Monday, June 6, 2011

Mystery chair with white water stains- Bopfish can't swim in those. Status: fixed!

I found three spindle back chairs at a thrift store on the West side of Columbus; one of them has a big ol' white water stain on the seat and I'm going to show you how I got rid of it. 
Bubba (the neighbor cat) is checking out one of the chairs in this picture.
Here are the three chairs.
They are very similar to Russel Wright for Conant Ball and somewhat similar to Paul McCobb.  They are most similar to George Nakashima's straight back spindle chairs for Knoll but the spindle configuration is wrong.
As you can see, there is no maker's mark

 They seem to be maple and, yes, they appear to have had a lot of use; that's okay, it shows "character".  I'll give them some cleaning and some other treatment before I send them back into the world.
Okay, right now I'm going to tackle the white water stain on the seat of one chair.
Ewwwwww, yuck!  That ring looks like it's giving me "devil horns" or maybe a small manta ray landed on this chair and left a wet imprint.  The product I am using is made by Homax* and is helpfully named "White Ring Remover" (that's why I picked it up).  It was...uh, around $3.00...I think, at Lowes in the cleaning supplies aisle.
Inside the resealable plastic pouch was a cloth impregnated with some kind of oily substance, a MAGIC oily substance.
After just a couple of minutes of rubbing the cloth on the white stain, it had faded considerably
The water stain was COMPLETELY gone after 3-4 minutes of rubbing!
When you are finished, you can fold the cloth and seal it back in the pouch for the next time you need to remove a water ring.  I did try it on a black ring, but the product would not remove it (I checked, Homax does not make a "Black Ring Remover"- darn).
*Bopfish Vintage has no affiliation, financial or otherwise, with this company; I just happened upon the product and tried it.

5 comments:

  1. Love the chairs. Shame there are only three. Lucky you, having a cute kitter cat to model for ya. Pretty cool to see a product that does exactly what it advertises.

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  2. Yup, that's my conclusion as well. When I first saw them across the store, my eyes nearly bugged out of my head but when I reached them I realized they were probably knockoffs.

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  3. The Whitney Funiture co. may have made these.

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  4. The Whitney Funiture co. may have made these.

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