Before Architectural Art Glass Studio could finish the restoration of my entry foyer stained glass, I needed to shore up the frame.  It was pulling apart and needed to be fixed first and that was my responsibility.  I took the frame to my neighbor Bill to see how he would fix it and he suggested 2 part epoxy.  I don’t have a lot of pics of the entire process, but after stripping the paint from the side exposed to the outdoors and sanding the stained side, I injected the cracks with the expoxy and clampped the frame until it dried (about 15 mins and it sets).  The one mistake I made is I used wood filler for the smaller cracks and ended up with visible white lines in the wood as the filler did not take stain.  My friend Chris Petersen gave me the tip of using dental tools to get fine particles of paint out of wood, so I asked another friend, Julie, who worked at a dental office if she could get me one.  She did and I was able to remove all the wood filler and I repeated the epoxy in those areas.

I didn’t realize that I didn’t take a final picture of the stained (inside) of the frame before taking the frame to Richard, but I gave it a coat of tung oil after the stain.  It looked AWESOME.  I definitely need some epoxy lessons, you can see signs of its use, but all in all I’m very pleased given I had never used the product before.  The side exposed to the outside I put a coat of Kilz on it as a primer.  You’ll just have to wait for the window to be reinstalled to see how it turned out.

Next up……fixing the moulding that went around the frame on the inside.  As part of the demo it had to be removed to remove the plaster.  Well, the wood was soooo dry and fragile that it cracked into about 10 pieces.  I will be absolutely mortified if I can’t put it back together.  I don’t want to think how much it would cost to pay someone that could make a new one.

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