Posted on 12/28/2003 8:01:54 AM PST by Theodore R.
Craftsman revives old wood with flame
By Juliette Rule rep9@wyomingnews.com Published in the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
CHEYENNE - As Tony Carr walks through the Depot Center, he tells stories about a piece of local past now erased by his labor.
But what he leaves behind is in keeping with the architectural traditions of the late 19th century train station, which has been the subject of intense restoration over the last year.
Carr, 45, is a restoration painter, and his contracted task of the last seven months has been to erase the signs of abuse and neglect on wood-framed windows at the Depot Center.
He has been doing it with a blowtorch.
It would seem the two - aged woodwork and hand-held flame - would be incompatible. But few know what Carr knows about wood restoration.
"It's an old-time way of doing it," he says of the work he has done on a handful of Cheyenne homes.
The secret might be more difficult to pry out of others, but Carr explains in his soft-spoken tone that there are some areas of a project he is more careful with than others.
Besides, he knows how nervous he was watching the process performed by a couple of 80-year-old guys he met on a job 25 years ago.
He always starts at the bottom of the project, and he pays attention to cracks, which would make the building more vulnerable to volatile flames.
The undressed wood isn't burned in the process, which loosens chunks of paint untouched by other tools.
The fire softens those bubbled layers of paint, and with elbow grease it reveals a surface ready for a new treatment. By the time Carr has finished a project, it looks much the way the depot's first architects designed it.
As far as depot project architect Glen Garrett can tell, Carr's technique marries his experience with wood to auto body work - a hobby Carr advertises as he tools around town in his 1957 Chevy panel truck, emblazoned with the logo "Anthony Carr and Son."
Like any old-fashioned father working in a trade, Carr said he hopes one day 9-year-old Charlie will lend a hand in the business.
Garrett said, "He (Carr) is a true craftsman. He is, in some ways, from another era. He has a real feel for that old building."
Carr's work is easily distinguished from that of other contractors, Garrett said, and it has set a standard of perfection seen throughout the work force at the depot.
To Garrett, there is something else that's different about Carr: Where others saw a need to replace those old, rotted sashes, he saw old-growth hardwood able to stand up to another 116-years.
Carr's technique works, judging from the look of the last three windows on the south side of the east end of the depot. The frames are actually pine, but the dark satiny stain offers a dimension unparalleled in other windows.
Of course, some of the wood was in such bad shape, it needed to be replaced. But not much.
"We've saved over 99 percent of the original window stock," Garrett said.
He added that Carr's carpenter brother, Henry, helped on the project and only replaced pieces that needed to be.
That area east of the brew pub must have been a baggage area, Carr concludes, running his hand over some rough spots he has sanded and stained. Those spots contrast with the velvet touch on the rest of the frame and look quite a bit different from the oak frames Carr restored in a third-floor conference room.
With sunlight streaming in, it's first hard to tell the wood is anything but polished. A step closer and the burls appear, offering dimension unseen in modern structures.
"Isn't it just beautiful?" Carr asks.
And some of Carr's contributions are his own idea. Like the copper flashing installed above windows on the trackside of the depot.
"You could tell that all that had ever been done there was paint," Carr said, pointing to the shelf created above the window, and below the glass half-circle.
That might have been a poor design for a wintry climate as the warm afternoon sun melts that snow, leeching that moisture into the wood. Water is wood's greatest enemy, and that engineering eye is that extra something Carr brings to the project, Garrett said.
Over time, that flashing will gain a patina in place of its shine, matching not only the brown paint of the window frames, but the accompanying copper pipe that leads rain and snowmelt from the roof, he added.
That color change should come by next year.
Until next year when that patina fades, it too adds some character to the sharply modern characteristic of the building constructed in the 19th-century.
Carr's inspiration is as easy to figure as his approach to the project: "Once you tear it down, it's gone forever," he said.
It is my experience that old flames will revive the wood, too.
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