How Old Is My Antique Chair ?

Beautiful antique furniture is a priceless possession and should you decide to sell it, you will find it fetches you a significant price.

If you have an antique chair piece and are wondering how to tell if it’s really unique, you need to do some tests on it, to determine this.

A piece of furniture is classified as antique, only when it is more than 100 years old or 150 years old. Furniture that is younger than this is not an antique piece.

If you have an antique chair how to tell if a chair is antique?

Check out the materials used to make it

In order to determine if your antique chair is really 100 to 150 years old, you have check out on the materials that have been used to make it.

Furniture that was made 100 years ago was done using cuts and polishes that are not what you see today. Much of American antique furniture was made using pine wood. The finish of the piece shows the difference and it is the finish that must be examined to determine the age of your antique chair piece.

Craftsmanship

One of the easiest ways on how to tell if a chair is antique is to look at the craftsmanship. Old antique furniture is definitely made by hand and machine cutting was introduced only in the 1860’s.

Furniture that is made by hand can be clearly made out in the way the edges are cut, in the shaping and in the joints. Joints will be dovetailed by hand.

You can find this out easily as they will be few in number and they won’t be evenly placed. If you see nicks and cuts on the furniture area, say in the sides or the bottom, it’s yet another indication that it was hand-made. Such cuts would have been done by spokeshave, or a plane and if you see straight saw marks is a sure indication that the furniture is an old piece.

Symmetry

The next point to check is the symmetry. It is not possible to get the perfect symmetry in hand-made furniture, though such differences are really hard-to-spot.

However, they do exist and you can see that pieces such as slats, rungs, rockers and so on, in the furniture piece are not uniform in their shape.

There is no perfect cutting here. When you look at reproductions of antique furniture, you will find them to be cut by machine and that’s why though they look just like the original, they can never replace the original because of the way they are made.

In old pieces of furniture, what is a main give-a-away is the size. With age, wood will shrink in size and this shows in the lack of uniformity in the piece’s dimensions, though you have to inspect the piece carefully to find this out.

Color differences

Another factor that shows age is color differences on the surface. This happens when it is exposed to sunlight in an uneven form. Another giving factor is hairline cracks, which can be found out only after clean inspection of the surface using a flashlight.

Check the finish

The final thing on how to tell if a chair is antique is to check is the finish. Antique pieces that are dated prior to the times of Queen Victoria have a Shellac Finish.

Sometimes you can also find them to have a French-polish finish which is another form of the Shellac Finish. Furniture that came after the mid 1800’s has a lacquer and varnish.

The best way to find out Shellac Finish is to test the furniture surface using denatured alcohol. After a small application, if the finish dissolves, it is made from Shellac.  Furniture pieces that are made prior to the 1850 also used oil, wax, or milk paint which can be determine by applying ammonia.

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