror from tipping out of the frame.
So unless your hall stand has been jostled and tipped a lot, which would probably happen during moves, the brads holding the backing in place aren’t likely to be under much pressure. Even the warping may not be a problem. The wood that makes up that frame in front of the mirror does the real heavy lifting in supporting the mirror’s weight.
If the mirror seems secure and the problems with the backing seem as though they’re just visual problems, you might want to leave it as is. Squirting glue into gaps between the backing and the framing isn’t a good idea. Although some glues are formulated to fill gaps, many others, including cyanoacrylates such as Krazy Glue (a brand of Elmer’s Products), aren’t really gap fillers; they bond two surfaces that are tightly pressed together. Plus, some glues contain ingredients that ruin the silvery coating that makes a mirror a mirror.
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If the mirror on your hall rack seems in danger of tipping out, though, beefing up the connection makes sense. The simplest option would be to add a few more fasteners. Although nails were used originally, it’s surprisingly difficult to pound nails into wood that’s upright and free-standing, without solid backing behind it. The piece moves with each hammer tap, thwarting your efforts.
Instead, use screws. You might be able to get them to hold securely in some of the empty holes left by the tacks that have fallen out. Otherwise, place the screws the same distance from the edge but midway between the fasteners from side to side. Pre-drill with a bit just slightly narrower than the screw shank. Wrap a piece of tape around the bit first as a depth gauge so you don’t accidentally drill so deep that you make a hole through the front. Rather than using screws with heads that are bugle-shaped, get pan-head screws, which have heads that are flat on the back, so the screw heads don’t dig into the backing and cause it to split — a risk when drilling close to the edge.
If the backing is so severely warped that you can’t get screws to hold, you could replace the backing without affecting the original look of the parts of the hall rack that show. But you would need to proceed cautiously while removing the old wood because backing is sometimes held to the mirror with glue, said Tonya Collins, account manager at Schoenbauer Furniture Service (800-955-7603; schoenbauer.com), which repairs furniture throughout the Washington area. “With antique pieces, nothing is 100 percent the same from piece to piece,” she said.
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If you aren’t sure whether the mirror is secure or if you don’t want to tackle making it more secure, a company that repairs antique furniture can help you. Schoenbauer makes house calls for a minimum fee of $175, which would cover an assessment plus adding more fasteners. If the backing needs to be replaced, the initial visit would cover getting the shape for a replacement piece, but the cost of the new material and the installation would be extra, Collins said.
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